David Tallerman's Blog

This post has been an unusually long time coming, given that, before I could say anything sensible about the four Armored Trooper VOTOMS OVAs that released pre-2000, I really needed to find time to watch the TV series, all 50-some episodes of it, and as a result, the box set ended up sitting on my shelf for many a year as other, shorter shows came and went.  Then, once I'd finally made it through - and it's pretty great, but the not the best paced or least repetitive, so there were breaks along the way - I then had to watch the OVAs I'd come for, and write them up, and more months went by.  And now here we are, and I learn that what was a reasonably priced box set at the time I set out on this is now fantastically rare and going at ludicrous prices, so that sucks.  All I can do is comfort myself with the thought that perhaps someday soon it will be rereleased in 4K, or perhaps 16K, or maybe Interactovision, because who knows what the future holds?

Well, Armored Trooper VOTOMS certainly has some ideas on the topic, none of them very cheerful, so let's dive into Armored Trooper VOTOMS: The Last Red Shoulder, Armored Trooper VOTOMS: The Big Battle, Armored Trooper VOTOMS: Red Shoulder Document: Origin of Ambition, and Armored Trooper VOTOMS: Brilliantly Shining Heresy...

Armored Trooper VOTOMS: The Last Red Shoulder, 1985, dir: Ryōsuke Takahashi

For the purposes of this blog, I'd been hoping these Armored Trooper VOTOMS OVAs would be standalone enough that I could potentially recommend them to viewers who hadn't already waded through the TV series, and The Last Red Shoulder, sadly, isn't that.  In actuality, it dovetails between the first and second arcs and is so annoyingly indispensable that I wonder why more of what's here didn't find its way into the show; were they really so dedicated to its "each arc is set on a different planet" structure that they couldn't slot in a little side story that adds a ton of clarity to what follows?

That side story finds our maybe-hero, maybe-antihero Chirico Cuvie hooking up with the surviving relics of the black ops military outfit he once belonged to, the titular Red Shoulders, to hunt down the officer who betrayed and attempted, with varying degrees of success, to murder them all.  However, it soon diverts to - but no, that's the most I can say without getting into spoilers, since the viewer who comes to this at its proper chronological point won't have met at least one of the core cast.  At any rate, the point at which The Last Red Shoulder really becomes useful, aside from deepening Chirico's backstory and setting up some important elements that will be picked up in the third arc, is in clarifying a major character relationship that, in the show, felt rather flimsy and nonsensical.  And, again, I find myself wondering what happened.  Did the creators realise they'd dropped the ball and seize the opportunity to plug a conspicuous gap?  Surely they didn't purposefully withhold this stuff so they'd have material for an OVA that came out a couple of years after it would have been really useful?

I guess the glass-half-full take here is that, as a VOTOMS film of a little under an hour, The Last Red Shoulder does a solid job of justifying its existence, both by finding a relatively self-contained tale to tell and by seizing on numerous opportunities to flesh out its source material in meaningful ways.  And it's possible I'm focusing on the wrong thing, anyway, or at least focusing on something that wouldn't have been the main draw for contemporary audiences, since the other virtue The Last Red Shoulder has going for it is being a proper OVA with something like a proper OVA budget, and thus having animation that's a meaningful step up from the TV series.  Admittedly, more time and money don't guarantee better results: the first time we see an Armored Trooper in motion is obviously meant to be something of a showcase, except that the extra resources appear to have gone mostly into lots of shading that just doesn't work.  But the overwhelming benefit is that, once we get into the second half, we finally get some good action sequences, practically a first from a series that had a ton of action, much of it ambitious, but never quite managed to do it justice because it invariably looked a bit shonky.

Armored Trooper VOTOMS with non-shonky action scenes is definitely a treat, since the VOTOMS had always felt cool in theory and a little bit duff in practice, and proper in-betweening and designs that don't wander off model and all that good stuff makes quite the difference.  Would that the same could be said for the score, which relies on the same handful of tracks that, if you've seen the TV show, will have become awfully familiar by this point - heck, even the opening and closing credit sequences get reused, reinforcing the sense that this is kind of just a longer episode that ought to have come out well before it did.  Which is fair, but also being mean with the benefit of hindsight, and while I can't imagine the uninitiated viewer finding a lot here beyond some respectable animation and solid storytelling, as an addition to the VOTOMS universe, The Last Red Shoulder does very much what I'd have hoped for. 

Armored Trooper VOTOMS: The Big Battle, 1986, dir: Ryōsuke Takahashi

Superficially, The Big Battle is up to much the same things as The Last Red Shoulder, in that it's an extra hour-long episode slotting into a gap in the TV show's continuity to shed light on a period that the series hurried past.  However, at the same time it's not that at all, to the point where, even having finished the show quite recently, I was puzzled by exactly how it was meant to fit, and the main giveaway was which characters happened to be present and know each other.  Which is to say that, while the events of the The Big Battle occur amid a time skip in the last episode, that knowledge isn't terribly important.  Sure, we get some idea of what was going on during that gap, and why such a gap occurred at all, and you might argue that the OVA informs the decisions made during the series' last few minutes.  But really, the significance of occurring so late in the narrative is not so much that The Big Battle clarifies what we don't know but that it summarises what we do.

So kind of a victory lap, then, though again, that's not exactly it; perhaps truer to say that what we have here is a concentrated burst of the things Armored Trooper VOTOMS was about across the course of its 52 episodes.  We have a new evil scientist, and a new and even more evil "perfect soldier" threat for Chirico to face off against; we have competing military factions still caught up in the superhuman arms race that's gone so spectacularly badly up to this point; and, in a nod towards the first story arc, we have gladiatorial battling using Armored Troopers, though The Big Battle ups the ante on that front by making one of the competitors an enormous mobile fortress.  Which, I think, finally gets us to precisely what the makers were trying to accomplish: more of the same to remind the fans of what they'd liked, but longer, bigger, and better.

If that was really the goal, I'd say that Takahashi and his team largely succeeded.  Mostly what that means is that the animation takes another significant step up, reaching all the way to "really quite nice by mid-eighties OVA standards."  And as I noted in regards to The Last Red Shoulder, VOTOMS is a franchise that gains enormously from quality animation.  Last time around, that primarily meant better action, and we certainly get that here, even if it feels ever-so-slightly thin on the ground until the final third; nevertheless, there's an excellent sequence of Chirico and Shako undertaking a stealth mission that's improved considerably by the visual upgrade.  But this time around, the dialogue scenes benefit too, with character designs feeling more emotive and staying resolutely on model.  Granted, it's never mind-blowing, but it's good enough to make both action and drama feel that bit more engaging.

Which leaves the problem, insomuch as there is a problem, lying with the story.  And I'm being vague there because, to a certain extent, this is an absolutely fine and valid use for an extra hour of VOTOMS: it really is nice to see familiar scenes and concepts dressed up in the animation finery they never quite got the first time through, and the climax is very much the sort of thing that the show obviously aspired to and could never quite land.  Yet it remains mildly frustrating that we gain so little new information here and that everything feels so well-worn.  Maybe this is only a problem because The Last Red Shoulder came along first and did manage to expand the VOTOMS narrative in small but significant ways, but it's a reaction I couldn't quite shake.  And frustratingly, that also means that, despite being much more standalone, The Big Battle remains another one for the fans, a shame given what an otherwise great introduction it would be to all of the franchise's preoccupations.  Yet I'm conscious I'm grousing about not a lot here, especially given that contemporary viewers would have had two years of separation from the series by this point.  If all you wanted was more VOTOMS, but dialled up to eleven, The Big Battle scratches that itch very well indeed, and that's nothing to be ashamed of.    

Armored Trooper VOTOMS: Red Shoulder Document: Origin of Ambition, 1988, dir: Ryōsuke Takahashi

I doubt I could have told you what my ideal for one of these VOTOMS OVA follow-ups was until now, but here we are: Origin of Ambition was what I was after all along.  I can't say it does everything right, because what does?  But it gets shockingly close, and certainly it's an outrageously good example of how to build out a property without damaging what's come before.  Unlike the first two OVAs, it's a prequel, which feels like a logical way to go given that the start of the series very much plonked us into the middle of what was evidently an ongoing drama.  And sure enough, it proves an inspired choice, not to mention a deeply organic one: there's never the sense of new narrative being spun out to stretch a story that, at this point, might certainly be regarded as over and done with.  Rather, what we get here explains a lot that had been left murky and other aspects that seemed implausible even by the standards of mid-eighties anime, and does it altogether convincingly, and in so doing both tells a fine hour-long tale in its own right and improves upon the VOTOMS mythos as a whole.

On the plot front, that's all I want to say, given how well Origin of Ambition took me by surprise both with its overall story and with a couple of well-timed shocks along the way.  I'll only add that here, at last, we have a VOTOMS OVA that's relatively friendly to the viewer who hasn't waded through all those many hours of TV.  Which, unfortunately, isn't to say it's much of an entry point to the franchise: though, strictly speaking, this is the new beginning of all things VOTOMS, it actually functions better as a sequel, in that its revelations wouldn't have anything like the same oomph without knowledge of what's to come.  However, if you happen to be the prospective viewer who fancies dipping a toe into this large pond but has no desire to commit to 50-some episodes of television and goodness knows how many hours of sequels, prequels, and sidequels, Origin of Ambition would, at the very least, offer you an excellent hour of giant-robot sci-fi.

Which is to say that, in another first, we finally have a slice of VOTOMS that you could, if you so desired, enjoy purely on the level of spectacle.  Once again, the animation quality has taken a leap up from the series, but here, the difference is seismic: Origin of Ambition doesn't merely look great compared to a mid-budget TV show, it looks great full stop, and at points very great indeed.  And while I don't want to be dismissive of VOTOMS's character drama, the more so when Origin of Ambition does much solid work on that front, I feel safe in repeating that the aspect the vast majority of fans, and evidently the creators themselves, wanted to see handfuls of yen chucked at was the action.  In the series, it was ambitious but flawed; in the previous two OVAs, it was ambitious and more than passable; here, it's everything I'd have hoped for.  At last we get Armored Trooper battles that live up to the concept and those fantastic designs and the brutal, gritty combat the series promised but never quite provided, and it's a joy to behold - though Origin of Ambition is equally capable of making something as quotidian as a fist fight or foot chase look splendid as well.

Ideally, I'd wrap this up there; but Origin of Ambition does manage to trip itself up on one minor but frustrating front.  Moreover, it's down to an aspect that really ought to have been an easy win.  In another first, we get some new themes and arrangements from composer Hiroki Inui, which would be exciting were any of them a patch on what the TV show had to offer or indeed any good in their own right.  There are pieces that build and improve with repetition, but there are others that don't work at all and are actively distracting, both in themselves and due to how carelessly they've been slathered over dialogue or chopped into random-seeming snatches.  It's not a huge deal, goodness knows, but it's diverting enough that I'd feel bad about declaring this a flawless masterpiece for the ages.  Yet even with that niggle, I'm absolutely comfortable in calling Origin of Ambition both the clear highlight so far of a franchise that's already had more than its share and one of the best sci-fi OVAs to come out of a period that wasn't exactly short of excellent examples.

Armored Trooper VOTOMS: Brilliantly Shining Heresy, 1994, dir: Ryōsuke Takahashi

Had you asked me in the early nineties whether I wanted any more of Chirico Cuvie's story, I don't know that I'd have said yes.  The series had wrapped up so perfectly, with an ending that could be equally interpreted as hopeful or nihilistic, and then Origin of Ambition had tied a neat bow on any loose ends that remained, and after that had come the 12-part OVA Armor Hunter Mellowlink - outside our remit thanks to the frustrating lack of a Western release - which had made a convincing argument that there was plenty of space in the Armored Trooper VOTOMS universe for new tales to be told around new protagonists.

But director Ryōsuke Takahashi and writer Sōji Yoshikawa felt it was time to bring Chirico back, and damn but I'm glad they did.  Far from being your typical tacked-on sequel, Brilliantly Shining Heresy feels very much as if the pair had spent the intervening years in constant planning.  Which normally would result in the opposite problem of a narrative that feels overly schematic, yet somehow they manage to avoid that too.  It's not as though Brilliantly Shining Heresy is indispensable, since there's no getting around how neatly the TV show wrapped everything up, but if Chirico was obliged to return, I don't know how it could have turned out much better than this.

For a start, we have a gem of a concept for why, though one I'll have to dance around if I'm not going to spoil an extremely long TV show.  Suffice to say that it makes sense, as does the three decade time gap, which is long enough to keep us from wondering too hard about those cast members who haven't returned and short enough that it's plausible for things to feel largely as we left them - though we'll also get a splendid in-universe explanation for why technology has moved on so little, one that covers the slightly ludicrous reliance on clunky one-man tanks that's been there to pick at since the start.

There's a lot of world-building here, including much that would have been nice to know a few dozen TV episodes ago, but it never gets in the way of an exceedingly straightforward core story: Chirico and Fyana get separated, Chirico tries to track Fyana down, and new antagonist Titania does her very best to kill him, largely because by this point everyone has decided it's effectively impossible, but also as part of a struggle to determine who'll be the new Space Pope.  Okay, so maybe not that straightforward, but the action - which is frequent and glorious - is enough to keep the extensive politicking from getting dull, and the politicking keeps Brilliantly Shining Heresy from feeling overly simplistic, for all that it's essentially a riff on The Terminator for quite a lot of its running time, albeit one where Skynet is basically the Catholic Church.  Best of all, for the first time we have an opponent for Chirico who feels like a meaningful threat, in part because Titania is actually a "Nextant", an updated take on the super-soldier technology that's been such a big part of VOTOMS, but as much and more so because she's a genuinely interesting character with a genuinely interesting arc to navigate through.

Animation-wise, there's a definite shock that comes with the transition into the nineties, and it's perhaps a good thing we had the in-universe time jump to soften that blow, but - aside from a lacklustre print that's a disappointing low point of the great-until-now Maiden Japan box set - the results are a glowing success.  Yet again, the action gets a noticeable boost, improving on the already high bar set by Origin of Ambition, and the revamped character and tech designs strike that fine line between fresh and respectful.  Composer Hiroki Inui, meanwhile, has some more new music, which manages to feel of a piece with what's come before without doing much to draw attention to itself.  Taken both on its technical merits and as a standalone story, then, I'd rate Brilliantly Shining Heresy up there with most any OVA from the nineties.  However, I've learned in writing this review that there are many who don't share my enthusiasm, and I can't really argue with their criticisms, particularly in regards to a controversial choice made towards the end; all I can say is that, for me, that didn't detract too much from the many other aspects that succeeded wonderfully.

-oOo-

Obviously, the conclusion here is that this was an uncommonly good set of OVAs, and to that I'll add that they came from a seminal TV show that's one of the prime texts of the Real Robot subgenre, up there with Gundam for quality and possibly influence as well.  But where does that leave us, when it's nigh-on impossible to watch?  As I said up top, hoping that it gets re-released, I guess, which is a rather sour note to end on - or would be were there not new VOTOMS on the way, and from the legendary Mamoru Oshii no less.  So maybe the odds of that re-release are better than they might otherwise have been, eh?
Next up: our last ever "normal" post before number 150, the wrap-up of the Studio Ghibli special and indeed of all things Drowning in Nineties Anime, and it's already mostly written, so hopefully the wait won't be quite so long this time...




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

If there's anyone out there who's actually following this blog in real time, then yeah, it's not your imagination, things have certainly slowed right down over the last few months.  I'm tempted to blame this on the black hole-like time-distending properties of approaching the end of such an epic enterprise, but actually I've just been really, really busy and, as a direct result, really, really tired.  Nevertheless, with our final post so near that I can practically smell it, I'm still  determined to make that last push and stagger over the finish line.  Thankfully, Christmas is a thing, and while I'm not much for all that seasonal jollity nonsense, it is a chunk of time in which to get down to some serious vintage anime watching.  But that's still a little ways off, and for now we might as well take a look at The Tale of Genji, Master Keaton, Dragon Century, and Yu Yu Hakusho: Eizou Hakusho...

The Tale of Genji, 1987, dir: Gisaburô Sugii

Bless Central Park Media, for all their many failings, they were perhaps the only anime distributor in history that genuinely went out of their way to try and educate their audience a bit about the breadth of Japanese culture in the midst of keeping them amused with all the blood, nudity, violence, and tentacles they'd come to expect.  Who else would have put out a title like The Tale of Genji, an art-house adaptation of the world's oldest novel that has no time at all for the viewer without a solid knowledge of the source material and the courtly Heian culture in which it was set?  And you have to wonder what exactly their expectations were for a title that, historical and literary baggage aside, is still pretty impenetrable, plonking its viewer into the middle of a narrative with little to nothing to orient themselves by and expecting them to gather enough crucial details along the way that by the mid point they might have some idea of who's who and what's what.

Which sounds negative, I realise, but I did open with, "Bless Central Park Media," didn't I?  And I meant that earnestly, in part because it's truly admirable that they put the effort into titles like this that were absolutely never going to see mainstream success but much more so because The Tale of Genji is wonderful.  Yes, director Sugii expects you to meet him more than halfway, but his compensation for that is some exquisite animation set to one of the most gorgeous scores you're ever likely to hear, both of which strongly evoke the Heian era without being unnecessarily beholden to it, so that the willing viewer is at once ushered into a far-distant age and given just enough of a modern hook that the experience never feels altogether off-putting and alien.

And this is true of the approach to the material as well, which, for all that it seems purposefully impenetrable in many ways, actually does a splendid job of finding themes that the modern viewer can hang onto without sacrificing the sense of a world and culture utterly different in almost every material way.  I lack the knowledge to say anything useful about The Tale of Genji the book, or how The Tale of Genji the film works as an interpretation of said book - but, for me, the movie was a psychosexual nightmare painstakingly detailing just how badly a patriarchal society can screw up and screw over everyone involved.  Genji, a noble and son of the emperor, is a man who can have anything he wants, and what he wants is practically every woman he sets eyes on, but what he really wants is the mother he was deprived of when he was too young to even remember her face.  So he falls in love and lust again and again, leaving broken lives in his wake, finding no satisfaction, seemingly oblivious to the depravity of sleeping with the woman who's effectively his stepmother and then her daughter, who he adopted while insisting, with apparent earnestness, that he'd never do precisely that.  He's a monster, but such a sad, lonely, eerily beautiful monster that we can't really do more than pity him, and it's easy to understand why women time and again let themselves be sucked into his terrible orbit - though, as he himself makes clear, it's not as though they have a great deal of choice in the matter.

Now, obviously, this isn't and was never going to be for everyone, and even if you do happen to find yourself on its wavelength, it's not perfect.  There are points where The Tale of Genji is simply too hard to follow, and while those passages invariably swim into focus later on, a little more effort being made to key us into when, say, months have passed between scenes would be no bad thing.  And while the film does a solid job of picking an end point that lets it wrap up its story in a relatively satisfying fashion without attempting to cram in the whole vast scope of the novel, some choices made in that ending, such as an effects-led sequence that seems to have blundered in from 2001: A Space Odyssey, are probably not the best way of getting there.  On the other hand, I can't bring myself to be too critical of a film that sets itself so bold a task, makes so few compromises along the way, says so much with relatively few words, and manages to do all that while being utterly gorgeous both to the eyes and the ears.  Some movies are best off being a mite flawed, and while The Tale of Genji doesn't quite reach to masterpiece status, in failing to do so it gets to some awfully bold and fascinating places.

Master Keaton, 1999 - 2000, dir: Masayuki Kojima
I don't know that I even ought to be reviewing Master Keaton here, and I certainly don't know if there's any point; at any rate, I can't recall another title that's clashed quite so hard with my rule of only reviewing films and OVAs and definitely not reviewing TV shows (unless someone asks me nicely or I feel like it.)  For the thing is that, while the last fifteen episodes of Master Keaton were released straight to DVD and so are counted as an OVA, you absolutely would never know that to look at them, since they're functionally identical to the TV episodes that preceded them in terms of quality and even have the same opening and ending sequences - not to mention how Pioneer's release further muddies the waters by lumping TV and straight-to-DVD episodes in with each other on the fifth disk of their eight-disk set.

Probably I'm the only person in human history who's attempted to watch those fifteen OVA episodes as a separate entity, and even I wasn't pedantic enough to ignore the TV episodes that appeared on disk five - that is, my disk one!  So we return to the question, what's the point in reviewing them separately except to stick to my own arbitrary rules?  And the answer is, I've watched them with the intention of covering them here, and damn it, I'm gonna do just that - but also that there's actually no good reason why you shouldn't cherry-pick Master Keaton, since it's terribly hard to find any of it, let alone all of it, these days.  To pre-empt the conclusion, it's a really good, frequently great show that happens to be remarkably consistent, to the extent that I'd have to think awfully hard if I had to rank the four disks I watched, and so if you see a Master Keaton DVD going cheap, be it TV or OVA episodes, you should probably jump on it regardless.

And now we're two paragraphs into a review and there's a good chance you haven't a clue what I'm on about, since it's fair to assume that the unreasonable difficulty in tracking down Master Keaton and the seeming lack of a collected edition have gone a long way towards robbing it of its rightful place in the pantheon of top nineties anime shows.  So let's start again: what we have here is the adventures of the titular character, whose actual name is Taichi Hiraga-Keaton and whose profession is an insurance investigator for Lloyd's of London.  Though already I've misled you quite a lot, in that the episodes flit all across Keaton's varied career, so that at various points he's an archaeologist and a soldier in the SAS, and while he certainly does have adventures, it's equally possible that any given entry might find him doing not much of anything or being sidelined almost altogether so that another member of the recurring cast or even a one-off protagonist can step into the spotlight.

This is a big part of what makes the show so good - and also, I suppose, what keeps it from being better than it is, for it's really closer to being a short story compilation than a series, and even the best short story compilations have their ups and downs.  For me, a down came early and soured me on the experience for a good long while, until I finally learned to forgive and appreciate what was on offer: it was, for the record, episode 23, which is set in the Lake District, an area of England I know pretty well, or well enough anyway to understand that it's not an enormous swamp.  After that, I found myself nit-picking more than was fair, and certainly more than I should be doing here, given that episode 23 isn't even one of the OVAs.  Point being, there are odd weaker episodes, and a few stunners, and the majority settle around good to very good; it's a respectable batting average, but it also means the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, since you never know what will come next, but you can be confident there's a high chance of enjoying it.

What's more consistent is the animation, which benefits from some distinctive and more-realistic-than-usual character designs and in general hovers somewhere above what you'd expect of a nineties anime TV show, though somewhere below what you'd hope for from an OVA: it rarely wows and never lets the side down, but its sheer reliability is impressive in itself given the vast range of settings and enormous cast.  There are some neat directorial flourishes along the way, too, and the general sense is of a show that intends to be serious entertainment for grown-ups, though not so serious as to sacrifice a sense of fun and whimsy.  If Master Keaton never quite perfects either, with the occasional lapses in research and logic dinting its smartness and the more action-centric episodes feeling lightweight among more sophisticated company, the very fact that it presses its hand so boldly is exciting in itself: it's a thoroughly ambitious show with a marvellous central character, one that hits much more often than it misses and impresses even at its worst.

Dragon Century, 1988, dir: Kiyoshi Fukumoto

There are, of course, vintage anime titles that are great by any metric, that are masterpieces of filmmaking beyond the specifics of their time, place, and medium.  And, more commonly, there are no end of vintage anime titles that, if you're into the sorts of things Japanese popular culture was fixated on at the time, are wonderful and well-made works of entertainment, even if they don't quite transcend their genres to the point where anyone can enjoy them in the way that, say, most Ghibli films do.  Those two categories, it's fair to say, have provided us with the vast majority of our positive reviews here.  But there's a third category that's harder to pin down, though if I had to describe it, would be something like "Vintage anime that's great if you happen to be really into vintage anime - but, like, really into, maybe to a slightly unwholesome degree."  Here we find those rare titles that perhaps aren't what you could call objectively good, but are amazing at condensing all the stuff of eighties and nineties anime into a pure cocktail of giddy awesomeness.  They're never going to convert a new audience, and probably plenty of people who dig anime will find them off-putting in their refusal to play by basic narrative rules when they could be chucking more cool stuff into the mix regardless of whether there's room for it or not, but if you happen to be on their wavelength, they'll carve themselves a permanent place in your heart.

Fight! Iczer One gets there for me, as does Battle Royale High School, but I'm not sure if Dragon Century mightn't have just claimed the top spot.  It's so absolutely disinterested in being anything other than the precise thing it is, so unwilling to waste even a second of its running time in dealing with the sort of fundamental storytelling you might expect, nay demand, of something built on the most bonkers foundations.  Dragon Century burns through more setup in its opening five minutes than many a full-length TV series will ever get around to, as in short order we discover that dragons are suddenly real, they've invaded our world, and though they haven't yet made their way to Japan, that nation is serious enough about the threat to cobble together a (very small) anti-dragon task force led by a man who, based on the world's shortest flashback, doesn't have a lot of love for dragons.  This is, I stress, not the plot of Dragon Century, and indeed not even the plot of the first of its two episodes, but merely the minimal amount of setup allowed to get us into the actual plot, with our actual protagonists.  But that I beg you to discover for yourself, since so much of the pleasure of Dragon Century is wondering where the heck it will go next, then being blindsided by a choice you almost certainly wouldn't have predicted.

This ought to be chaos - the more so since since the second episode starts again after a lengthy time jump and has to rush through any entirely new setup so that it can tell an entirely different story - but Fukumoto does a fine job of keeping things on the rails, though not so on the rails that it's not all delightfully mad.  Sure, it's streamlined within an inch of its life, but Dragon Century is never obtuse, and we always have as much knowledge as we need, albeit with the sense that there's an enormous amount of additional information we could be benefitting from if there was only the space for it.  Admittedly, this borders on the ludicrous at points, as when a dragon just remembers that it can speak fluent Japanese, but then that returns us to my opening point: do you want exposition, or do you want the raw stuff of vintage anime jetted in your face at a hundred miles an hour?

Thankfully, Dragon Century looks the part as well, hailing as it does from that brief window at the tail of the eighties in which something like this would receive a respectable budget and the attentions of animators eager to show off what they could do.  The action fares well, the backgrounds are detailed, and reuse of footage is kept to an agreeable minimum.  The only really questionable choice is that the dragons look awfully humanoid, despite being based on the classic Western folkloric template, and they take a bit of getting used to, until you realise they have to be that way because how else would we get dragons wielding machine guns?  And that, really, is the crucial point that should help you decide whether this is something that warrants the effort of tracking down and devoting fifty minutes of your life to: dragons with machine guns, yes or no?  Probably there's no right answer, but there's certainly one that proves you've fallen far too far down the vintage anime well - and if that's the case, you might as well make the best of it and bask in the crazy delights that Dragon Century has to offer.

Yu Yu Hakusho: Eizou Hakusho, 1994 - 1996, dir: Noriyuki Abe

There are two reviewing practices I've never been very proud of on this here blog, and I'm about to do both of them at some length.  One is reviewing something I lack the wider context to give a fair assessment of, and given that my entire experience of the Yu Yu Hakusho franchise consists of the less-than-half-hour first movie and the actually-movie-length second movie Poltergeist Report, but none of the TV show's 112 episodes, it's fair to say that I barely have the faintest idea of what I'm talking about.  Then the second is reviewing the release rather than the product, is a heavy feature of many of my earlier posts, which date from that dark and woeful age in which the odds of seeing vintage anime on Blu-ray were vanishingly rare.  And given that the version of Eizou Hakusho I'll be talking about is that of Funimation's hugely lacklustre DVD release - with a forced 16:9 aspect ratio, dreadful audio mix, and a print that looks like it was ripped from someone's old VHS copy - it's tough to make fair judgements when it comes to things like animation and music, since Funimation have taken pains to ensure that everything looks and sounds about as bad as it possibly could.

So, I dunno, maybe take it with a pinch of salt when I say that Eizou Hakusho sucks, and sucks so badly that it's one of the very few vintage anime releases I genuinely regret devoting a chunk of my life to.  The more so since what we have here is actually two OVAs bundled together, and only the first, which Funimation call Scenes From the Dark Tournament, is actually soul-draining to watch.  In essence, it's an hour of out-of-context fights - from a dark tournament, you see - and is thus, for someone who's not much of a Shonen fan, pretty much a vision of hell.  Not, you understand, that I don't enjoy a good fight scene, but firstly I do generally need to have some idea of who and why and what the heck's going on, and secondly, I'm not convinced that any of these snippets, (bar perhaps the last, which understandably gets more attention), are any good at all.  They're extremely formulaic, and the formula amounts to "enemy with one specific, mildly interesting power seems to be getting the upper hand, until, for no obvious reason, our hero abruptly wins."  Good animation or imaginative direction could make that watchable, but, even putting aside Funimation's washed-out, blurry print, there's nothing terribly exciting happening on the visual side of things, and while there's a quite staggering number of songs playing over both this and the second OVA, you could count the ones that make any impact on one hand and probably still have enough fingers left to play the piano.

Eizou Hakusho part two is, as I say, something of an improvement, though that's extremely relative.  Each of its four episodes is devoted to a particular character, each starts with a short music video-style thing showing them off, and each then delivers a few chunks of plot, some of which I take to be recapped from the TV show and some of which, presumably, consist of material that would have been new to viewers.  As such, while they don't really have stories as such, they have bits of stories, and that's meaningfully better than an hour of random fights - though, of course, there are still plenty of random fights in here too, including some we already got to see in part one.  It's watchable, anyway, and the prints are marginally better, though the audio still sucks, and by the end I had a vague handle on who the main cast members were, though not so much that I was itching to track down the TV show, or indeed wanted to ever watch another second of Yu Yu Hakusho.

Does that make Eizou Hakusho only for the fans?  In a sense, obviously, yes, in that there's absolutely no reason you'd want to watch this if you hadn't already made your way through everything else Yu Yu Hakusho-related.  But even then, it feels awfully vapid and mercenary, and I struggle to imagine the fan who was clamouring for this precise thing, rather than, say, a meaningful side story or epilogue or even a reanimating of some of the key moments covered here.  To put it another way, I can't think of a franchise that I've ever been so devoted to that I'd consider something like this a worthwhile buy.  So no, not even one for the fans, but one for the completists, the more so since the DVD includes the previously unavailable first movie, which was at least OK, and you can, at time of writing, pick it up fairly cheaply.

-oOo-

That ended on a sourer note than I'd have liked, and it's just possible I was being extra harsh because stumbling upon a release from a major franchise that I hadn't known existed was kind of exciting at the time.  I mean, I don't think that's the case, it genuinely was nigh-on unwatchable, but who knows?  At any rate, let's focus on the positives: we have three new recommendations, and a holiday spell of finally catching up on the last leg of my vintage anime reviewing is just around the corner.  Until then, why not go hunt down Dragon Century?  It has dragons with machine guns, don't ya know...   



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

Pleasant as it was last time around to cover some of my all-time favourite films in the second part of our Studio Ghibli special, this month's batch of deeply obscure oddities feels so much more in the spirit of Drowning in Nineties Anime.  Though, thinking about it, it's fair to say that all four entries here are actually products of major franchises - it's just that they're major franchises that never made a meaningful impact outside of Japan.  And so we have an Osamu Tezuka adaptation, a hugely popular magical girl, a spin-off from an enormous video game series, and an OVA from a major action-comedy franchise, and there's still an extremely good chance you won't have heard of a thing from among Ambassador Magma, Gigi and the Fountain of Youth, Fire Emblem, and Saber Marionette J Again: Plasmatic Crisis...

Ambassador Magma, 1993, dir: Hidehito Ueda

It's always nice when a title exceeds your expectations, though nicer, it has to be said, when those expectations were above rock bottom.  Ambassador Magma the OVA series is a slice of vintage anime that I've never once known anyone to mention, which was released by not one but two publishers you've almost certainly never encountered: Kiseki in the UK, L A Hero in the US.  Heck, I'm not convinced Kiseki even put out the full series, given that there's no trace of more than three volumes that I can find; the US version spreads the 13 episodes over six tapes, and I assume they'd planned to do likewise.  And while in the plus column we have as source material a much-loved, in Japan anyway, manga from the legendary Osamu Tezuka, nostalgic reboots of classic sixties properties are every bit as likely to go awry in Japan as they are anywhere else.

Yet, with all of that, Ambassador Magma is thoroughly okay and frequently quite good, and if that hardly sounds like a recommendation, I do intend it to be, albeit with a few caveats.  The one you might expect would be that you're unlikely to ever find the thing, except that it's apparently reared its head on US streaming services, having skipped a couple of decades of intermediary formats.  That aside, the negatives are mostly trivial, and largely come down to an acknowledgement of what he have here: for all that I get the impression the creators were doing quite a bit to make their material feel more current than its source, they certainly didn't go so far as to erase its innate goofiness or to worry unduly about setting it apart from a million other "boy and his giant robot buddy have exciting adventures" anime properties.

Which isn't to suggest that's all it's up to; one of Ambassador Magma's weirder quirks is how little screen time the titular golden giant gets in favour of our teenage protagonist Mamoru, his parents, a handful of reporters, a bunch of military folks, and indeed Magma's arch-nemesis Goa, all of whom feel more significant to the story as it unfolds than the huge shiny guy who occasionally pops up to batter a monster.  Indeed, this was Ambassador Magma's best surprise: for all that it has a definite 'cartoon adaptation based on a 60s comic aimed primarily at kids' vibe, the actual plot veers all over, including to a few places I'd have never anticipated, and spends as much time dipping into horror and weird sci-fi and smaller scale action as it does focusing on the sort of giant-robot-battling-monsters shenanigans you'd have every reason to expect.  The plot has its share of flaws, including a few points where, in the dub anyway, it's downright incoherent - Goa's backstory with humanity, in particular, seems to change on a scene-by-scene basis - but generally it does a respectable job of finding thirteen episodes of content with which to keep itself occupied and building towards its climax with a proper measure of escalation.

At which point I'm starting to feel like I'm describing a show that's better than "thoroughly okay", and arguably my reason for landing there comes down largely to personal taste.  The more so since it's mostly due to the look of the thing, and I can't really fault the animation as a whole: it's never less than competent and often rather ambitiously flashy.  But the character designs are just horrible.  The goal, I think, was to keep the simplicity of Tezuka's art while bringing it into the present, and Ambassador Magma fails on both counts, losing every iota of Tezuka's charm but still looking dated even by nineties standards.  Moreover, it's the main cast who get the worst of it, which becomes all the more noticeable later on when a couple of designs that actually work show up.  It seems like it ought to be an inconsequential bother when stacked against the virtues elsewhere, but in practice it's an awful drain on the show's energy, making it too often look like the kiddie cartoon it mostly manages not to feel like.  And so we end up back at "thoroughly okay", with the caveat that if the designs don't bother you, and if you're a fan of Tesuka and that era of Japanese sci-fantasy, you might find plenty to love here.

Gigi and the Fountain of Youth, 1985, dir: Kunihiko Yuyama

If we were to discuss Gigi and the Fountain of Youth by its more accurate-to-the-Japanese title, we'd be talking about Magical Princess Minky Momo: La Ronde in my Dream, which, as you might notice, hasn't a single word in common and also apparently has a different protagonist.  Quite an accomplishment, you'd think, but the fact is that we're back in the world of Harmony Gold and Carl Macek, and if you have any familiarity with those names, you'll both know better than to be surprised at a spot of drastic misnaming and have already set your expectations to a barrel-scrapingly low level.  For their collaboration was mostly one of treating Japanese animation as raw product to be mangled in whatever way they saw fit, so long as it could be made vaguely palatable to small American children.

I say "mostly" because here we are and the dub of Gigi and the Fountain of Youth is actually pretty great, Gregory Snegoff's script is a solid piece of writing in its own right, and while I have my doubts as to how much any of this is a faithful adaptation of the original Japanese - the apparent lack of ten minutes of running time sets off alarm bells even before you get to some obvious translation liberties - the truth is that it works just fine.  And to be fair to all involved, bringing the second OVA spin-off of a long-running, much-loved-in-its-native-country magical girl series to a Western audience that almost certainly wouldn't have the faintest knowledge of it was no small task, and we can hardly blame those involved if they chose, for example, to slap a bit of narration over the opening credits to key us in on some crucial information.

But already we get to why this is the rare dub that works on its own merits.  What starts with an upbeat but faintly dry narrator tossing us some bare-bones information rapidly devolves into an argument between said narrator and Gigi's dad, the king of some magical realm that the adaptation makes no efforts towards explaining.  For all that it's an obvious idea, the execution is legitimately amusing; but more than that, it does a fantastic job of setting our expectations, since, though the narrator will vanish soon enough, the foreknowledge that we're in for lots of freewheeling weirdness with the barest respect for the fourth wall or narrative convention is extremely valuable for what's to come.

And this I don't think we can pin on Macek, Snegoff, Harmony Gold, or any of the game American cast trying to navigate through the madness; it certainly feels in keeping with other Japanese kids' movies of the period, where pure dream logic and whiplash tonal shifts were par for the course.  However, nor are any of the American creative team trying to rein the material in, and thank goodness for that, since once you settle into Gigi's rhythm, it's a delight.  Or should that be lack of rhythm?  Certainly, the first twenty minutes or so, in which Gigi and her friends set off to rescue her parents from an airline crash and stumble upon an isolated island that houses what's basically Neverland from Peter Pan, feel as close to incoherent as any narrative I've seen that wasn't being purposefully surreal.  That seems pretty baked in to the franchise, too: take Gigi's magical girl power, which isn't to transform into a single alternative persona, as is usually the way with these things, but to turn into literally anyone she wants to be.  Granted, her choices here only extend as far as "sneak thief" and "pilot", but it remains a uniquely disorientating approach to that particular trope.

Nevertheless, bear with Gigi and the Fountain of Youth and there is an actual plot here, with something like a beginning, middle, and end.  Granted, that beginning, middle, and end cover a dozen different genres, from comedy to conspiracy thriller to musical, and get awfully cluttered with whatever ideas happened to strike the creators in any given moment, but they're there.  And crucially, keeping up never feels like a chore.  At worst, it's a bit confusing in the early going, which really is a whirlwind of seemingly unrelated stuff happening.  But while it's never less than busy and deeply eccentric, the bones are those of a solidly entertaining and even, in places, an unexpectedly poignant movie.  And while the animation budget seems more in line with some polished episodes of the TV show than an OVA, it's really only the frame rate that suffers, with there never being a sense that the spectacle - which gets pretty darn spectacular in places, as the absurdity reaches epic heights - is being compromised.  For all its strangeness, there's the sense that everyone involved was giving their all to Magical Princess Minky Momo: La Ronde in my Dream, and let's be glad that the same can be said of Gigi and the Fountain of Youth.  It's a heck of a shame we never got more of Minky Momo's bewildering adventures in the West, but at least Macek and co recognised the gem they had and tried to do it justice.

Fire Emblem, 1995, dir: Shin Misawa

To start with some positives that set Fire Emblem a little apart from your average two-part OVA, and indeed your average nineties anime video game adaptation, it's an awfully slick and detailed piece of animation made by a director who's making actual choices that go beyond ensuring that everything's legible and on budget.  Misawa constructs scenes interestingly throughout and stages some bursts of legitimately exciting action, and he and his team have put meaningful thought into such age-old problems as how to distinguish past from present and how to keep a large cast easily identifiable.  To expand on that latter example, not only do we have some easily readable designs and a spot of well-used colour coding, the central characters are drawn to a notably more exaggerated, big-eyed aesthetic compared with the relative realism of the minor players.  It may sound like damning with faint praise, but there's much to be said for good nuts-and-bolts filmmaking, especially when you've got a lot of material to work through and not much time in which to do it.

Except that I was damning with faint praise, because none of the above is enough to save Fire Emblem.  I mean, I guess that it's saved from being an unmitigated disaster and nudged into the heady realms of mildly ambitious failure; I'll never be the one to argue that above-par animation and more-than-competent direction count for nothing.  But they can't substitute for good bones, and Fire Emblem has such dodgy bones that it's amazing it can stand up straight, let alone stagger along for the better part of an hour.

We might lay that at the door of its being an adaptation of a video game that was never about to have its plot squashed into fifty minutes, and we might also point to the fact that it feels awfully like there was intended to be more than what we ultimately got, but, though both points surely didn't help, I think we'd be making excuses for some pretty fundamental failings.  Because if you only have two episodes, you have to make sensible use of that time, and Fire Emblem doesn't do this to such a degree that I truly couldn't tell you what tale the first episode thinks it's telling.  If I were being generous, I'd propose that it's to do with the young prince-in-exile Mars working past his doubts and the caution of his elders to re-enter the conflict that claimed his father's life, but even then, what I've summarised there is basically just a series of events: "hero sits around, finally decides to act" is a jumping-off point, not a story in its own right.  And while part two feels somewhat less shapeless, it commits the identical sin and adds a new one of its own, splitting the focus onto a side character who also spends twenty minutes dithering before finally deciding to act for reasons we the viewer have barely been made privy to.

Not finding enough of a narrative through-line is annoying, but I guess it's understandable given how much game there was to cram in here - though, again, we might argue that trying to cram so much in rather than picking out a couple of chunks that would be satisfying in their own right is precisely where things began to go wrong.  At any rate, what pushes Fire Emblem over into being properly annoying is how much of a slog it is to follow even when there's so little happening.  I praised Misawa for differentiating his flashback footage, for example, but the method he chose just looks like someone mucked up the contrast, and even then, opening with a flashback when you've not established anything to flash back from is pretty shoddy.

Fire Emblem does a lot of that kind of thing, not to mention at least one moment of flat-out incoherence: there's a scene in which the side-protagonist of episode two appears to rescue a young couple from bandits, yet when we next encounter them, one's back in captivity and the other is having their injuries treated by our heroes, and I was so bewildered that I watched the sequence again to be sure I hadn't missed something.  But no, we're presumably just meant to guess what occurred in the meantime, or maybe to have played the game, in which case why bother adapting it to a different medium at all?  Put all those niggles together and the results are actively frustrating: such a straightforward bit of cheesy fantasy ought to be the easiest thing in the world to keep up with, not a puzzle in constant need of unravelling.  And, if anything, it only adds to the frustration that Fire Emblem gets so much right; there were obviously a bunch of talented people here putting in the effort to make something special, and it's a shame the good stuff was undone by such fundamental mistakes.

Saber Marionette J Again: Plasmatic Crisis, 1997-1998, dir: Masami Shimoda

I was unreasonably excited to come across Saber Marionette J Again, given that, before I stumbled upon it, I'd pretty much convinced myself I knew of every bit of nineties anime there was that had made it as far as a DVD release.  And my only prior history with the Saber Marionette franchise - which is surprisingly vast for something so widely forgotten - was the OVA Saber Marionette R, which I'd quite enjoyed, particularly for the extravagant amount of world building it managed to fit into a relatively brief running time.  Saber Marionette J Again, at six episodes long, had twice the space to work with, so what could go wrong?

Looking at the back of the DVD case, I can see at least one reason why I was foolish to get my hopes up.  It's not the quality of the artwork, which is hard to judge from still images: they can't convey the jankiness of late-90's animation that's relying too hard on computers to do things on the cheap, at the behest of animators who seemingly have no idea how to hide the seams, to the point where there's invariably a digitised line or two flickering aggravatingly somewhere.  (Though I do think you can spot the floatiness of digital foregrounds plastered over painted backdrops if you look carefully.)  But no, the actual giveaway is that, of the seven images chosen by Bandai to promote the show, not one shows off anything more dramatic than a conversation.

You might think that, if you were trying to sell buyers on your light-hearted action show, you'd want to include some action in there - but we oughtn't to criticise whoever designed that packaging for failing to emphasise something that Saber Marionette J Again could hardly have made a lower priority.  Our first hint of excitement comes, I swear, towards the end of the fourth episode, and only number five could legitimately be described as action-heavy.  I'm not saying a six-episode OVA has to be action-packed, not even when it's the sequel to a TV series that was; I'm sure I could come up with examples of similar things I love that are heavier on the talking than this.  But the problem is that Saber Marionette J Again does so little to fill that void with anything else, and indeed so little to warrant its running time.

What we get is pure anime spin-off boilerplate: the cast are reunited for tenuous reasons and a new character is introduced, who'll prove to be crucially important until they vanish at the end, never to be heard from again.  Here that character is Marine, and her arc is a great illustration of the leaden pacing.  If I remember rightly, she doesn't even properly appear until episode two, where she's set up as an antagonist in a thread that's rapidly dropped.  We then get an episode of her being incorporated into the show's ongoing harem comedy shenanigans, before, well into episode four, we get the aforementioned action scene as a lead-in to - well, to the plot, essentially, or at any rate to the particular (and yes, plasmatic) crisis that Marine will be required to deal with.  Like I said, it's purest boilerplate, but it's terrible at being even that, what with its somnambulant pacing and plenty of enormous, unnecessary plot holes and baffling character decisions, as when the nominal villains spend an episode trying to kill the one and only person they know can save the world on which they themselves live.

In a sense, though, such criticisms are maybe missing the point.  Or it might be fairer to say that, in saddling Saber Marionette J Again with any sort of high-stakes drama, the creators were the ones missing the point of their own property; either way, the plot's dumb because nobody cared about it and because the show has no place for existential threats when it would rather be hanging out with its silly, one-note characters making goofy jokes.  And who knows, if you were a fan of the series, maybe that would be enough?  Purely on its own merits, though, Saber Marionette J Again is functional, kind of ugly, and ultimately sunk by devoting any energy at all to a narrative it couldn't be less invested in.

-oOo-

You'd really think I'd know better than to have any sort of expectations by now, yet Fire Emblem and Saber Marionette J Again both managed to disappoint, so more fool me.  On the other hand, my hopes were low indeed for Ambassador Magma and Gigi and the Fountain of Youth, and those both proved to be nice surprises, particularly the latter, which has become a minor new favourite.  And, you know what, with only four more posts to go because we've covered basically everything there is to cover, or three if we exclude the end of the Studio Ghibli special, it's pretty great that there are still some unexpected treats waiting to be found.  Plus, I'm far enough into the next post to know that we haven't seen the last of them, and that we may yet get to wrap up this marathon through the vast world of vintage anime with slightly more of a bang than a whimper...



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 It's post number 145, which means part two of the Drowning in Nineties Anime Studio Ghibli special, and specifically a look at the four films released by Ghibli between 1989 and 1993.  They're fascinating for any numbers of reasons, of course, but what struck me was that here, already, three movies into their lifespan, we were into the troubled stage in which the studio tried to figure out how the heck it could be more than just an outlet for its two genius creators, Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata.  Spoiler alert, except not really, since we both live in the present day: they'd never quite work that out, and the whys and wherefores of that failure would lead to some fascinating and even somewhat tragic places over the succeeding decades.  Though the flip side, and another thing that's awfully evident here, is that the mere act of trying, and the determination to not coast on early successes, led them to some equally interesting places and - as we're about to see - a wonderfully diverse output.

Let's take a look at Kiki's Delivery Service, Only Yesterday, Porco Rosso, and Ocean Waves...

Kiki's Delivery Service, 1989, dir: Hayao Miyazaki

Kiki's Delivery Service was originally intended to be a short film - at a planned 60 minutes, short by Ghibli standards, anyway - and to be directed by Sunao Katabuchi, until Hayao Miyazaki's involvement as producer because so extensive that he took over as director too, at which point the running time ballooned, as did the budget, to end up being among the highest for an animated film at that point.  At the time, perhaps no one would have thought much of Katabuchi being shouldered out by his considerably more experienced and respected producer, but now we have the benefit of nearly four decades of hindsight and know that he'd go on to become a master animator in his own right, with In This Corner of the World in particular standing as one of the great achievements of 21st century anime.  So it's interesting to wonder what might have been had Miyazaki held back, and to speculate to what extent all this was the result of a troubled production, as, not for the last time, Miyazaki tried and failed to expand Ghibli's directorial base beyond himself and Isao Takahata.

Whatever went on, Kiki's Delivery Service is a markedly less flawless film than anything Ghibli had produced up until that point.  Indeed, at the level of raw plot, it's really kind of a mess.  Miyazaki's screenplays have a tendency to be kind of shaggy, but none of them rely so heavily upon contrivance and happenstance as this does, and none feel so aimless until well past their midway point.  A single example to illustrate: having set off alone at 13 to find her way in the world, young witch Kiki has more or less accidentally set up a delivery business, since being able to fly on a broom is handy in that line of work.  For her first proper job, she's tasked with delivering a bird cage that contains a toy black cat that so happens to be the spitting image of her familiar, Jiji.  But mid journey she's caught by a gust of wind, the toy cat gets lost during a run-in with some angry crows, and Jiji is obliged to play dead to act the part until Kiki can recover the real thing.  This she does by noticing it in the window of an artist who lives in the depths of the woods - said artist will become an important character, not to mention something of a deus ex machina, later - and the problem of swapping Jiji with the toy turns out to be no problem at all thanks to the intervention of a kindly old dog.

Write it down like that and it really is just ten minutes of stuff happening, without much rhyme or reason and without much in the way of character agency.  While Kiki ignores a warning about the wind and does a bit of housework as payment for the return of the toy cat, nevertheless it mostly feels as though neither her travails nor her successes are due to anything she has or hasn't done.  And such woolly plotting isn't the film's only flaw, either: I'd forgotten how irritating the character of Tombo, Kiki's kind-of love interest, is, at least until we get to know a bit more about him past the midway point - since it very much seems we're meant to find him off-putting until then, as Kiki herself does.  I'd even propose that Joe Hisaishi's score isn't up there with his best efforts, with a tendency towards a chipper Continental vibe that's a perfectly fine match for Miyazaki's purposefully nonspecific hodgepodge of a European town but doesn't elevate the material the way his finest works do.

Yet I love the film wholeheartedly, and would rate it in the top half of any list of my Ghibli favourites.  And feeling that way doesn't require me to ignore its flaws, as I hope I've made clear, or to pretend they're all somehow intentional.  I do think they're somewhat intentional, and in a way only a genius like Miyazaki could pull off, but that's not to say that, for instance, having a major character who's downright annoying for half the running time should be ignored.  Nevertheless, a Kiki's Delivery Service without its imperfections would undoubtedly be worse, since the thing it's exceptionally good at, which happens to be the thing Miyazaki stated as his intention for the film, is to capture the sort of crisis of faith you can only really have as a teenager, as you realise that the world isn't fair or rational, and sometimes bad things happen for no reason, just as sometimes you're rewarded for getting things wrong.  You wildly misjudge situations and people; you sulk and often don't even know why; you can be overwhelmed with joy and wonder one minute and sunk in self-loathing the next.  And few films convey that turmoil half so successfully, or with a central character half so well-formed and charming as Kiki, a protagonist markedly more complicated than any Miyazaki had offered prior to this point.

Plus, the plotting may often feel arbitrary, but when every moment is so perfect in and of itself, it's hard to care.  Take that sequence I critiqued earlier: sure, it's set off by a random mishap, but my goodness is the scene of Kiki being flung about by gale force winds an exquisite bit of animation - indeed, the flying sequences consistently rank among the most terrific of Ghibli accomplishments - and lucky break that it may be, my goodness are the scenes with Jiji and Jeff the elderly dog funny and adorable and sweetly melancholy.  It's as though Miyazaki, through enormous force of will, is invariably finding the best possible version of material that theoretically oughtn't to work half so well as it does and that, in lesser hands, could slip into being aimless and twee in a heartbeat.  And while I don't know that I'd describe Katabuchi as "lesser hands", I can certainly see how, so much nearer to the start of his career as he was then, he might not have been able to read between the lines of Miyazaki's screenplay the way its author could.  Which is okay, I think; ultimately he'd go on to make a couple of near-perfect coming-of-age movies of his own, and we got to have Hayao Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service, one of the loveliest and most empathetic family films of all time.

Only Yesterday, 1991, dir: Isao Takahata

A couple of personal anecdotes to start with.  First up, Only Yesterday was the film that turned me around on Isao Takahata, who until then I'd regarded as that other guy from Studio Ghibli, and knew only from Grave of the Fireflies, a film that's almost impossible not to admire and equally nigh-impossible to love.  But Only Yesterday, now there's a movie that you can fall in love with, and I did, and I love it still - indeed, I was slight surprised, returning to it, to realise just how big a place it holds in my heart.  That being anecdote number two, as I discovered to my shock that I've been quoting one particular stretch of dialogue practically verbatim for years without appreciating where it had come from or that I was quoting at all.  For those who've seen it, it's Toshio's mini-lecture in response to Taeko's joy at being amid what she sees as untouched nature, to which he responds that every stream, every wood, every hedgerow has actually been arranged and controlled by the people who live there, generation after generation, in service of their needs.

Only Yesterday is full of such insights.  It's long, at narrowly under two hours, and has the bare minimum of plot: Taeko takes a working holiday in rural Japan as a break from an office job in Tokyo that she's starting to realise isn't fulfilling her needs at all, reminisces about the brief spell in her childhood that made her want to visit the countryside in the first place, and hangs around with Toshio, a local organic farmer, who already has quite the crush on her and who she slowly discovers she's falling for in return.  Really, laying it out like that suggests a more plot-heavy and overtly structured film than the one we get, which is episodic in the extreme, often spending minutes at a time exploring a particular incident in ten-year-old Taeko's life, varying from the triviality of trying fresh pineapple for the first time to the momentousness of the one occasion her kindly, rather distant father struck her.

It ought to be messy, and yet it's so perfectly controlled and so constantly engaging that it never feels that way.  I think that part of why I was once a little cool on Takahata is that his films can feel kind of unfocused and overloaded with stuff, and sure, that stuff is all wonderful, but does it absolutely all need to be there?  Watch Only Yesterday closely and the only possible conclusion is that yes, it does, or at the very least that Takahata strongly believes it does, and has given his utmost to ensure that not a frame feels wasted or superfluous.  It's intoxicating, almost but not quite too much of a good thing, and just as with Grave of the Fireflies, I was a helpless, blubbering mess by the end; but this time it was the happy crying that comes from watching something completely transporting and genuinely life-affirming, not because it feeds you platitudes but because it reminds you that goodness exists and change is possible.

And obviously it's gorgeous, that ought to go without saying at this point, but even by Ghibli standards, Only Yesterday is gorgeous in some particularly distinctive ways.  That extends to the soundtrack, surely the most complex of any of the studio's movies, with a mix of licensed tracks, an original score, and most strikingly, traditional Eastern-European folk music that lend the scenes it appears in a haunting, off-kilter energy.  Visually, meanwhile, Takahata makes the perhaps obvious choice of making the present-day scenes essentially realistic, while the flashbacks to Taeko's childhood have the washed-out, faded-edge impression of old photographs, an approach that would have been easy to abuse and which he manipulates sublimely to convey the ebbing and flowing vividness of Taeko memory.  And though it's easy to think of Miyazaki as Ghibli's resident perfectionist, not much in his canon can compare with the attention to detail in the the present-day scenes: what they lack in gimmickry, they more than make up for in quality, rendering prosaic elements like a night-time car journey so painstakingly that they end up feeling not at all prosaic.  There's truly not a frame I could nit-pick, just as there isn't a moment I'd trim or change: it's daft to talk about perfect films, of course, and yet for the life of me I can't imagine a better version of Only Yesterday than the one Takahata created.

Porco Rosso, 1992, dir: Hayao Miyazaki

Porco Rosso is a lark, a word I'd use to describe nothing else in Hayao Miyazaki's filmography, not even the relatively frivolous Castle of Cagliostro or the non-stop high adventure of Laputa.  Almost always there's a basic seriousness to Miyazaki's work, which in turn demands that we take it seriously, no matter that its subject matter might, on the surface, not seem to warrant such treatment.  Partly, perhaps, it's a consequence of the sheer artistry involved, and partly that whatever he's making, there's always a depth to the world-building and characterisation, and partly it's that, even in his lightest works, themes tend to creep in around the edges, along with an awareness that, however much we might wish otherwise, the world isn't always a safe place full of good people.

Porco Rosso sort of still has all that.  It would be hard to claim otherwise of a film that spends its entire running time under the encroaching shadow of fascism and ends by acknowledging that the high times it's shown off for 90 minutes are done with, never to return.  Heck, our hero is a former soldier with a tragic past that he's trying to outrun, outlast, or perhaps just give as little thought to as possible.  But he's also, like, a pig.  I mean, a humanoid pig, sure, who wears clothes and can talk and fly a plane and do basically all the things people do, but nevertheless, a pig.  And the film doesn't dance around this, so that we can never forget for an instant we're watching a movie about a humanoid pig who's also a fighter pilot.  But even if that weren't the case, even if Porco Rosso the character - it means "Red Pig", see what I mean about not letting you forget? - were merely a rather Humphrey Bogart-coded tough guy making his mercenary living taking out sky pirates above the Adriatic, this would still, I think, be light-hearted in a way practically nothing else Miyazaki put his mind is.

This is amply illustrated by the opening sequence, in which a band of said sky pilots semi-inadvertently kidnap a class of school girls, who couldn't possibly be less nonplussed about the situation, and don't start to take it any more seriously once Porco arrives to rescue them via the questionable means of shooting their plane down.  This ought to be at least mildly concerning, but since no one within the film is concerned - not the kids, not the pirates, and not our hero, who, to be fair, is suitably careful in picking his shots - we the viewer can't be concerned either.  And so it goes: though serious things will happen, and though the spectre of fascism is always hovering close by, nevertheless the overwhelming mood is one of joy, because who wouldn't want to live in an alternate mid-war era when mercenaries and sky pirates fought thrilling battles in one of the lovelier places on Earth?

I think we can safely assume that Miyazaki did.  More than anything in his CV, this feels like not merely a passion project but a reward for reaching a point in his career where he could make something so wilfully odd and go so all-in on the one obsession that's been a constant across practically all his work: that of flight and particularly the brief age of mechanised flight we see portrayed here, in which the nascent science of aviation relied as much on luck, persistence, and magical thinking as it did on - well, science.  Porco Rosso is brazenly obsessed with this stuff: the entire middle act is effectively just one scene after another of Porco's plane being repaired, while what plot there is ticks away gently in the background.  It ought to be deadly dull for anyone who doesn't share Miyazaki's passion, but then Miyazaki's a man never bettered at expressing through the medium of animation precisely why he feels as strongly as he does about any given topic.  Plus, by this point we have the film's secret second protagonist in play, Fio the teenage mechanic, and Fio is fervent and open and excitable in all the ways Porco isn't, such that we want her to succeed almost as much as we want to see Porco back having thrilling midair duels.

Because the advantage of having a director indulging himself on a subject he's wildly enamoured with is that he throws everything at the flying scenes, pushing the medium about as far as it will go and indulging in sequences that would send most animators scurrying for the hills.  Water is tough to animate; complex objects moving in three dimensions are tough to animate; it follows, then, that no one in their right mind would build their hand-drawn animated film around aircraft fighting mostly over the ocean.  But passion projects aren't meant to be pragmatic, are they?  And if I were to really nit-pick, I might add that they're maybe not always meant to be loved, either, since they're made, first and foremost, for their creators.  Having had nothing but positive things to say, I'd have to admit that, for me, Porco Rosso is still lesser Miyazaki.  Granted, that's barely a criticism, just an acknowledgement that the film, while delightful, is a little trivial-feeling in the company of masterpieces - though from anyone else it would certainly be at least a fondly remembered cult classic, which goes to show what a stupid bar for Miyazaki films holding them up to other Miyazaki films is.

Ocean Waves, 1993, dir: Tomomi Mochizuki

Ocean Waves was a departure for Studio Ghibli in just about every possible way.  The standout, of course, was that for the first time they'd be putting out a work by someone other than its two founding fathers, Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, a notion they'd flirted with before with Kiki's Delivery Service - and we've seen how that went.  But this time, Miyazaki and Takahata were serious: Ghibli had to be more than just the two of them, and so it was time for a project that gave some of their hot young talent a chance to shine.  Only, by way of mitigating the obvious risks of putting out a Ghibli project without the name of either of its two resident geniuses attached, it was going to have to be something a little more contained in scale: a TV movie with a suitably smaller budget and less ambitious animation, and a story to match, not a sweeping epic but a high-school drama confined to a handful of locations, with a 72-minute running time that would barely quality it as a feature film in the West.

Ocean Waves went over-budget, of course; even without Miyazaki and Takahata, Ghibli was still Ghibli.  Nevertheless, what Tomomi Mochizuki eventually delivered was effectively what the brief had demanded, which perhaps inevitably left it as noticeably cheap-looking by comparison with their previous output and comfortably the worst film they'd released up until that point.  But let's flip that on its head and clarify my position early: even if Ocean Waves was, in 1993, Ghibli's least great film, that's not to say it wasn't pretty great in its own right.  And cheapness, too, is extremely relative: there's some jolting animation that would have looked out of place in, say, Laputa, but there's also some lovely and effective backgrounds and some incredibly nuanced character animation, that being a speciality of Mochizuki's, as he'd proven with the similar and thoroughly wonderful Kimagure Orange Road: I Want to Return to That Day five years earlier.  Ghibli's idea of budget animation was not anyone else's, then or now, and there have been no end of cinematic releases that couldn't hold a candle to their idea of made-for-TV.

The same goes for the narrative.  In no way did the shift in material mean that Ghibli were abandoning their standards for smart, empathetic, complex storytelling.  Though, granted, on the surface, Ocean Waves offers a fairly traditional coming-of-age tale centred around a high-school love triangle: in the coast city of Kōchi, close friends Taku Morisaki and Yutaka Matsuno both become involved with a new transfer student, the beautiful, troubled Rikako Muto.  For Matsuno, that means immediately falling for her and doing practically nothing about the fact, while Morisaki, our protagonist, inadvertently finds himself developing a more complex relationship with Muto, beginning when she borrows a large sum of money from him while on a school trip.

Common enough ingredients; however, it's fair to say that the traditions to which it hews closely were less ingrained then than now, and more importantly, that Mochizuki's interests go beyond the usual limits of the genres he was working in.  Indeed, it would be hard to argue, for most of its running time, that the film cares much about the question of who might end up with who at all.  Rather, it's the process of looking back on these events that preoccupies Ocean Waves, and especially the idea that, particularly in our most formative years, it's awfully hard to pick out what's important and significant to our lives from amid the chaos.  Retrospect reshapes everything, and while sometimes that means distorting the past to fit a shape we'd have preferred or turning the molehills of small hurts into mountainous injuries, it can also mean that we see more clearly and understand much better, especially when it comes to gauging our own actions and making sense of those of others.

From all of that, you might fairly claim that Ocean Waves is a perfectly fine example of a particular type of story rather than the sort of ground-breaking masterpiece Ghibli had been trafficking in almost exclusively up to that point, and you'd be right, more or less.  Yet I've always thought that it did break ground in its way, and while it's impossible to gauge, for me its influence routinely shows up in the many subsequent anime that treat the travails of teenagerdom with honesty and respect.  Is it really a stretch to suggest that a film like A Silent Voice or a show such as Toradora! has a dash of Ocean Waves DNA in there?  Whatever the case, if lesser Ghibli means doing the familiar exceptionally well rather than expanding the breadth of cinematic animation, that's a low bar I'm happy to live with.  Granted, it has its flaws - the biggest, for me, being Shigeru Nagata's score, which goes too far in trying to dictate mood and routinely opts for the wrong one - and while I greatly admire Mochizuki, no one could claim he was on a par with his fellow Ghibli directors.  Yet he proved himself, here and elsewhere, as being absolutely terrific at honestly representing the emotional landscape of teenage life, and while I can imagine an objectively better version made by Miyazaki or Takahata, it would surely lack much of what I admire in Ocean Waves, where the smallest gestures and moments carry such a wealth of meaning.

-oOo-

Five more posts to go, then, with the big 150 seeing the end of our Ghibli tour.  In the meantime, there's plenty of interesting stuff left to cover, at least by a given definition of interesting that assumes everyone involved to be hopeless vintage anime nerds.  There's a few more VHS-only releases, and more surprisingly, a handful of things that made it as far as DVD and even Blu-ray - in part because there's a classic or two I've neglected and need to tick off for the sake of completism.  On top of all that, there's likely to be an Armored Trooper VOTOMS special, what with it producing a quite hefty number of spin-offs across the eighties and nineties, and the only real question mark comes down to whether I can finish watching the TV series in time.  I mean, I will, it's really good, but damn is there a lot of it.  Anyway, that certainly won't be next time, so expect a bunch of stuff you've probably never heard of...



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There's a very good chance you haven't heard of UK anime distributor Western Connection.  Actually, it would be strange if you had; they only ever released on VHS, managed to put out all of about two dozen titles, then vanished without a trace.  And what they did release was mostly pretty obscure, not to mention what a hash they generally made of doing so, with badly timed subtitles, tissue-paper-thin inlays, bafflingly worded descriptions, horribly cheap and unreliable tapes, and a money-saving hack of cutting out episode credits to pass off OVAs as films.  Heck, those weren't even their worst offences, as we're about to see - because, yes, this time around we're looking exclusively at titles from this most would-be-notorious-if-anyone-had-heard-of-them of distributors!  So let's see what mess they managed to make of Slow Step, Dancougar, Galactic Pirates, and Hummingbirds...

Slow Step, 1991, dir: Kunihiko Yuyama

Upon starting the second of Slow Step's five 45-minute episodes, a couple of things occurred to me.  The first was just how much had been set up in the first episode, for all that it had seemed to be ambling along in a fairly aimless slice-of-life mode - yet here we were and there were numerous characters in the mix with multiple plot strands around them, half of which had crept up on me unawares.  Which led directly to the second revelation, that I was already thoroughly caught up in those character dramas and eager to find out how things would pan out.

This, it turns out, is basically the game Slow Step is playing throughout, ushering its plot and cast towards you with the lightest of touches while at the same time developing them with sufficient care and attention that it's hard not to get absorbed.  I guess, then, that a third surprise was the realisation that I was watching something kind of special: superficially familiar in a bunch of ways, sure, but stamping its own personality on well-worn themes and even sometimes using that familiarity to surprise.  For example, by the beginning of episode two, our female lead Minatsu has managed to stumble her way into a situation where she's dating two different boys, one of them while wearing a fairly obvious disguise.  It's remarkable how plausibly we get to that point, and the disguise, which amounts to a wig and glasses, is obviously preposterous, but the character designs sell it nonetheless.  However, with so much vintage anime behind me, I was starting to dread the narrative convolutions that would be needed for Minatsu to keep her double life up and how tired that was likely to get with another three hours of running time to go.

Only, Slow Step doesn't do that.  The dual identity shenanigans last for precisely as long as they need to, and when Minatsu's charade inevitably falls apart, it does so in a manner that both advances and deepens the plot - which, remarkably, is how more or less everything works.  We have not one but two interlocking love triangles and a show that's both a baseball anime and a boxing anime, but somehow none of those elements stumble over each other or detract from the whole.  The sports bits arguably gets the shortest shrift, but only in so much as their value, asides from providing a bit of action, is in how they matter to and affect the characters.  Even the comedy is never there purely for its own sake, with a general lack of overt gags or goofiness.  And for all that, Slow Step manages to be awfully funny when it wants to be: I didn't laugh constantly, but I laughed hard in a fair few places, and often it was at a joke that had been gathering steam in the background only to catch me off guard at the crucial moment.

The writing, then, if I haven't already made that clear, is very good indeed.  How much of that we can pin on Manga creator Mitsuru Adachi I daren't say, since I can't find a credit for a scriptwriter anywhere, but it's certainly splendid source material: Adachi, as I understand it, was quite a big deal in Japan, yet for whatever reason his work has barely found its way to the West.  Our loss, clearly, and all the more so if this is the sort of adaptation he gets.  I've had cause to say nice things about director Kunihiko Yuyama before now, and while he's not up to anything radical here, with the animation rarely having to do much besides make the most of Adachi's charming designs and keep the sports sequences lively, he certainly deserves kudos for the spot-on pacing and nice use of colour palate to build mood.  As stylistic choices go, it's all familiar stuff, but familiar stuff done so impeccably that it feels awfully fresh and exciting nonetheless, which is really Slow Step all over.

Dancougar, 1987, dir: Jutarô Ôba

Before we can begin to talk about Dancougar in terms of content, we need to get past what it was and what Western Connection did with it.  Most of that is the sort of sneakiness and shoddiness we've grown awfully familiar with in this long tour of vintage anime, and if you've made it this far, you'll hardly blink an eye at the discovery that what Western Connection put out as a standalone film was in fact an edited version of the three-part OVA God Bless Dancouga, second sequel to the 38-episode show Dancouga - Super Beast Machine God.  Granted, while there's scant effort made to reintroduce the concept or characters, it remains a bit more forgiving to the unfamiliar viewer than that might imply - and a good thing, too, since pretty much every viewer would be unfamiliar when this was dropped into UK stores because said TV show hadn't been released outside of Japan.  But we're still not really breaking new ground, and though we might add in Western Connection's bargain-basement production standards, none of that was unique to them either.

You know what was?  Releasing a title with the edges of the animation cells in shot, that's a new one on me.  I concede here that I might not do the best job of describing this, because I'm nowhere near having the technical knowledge to explain how Western Connection botched as badly as they did, but essentially, there are shots - and not just a few! - where the images appear unfinished at the top and bottom of the picture.  That unfinishedness is nothing weird in and of itself, it's how hand drawn animation was done in those days: you painted what was intended to be visible in the finished product and fudged the rest, and of course it would never occur to an animator that someone might be bonkers enough to release their hard work in such a state.  The practical effect varies from distracting to incoherent, since sometimes your brain just registers that something looks kind of off, but sometimes characters are missing their legs and appear to be floating in mid-air.  Put it all together, though, and it's the sort of bewildering mistake that the best anime in the world would struggle to survive.

If Dancougar is hardly that, it's fine for what it is, which is to say, an obviously unnecessary sequel that has all the usual problems unnecessary sequels are prone to, like having to spend an inordinate amount of time re-establishing its setup and then introducing a new conflict.  And to its credit, it even plays with those issues a little: there's an interesting thread teasing the notion that all our heroes have accomplished until now is to get rid of an external threat, leaving the usual bad actors to make everyone's lives miserable, since it hardly takes an alien invasion to make human society rubbish.  Had more been done with that idea, we might actually be on to something, and once it becomes apparent where everything's leading in the closing third, it's hard not to be disappointed, especially if you're one of those viewers new to the franchise who were naively hoping for a climax that didn't rely heavily on foreknowledge you couldn't possible have.

Admittedly, if you can get past Western Connection's ruinous cockup, the animation's rather nice, particularly during the giant robot action; but then there's not enough of that, and aside from the plot briefly threatening to go to interesting places, that's about the only significant positive I had.  Would that have changed if I'd been familiar with the rest of the series?  Marginally, perhaps, in that knowing the cast might enliven some of the character drama that bogs down the opening minutes; but I do think that, Western Connection's astonishing ineptitude aside, what really harms Dancougar is the sense that this story doesn't need telling and everyone new it.  So I guess we can be glad that what they chose to ruin in so unique a fashion wasn't some lost masterpiece but a serviceable, disposable sequel made for no other reason than that somebody supposed it might sell.

Galactic Pirates, 1989, dir's: Shin'ya Sadamitsu, Katsuhisa Yamada, Kazuo Yamazaki

One of the nice things about Western Connection was that they didn't generally go in for dubs - assuming you're like me and have no love for them, which is a big assumption, I'll admit, and probably in a perfect world they'd have done what the majority of publishers at the time did and released in both formats.  But they didn't, and because of that, the vast bulk of their titles are subtitled, a fact of which I, at any rate, have been glad.  But then we come to Galactic Pirates, which bucks that trend in a big way.  For not only was it solely put out as a dub, it's the sort of dub you're most definitely going to have strong feelings about.  And for most of the presumably small number of people who ever experienced it, those feelings were no doubt negative, because it's obvious within seconds that notions like respect for the material and restraint and faithful interpretation were not so much off the table as never in the room to begin with.

This manifests most obviously in a volume of swearing that would have put the curse-happy folks at Manga to shame and in the decision by one of the leads to play his character - a human-sized, talking cat, mind you - as though they'd just wandered in from a particularly tacky seventies Blaxploitation movie.  Since the cat's black, you see?  It's certainly a bold choice, and we might say the same for the director who didn't shoot the idea down immediately and the rest of the cast who didn't march their colleague out into the carpark for a sound kicking.  And yet, I dunno... it sort of works?  Oh, not in the traditional sense of good dubbing, in that it never stops being wrenching and obviously apart from the source material.  But it does have a certain "go big or go home" quality, and the performance, in itself, has a measure of enthusiastic charm, and sometimes it brings a spot of humour that wasn't there on the page, and I can't honestly claim I hated it.  In fact, from the perspective of someone with no time for dubs, this one sort of worked for me, and make of that what you will.

That is, anyway, on the level of the performances, and to some extent the humour, if you can get past the tendency to chuck in swear words in place of actual jokes.  And since Galactic Pirates is a comedy above all else, that actually gets us a fair way.  But there is a plot, quite the convoluted one in fact, and where the script translation - by someone named Dr. D. Shoop, who I'm inclined to suspect may not have been a real doctor - falls down is in losing said plot at every turn.  What's not gags and swearing seems to consist entirely of proper nouns, many of them variations on "cat" - a word that may be one of our protagonists, one of our villains, or a sentient AI that makes imagination a reality, depending on context - and following along winds up somewhere between a chore and an impossibility.  I couldn't manage a plot summary, and if I did, it would disintegrate by the last episode, by which point numerous characters and factions are following various agendas that seem to relate only tangentially to each other.

That's a problem, obviously, but it would be worse if there wasn't the impression that Galactic Pirates was always meant to be chaotic and that the script is, at worst, exacerbating an existing and somewhat intentional issue.  More to the point, the plot doesn't matter all that much; indeed, if there's a real flaw here, it's that the complex but aimless narrative gets the emphasis it does when the comedy, characters, and action are what works.  Thankfully, those better elements get foregrounded more often that not, with the wider story frequently sidelined almost entirely.  The second episode, for example, features a baseball match in which no-one knows how to play baseball, or even can agree on whether hand grenades and intervention by sentient spaceships are allowed, but everyone argues incessantly over the rules nonetheless, and it's genuinely hilarious in places.  If nothing else is quite that good, we never go too long without a solid joke or cheerfully weird concept to liven up events, and even in the weaker moments, distinctive designs and some fairly impressive animation help keep things lively.  Top it all off with an English-language heavy rock soundtrack by metal band Air Pavilion, which is somehow better for being such a weird fit for the material, and you're left with an interesting curio that works more often than not, despite - and very occasionally because of - the less-than-ideal treatment it received at the hands of those wacky folks at Western Connection.

Hummingbirds, 1993, dir: Kiyoshi Murayama

It's obviously bad practice to review the title you were expecting rather than the one you got, and yet the version of Hummingbirds I had in mind makes so much more sense than the one that was actually released that I had a hard time getting over it.  If you have an anime in which, for reasons unknown, the Japanese military has been entirely privatised and the only ones daft enough to take them up on the offer are idol groups, you'd surely think the central joke would be along the lines of, "Wouldn't idols make terrible pilots, on the grounds of them not having any of the relevant skills and there being basically no connection between being a popular musical performer and controlling a piece of state-of-the-art military hardware?"

Hummingbirds begs to differ.  Instead, our five protagonists, the Toreishi sisters, are all hotshot pilots to begin with (despite their youngest member being all of 12 years old) who happen to also want to be idols, and so are uniquely well suited to these bizarre circumstances.  And I'm all for avoiding obvious jokes, but there's nothing to say an obvious joke can't be funny, and by the same measure, dodging one is really only a virtue if you have another to replace it with.  I've read reviews that suggest Hummingbirds is a biting satire, but personally I couldn't see it: it has little to say on the topics of either the Japanese military nor idol culture, except for noting in passing that the two would make for quite the awkward fit.  Indeed, I'm not even sure we can regard Hummingbirds as being primarily a comedy of any stripe.

With all of that out of the way - and I do wish I'd known it going in, so perhaps it's worth so much emphasising - we can finally consider what Hummingbirds is rather than what it isn't and acknowledge that the show has quite a bit going for it.  The animation, for one thing, is mostly pleasing, particularly in the air combat sequences, which generally look pretty great, albeit at the price of some occasionally rough character work elsewhere.  After the action, most of the money seems to have gone on the song and dance numbers, which are as regular as you'd expect from a show about idols.  You might also expect some really standout tracks, and thus find yourself mildly disappointed, but everything's catchy and certainly good enough that having the brakes jammed on for five minutes of musical interlude never gets annoying.  And the cast are a charming bunch to be around; the sisters are a little indistinguishable beyond their effective designs and obvious age differences, but in episode two the rival Fever Girls arrive and bring a considerable spark to the proceedings, something the creators some to have realised given how much they become the centre of attention in the latter half.

So a neat four-episode OVA that fails to exploit the daftness of its core concept, but opts instead for being an appealingly character-led show about idols with solid production values and plenty of catchy tunes, along with some unexpectedly exciting bursts of action.  Put like that, it's hard to fault Hummingbirds, and I strongly suspect that when I return to it, as I'm sure I will, I'll enjoy it even more for taking it on its own considerable merits.  Which would be a nice, positive note to end on, but since this is the Western Connection special, we'd better take a moment to consider how said distributor managed to muck up this particular release.  Only, this time around, it's slightly tragic, in that they put out just the one volume, containing the first two episodes, before they finally went bottom up.  What's worse, it's a solid release, perhaps suggesting they were getting their act together towards the end.  Thankfully, all four episodes - under the original, obviously better title of Idol Defence Force Hummingbird - are up on YouTube, which is surely a better option than tracking down a phenomenally rare video tape and then feeling sad that you'll never get to see the ending.

oOo-

I suppose it would have been best if these titles had sucked, given that it's all but impossible that any of them will see the light of day ever again. Yet I'm personally glad that they didn't, and that Western Connection, for all their eccentricities and sometimes almost unbelievable lack of care and common sense, managed to put out such a respectable and cheerfully eccentric catalogue.  Indeed, had they continued, and had their quality control improved substantially, I've no doubt they'd be one of my favourite distributors, and even with their small output, I have a definite soft spot for them: after all, aside from what we've covered here, they were behind stuff like Samurai Gold, Ai City, Grey: Digital Target, and The Sensualist, all of which I've raved about to a greater or lesser degree.
Though they did also release Kama Sutra, so, yeah, maybe they got what they deserved.



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 There are a couple of themed posts on the way - 145 will be part two of the Studio Ghibli roundup, and 144 will be, er, not that - but before we reach those, there's more random stuff to be gotten through.  In a change from recent programming, however, that doesn't just mean desperately obscure VHS-only releases.  We have something that made it all the way to DVD, but also, and much more excitingly, we have a brand new Blu-ray release that's (sort of) never seen the light of day before in the West.  Yes, the good folks at Discotek have been at it again, and altogether that leaves us with Luna Varga, I Dream of Mimi, Digimon Adventure, and Techno Police...

Luna Varga, 1991, dir: Shigenori Kageyama
Luna Varga, a four episode comic fantasy OVA of a flavour that was everywhere in anime at this point, has essentially one idea going for it, and whether that one idea is stupid, awesome, or a bit of a both is surely in the eye of the beholder.  Towards the end of the first episode, our plucky heroine the princess Luna, whose kingdom is under assault from the local warmongers, finds herself in a hidden dungeon beneath her castle and uncovers a secret weapon that her family has squirrelled away for just such an occasion, in the shape of a giant dinosaur-thing by the name of Varga.  The only kink in this good news is that Varga will only function with the addition of a brain, and Luna will need to be said brain.  And while there are no end of ways that might have been represented, this being anime from the beginning of the nineties, there was only one they were likely to go with, and that is of course Luna sitting on Varga's head butt naked.

The butt nakedness has mostly been addressed by midway through episode two, which isn't to say Luna won't be exposed quite regularly, in part because Varga's more portable form is a tail that protrudes from exactly the part of Luna you'd expect a tail to protrude from.  And like I said, you can respond to all of this in one of two ways, or possibly bounce between the two extremes like I did, but at any rate, what we have here is four episodes of a scantily clad woman riding about on a dinosaur that's attached to her nether regions.  Though having said that, I'm reminded of how much of Luna Varga busies itself with other stuff, such as wacky comedy, perhaps because the scenes where Luna and Varga are in full-on kaiju mode are invariably the action set pieces, and Luna Varga is rather thrifty by early nineties OVA standards - though thankfully Kageyama's energetic direction and some nice designs ensure that it never looks offputtingly cheap.

Nevertheless, I can't convince myself the version of Luna Varga we got quite works, and that's frustrating, since it really feels as though it ought to.  It is, after all, effectively being a mech show where the giant robot is replaced by a giant monster and the boring male protagonist is replaced by a feisty princess, and that's surely a solid enough twist to keep a four episode OVA afloat.  In fairness, it's not as if Luna Varga doesn't manage to get itself over the finish line reasonably intact, only that there's the persistent sense that nothing's quite functioning as well as it should be.  The surrounding cast are varied and entertaining, and there are hints of intriguing world building: two of said cast, for example, can turn into animals on a whim, which is apparently a thing some people can do.  But almost everything occurs more as an amusing idea than as meaningful content, and thus ends up feeling slightly like filler on the way to a final encounter with the big bad that's an awfully generic note to end on.

I guess my point is, if you're going to have a central premise as outlandish as "princess has dinosaur attached to her butt" and then pepper it with dark wizards who can only summon pterodactyls and people who turn into flying cats at the drop of a hat, you probably need to accept that you've gone to a weird place and run with it, whereas what we get here somehow ends up making all of that feel rather generic.  As someone who has quite a fondness for generic nineties anime comic fantasies, I wasn't overly put out by that, and goodness knows there are plenty worse examples of the form, but there's no denying that an opportunity for something much more memorable was sitting there in plain sight.

I Dream of Mimi, 1997, dir: Masamitsu Hidaka

OK, yes, I'm afraid I'm breaking the "no hentai" rule yet again, and again it's because some rando on the internet claimed that something was good enough that, with a bit of squinting, you could enjoy it on its non-pornographic merits.  Now, I don't really agree, but I can sort of see how someone might have come to that conclusion about I Dream of Mimi, if only because there's some genuinely nice animation here, and some unusually good character designs, and a general sense that more than the usual thought has gone into the visual side of things, and not just for the sorts of reasons that hentai tends to focus on.  Which is to say that by "good character designs" I don't just mean "well-drawn boobs".  Though that too.

I care a fair bit about nice animation, enough so that I can ignore some pretty hefty failings, so that's a good start, and it's not even as if I Dream of Mimi has nothing else going for it: the humour worked enough of the time to keep me routinely amused, and since this is primarily a comedy when it's not being hentai - and quite often when it is being hentai - that's certainly a win.  And the sexy stuff is all consensual and not especially graphic and relatively well woven into the plot, so in theory it's not as if its being hentai detracts from its other merits, either.

But in practice, by trying to do something awfully familiar but with a mildly pornographic twist, I Dream of Mimi leaves itself with not enough time to tell a decent story or to tell the one it's set itself very coherently.  For what we've got here is one of those "nerdy guy gets magical dream girlfriend" shows that were, and no doubt remain, awfully common in the world of anime.  They always had the potential to be kind of gross, and I've commented before on how miraculously they generally manage to sidestep being the worst version of themselves: heck, Oh My Goddess! is a personal favourite, and I doubt I could explain that to someone without making it sound deeply icky.  Indeed, I remember singling out Video Girl Ai in my review on precisely that point, and being gobsmacked that it somehow wrung something heartfelt and witty from a premise that had every reason to be all sorts of unpleasant.

I won't quite go so far as to say that I Dream of Mimi is the version of Video Girl Ai that I praised Video Girl Ai for not being, but the possibility certainly occurred to me more than once while I was watching.  Out story involves the nerdish Akira, who buys a computer from a dodgy fellow in the street and is surprised when he gets home that said computer is a naked girl, whom he eventually names Mimi.  The show, incidentally, doesn't seem to know the difference between computers and robots, or indeed between computers and sexbots, that being effectively what Mimi is, since she immediately pledges herself to Akira for all eternity and seemingly has no functions that aren't powered by... Well, look, let's just say that if you'd care to hazard a guess at what Akira has to do to expand her RAM, or where her software needs to be inserted, then, unless you have the cleanest of minds imaginable, you're almost certainly right.

Given that we're in the realms of hentai, I guess there are plenty dumber reasons to jam a bunch of sex scenes and an awful lot of nudity into what's primarily a romantic comedy.  But I Dream of Mimi never quite figures out how to balance those elements.  Given that Mimi is a sex-powered machine, and an awfully possessive and demanding one at that, the romance doesn't function well at all, and the comedy keeps getting sidelined for what turns out to be the main plot, some action-heavy business about invading American computers that in turn doesn't gel with the ongoing business of Akira trying to hide from his friends that he's inadvertently married a nymphomaniac PC that looks like a teenage girl, and all in all this feels like a title that needed to pick fewer lanes and stick to them.  If the concept appeals, it's certainly easy to imagine a worse version, and indeed a sleazier and more charmless version, but unless you're absolutely determined to have sporadic sex scenes in your magical girlfriend show, there are much better takes on that over-done setup to be had.

Digimon Adventure, 1999, dir: Mamoru Hosoda

Digimon Adventure is quite a pointless title to be reviewing, but pointless for different reasons to how most of these reviews have been over the last two or three years, given that, thanks to Discotek and their recent Blu-ray, you can actually buy it in normal shops for a relatively reasonable amount of money.  On the other hand, you almost certainly know in advance whether you'd want to - are you a Digimon fan, a Mamoru Hosoda fan, or both? - and given that Discotek's release includes the first three movies and that, at twenty minutes, Digimon Adventure is far and away the shortest, the odds are stacked against anyone splashing out for it in isolation, especially when they're also getting Hosoda's well-regarded follow-up Our War Game.

The logical thing to do, then, would be to review the release rather than the individual film.  But I'm not going to do that because only Digimon Adventure came out during our decade of choice, and even if I do break my own rules here so often that it's become a running joke, I'm in a stubborn mood today.  Yet thankfully, none of that matters, because if you fall into either of the categories mentioned above, then the first Digimon film, in spite of its miniscule running time, is damn near good enough to warrant the price of entry on its own.

Though, I dunno, maybe that's a little truer if you're in the Digimon fan camp?  Hosoda brings an unusually visible amount of directorial presence, far more than you'd expect for a property like this, but I don't know that we can call Digimon Adventure a Hosoda feature in the way that, say, Wolf Children or The Boy and the Beast,  or even his later franchise entry, the One Piece film Baron Omatsuri and the Secret Island, are.  Yet Digimon Adventure manages to be a perfect approach to what a franchise movie should be, while at the same time feeling as if it's doing quite a bit more than what that would call for.  The story is as simple and slight as can be - some years before the start of the TV series, Tai and his little sister Hikari have their first encounter with a digimon, then there's a big fight - but feels considerably more substantial and nuanced than that suggests.  It starts out light-hearted, gets awfully dark before the end, and has as many delightful character moments as films four or five times its length.  Plus, Hosoda being Hosoda, and having his shtick down apparently from even very early on in his career, the animation is wonderful, and in most of the ways his later work would feature wonderful animation, with tons of charm and subtlety of expression to the scenes that are primarily about two children trying to make sense of the cute but baffling monster that's inserted itself into their lives and a real sense of scale and weight to the climatic battle.

And you know what?  I've changed my mind.  In spite of a rather high price tag - sure it's three movies, Discotek, but they have a combined running time of one quite long movie! - I'd recommend this to any vintage anime fan, and to anyone who's interested in following Hosoda back to his roots.  I know I said I wouldn't review the release, but Our War Game is pretty wonderful, spoiled only by some dated digital animation work and the fact that its director would return to the same well with both Summer Wars and Belle, leaving it feeling like something of a rough draft - albeit the rough draft of a skilled craftsman who already had most of what he needed to do figured out.  And the third film, Hurricane Touchdown!!, is a perfectly serviceable, entirely rote franchise movie, which is okay because it just emphasises how elegantly Hosoda balances an auteur's instincts with the needs of his material, and so makes Digimon Adventure seem all the better for how much more it accomplishes with less than a third of the running time.

Techno Police 21C, 1982, dir's: Nobuo Onuki, Masashi Matsumoto

I try not to repeat what others have said better than I could, so rather than detail the origins of what would come to be known in the West as either Techno Police 21C or plain old Techno Police (I'm assuming, based on no evidence, that it had a different title in Japan), I'll just point you to this review.  But short story even shorter, since it's handy information to know in advance: what we have here was intended to be a TV series that never got off the ground, and in desperation, the extant footage was cobbled together into something that, if you were being very generous in your definitions, could be regarded as a movie.

Though why anyone would be generous towards Techno Police is beyond me, since it isn't very good, and almost certainly wouldn't have been a good TV series, perhaps struggling its way up to "cheap and generic" in its better episodes.  Here, those better episodes get translated into better scenes, of which there are maybe two, though I can only remember one, so perhaps I'm already being too kind.  There simply isn't anything to get excited about, and I do wonder how things ever got so far as they did, since surely not even in 1982 was "futuristic cops are partnered with robots" such a ground-breaking premise that you could hang an entire TV show - or movie - off it without bothering to concoct anything in the way of interesting characters, settings, narrative or themes?  And if I'm wrong and Techno Police had genuinely come up with a notion so radical and ground-breaking that it had to be thrust into the world by some means or other, even then, I refuse to accept that more couldn't have been down with it than ...  well, than nothing, since Techno Police is content to go nowhere with its core idea.  The closest we get to a hook is that the robot partners are essentially new-borns who have to be trained in the basics of police work and social behaviour, which translates to a brief montage of wacky misunderstandings, while also offering a fine example of the level this is operating on, given what an awesomely stupid jumping-off point "robot cops that don't know how to be cops" is.

Still, the robots serve us better than their human counterparts, since they at least get some mildly appealing designs, whereas the homo sapiens of the cast are bland as bland can be, both in appearance and whatever passes for character.  They're not even stereotypes, and the only two traits I can recall about any of them are that the hero, Ken, is introduced to us as having a thing for trashing his police motorcycles that you might imagine would figure somewhere in the subsequent plot but doesn't, and Eleanor, the one who's a girl, gets an hilarious line in which she seems to suggest that getting into tanks is somehow her speciality.  There's a third team member, but even looking at his picture on the cover and having watched this thing yesterday, I can't recall a single detail about him, and there are some recurring villains who I've also largely forgotten, and if there's a lower bar to clear than making your anime villains remotely memorable, I struggle to think what it might be.

Needless to say, the animation is resolutely threadbare, leaving multiple action sequences that feel like they probably ought to be mildly exciting as anything but, and an early score by Miyazaki's go-to guy Joe Hisaishi serves only to illustrate that even geniuses have to learn their craft somewhere.  And with all of that said, and since I always try not to be wholly negative, I'll close by admitting that, in its incredibly modest and inept way, Techno Police did kind of charm me.  It's not hatefully bad; you can sort of feel that somewhere deep beneath its bland and clunky exterior is the heart of something that somebody genuinely cared about - woo, robot cops!! - and however badly that spark got lost along the way, it wasn't altogether extinguished.  Of course any modern child would be repelled by its incompetence and immense datedness, but I can imagine a kid in the late eighties stumbling across Techno Police on TV and kind of digging it for the course of eighty minutes.

-oOo-

I possibly got a bit more excited over Digimon Adventure than is altogether reasonable, but it's been on my want-to-see list for a good long while, and it's nice not to have been disappointed.  However, in terms of recent good news, it's turned out to be a mere taste of what's to come.  In particular, and after I grumbled hard about their past incarnation only recently, I'm feeling awfully positive about the new-look AnimEigo, who just made a bunch of very exciting announcements, including one that would feature high on my top ten of vintage titles that demand a Blu-ray release.  And I don't know why I'm being coy, it's the Black Jack OVA series!  Yay!  So who knows, maybe we might even get another new title or two to look at before we hit the big 150?

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

One last post for 2024, which has been a rather dramatic year for Drowning in Nineties Anime if the Blogger stats are to be believed, in that people appear to have been actually reading these things in considerable numbers.  This seems deeply unlikely - why do you never comment, oh phantom readers? - but at least it's been nice to imagine that I'm not rambling into the void.  And of course it would be even nicer to finish the year with something momentously exciting, but that was never going to happen, so we'll have to settle for a very tenuously themed post.  Our four titles this time have one thing in common, and that's that they all clock in at well under an hour.  It's not much, but it's all we've got, so let's take a look at Guyver: Out of Control, Baoh, Shonan Bakusozoku: Bomber Bikers of Shonan, and On a Paper Crane: Tomoko's Adventure...

Guyver: Out of Control, 1986, dir: Hiroshi Watanabe

By this point, it's mostly to be expected that the releases I cover here are lost and forgotten; there was just so much of this stuff coming out, and the law of averages dictates that a lot was bound to fall by the wayside.  But then sometimes I come across something I'd definitely have expected to leave at least some trace, and Guyver: Out of Control falls hard into that category.  That there's an entire entry of the Guyver franchise nobody ever seems to mention?  Well, that took me by surprise, given the extent to which the OVA series was one of the seminal titles from among the first major wave of anime exports.  It's still a fondly remembered show, and though I've never seen it, I know the later TV series has its defenders; heck, there are even people who like the first live-action adaptation, though goodness knows why.*  But try as I might, I can't find one person who has a nice word for Guyver: Out of Control, the first attempt at adapting the property, a mere year into the lifespan of a manga that would go on to run to a whopping 32 volumes.

So let me be that person.  Guyver: Out of Control is a long way from perfect, and it's probably fair to say that it's inferior to the bulk of the later OVA series, and from what I've read, it plays fairly fast and loose with its source material.  But as an attempt at doing the whole Guyver thing in under an hour?  It could have turned out plenty worse.  Out of Control is something of a whistle-stop tour, and it's evident that there were boxes to be ticked.  Gore?  Check.  Gratuitous nudity?  Check.  Every possible combination of humans, guyvers, and zoanoids fighting each other?  Yup, a big check there.  And if words like "guyver" and "zoanoid" mean nothing to you, you're probably not the target audience, but there's certainly enough information here to follow along, and much more would be a flagrant waste of running time.  We learn that zoanoids are humanoids that change into gross monsters and that they're bad; we learn that guyvers are suits of biomechanical armour and that they're icky but awesome.  We learn that when the latter punches the former real hard, they tend to explode in showers of blood.  For me, that's about all you really need.

Okay, I'm joking slightly.  On its dramatic merits alone,  Out of Control is thin stuff, and that's particularly apparent with our hero Sho, whose characterisation is effectively nonexistent, and still more than his love interest Mizuki (who the subtitles insist, distractingly, on calling Mizuky) ever gets, unless you consider "being kidnapped" a personality trait.  The bland, big-eyed character designs do them few favours either; from what I can tell, they don't appear to have been ported over from the manga, and those slightly cartoonish designs are a poor fit for the material.  Thankfully, though, and more importantly, Out of Control does right by its zoanoids, which are satisfyingly gross, and mostly manages not to screw up the guyver itself: it's kind of gangly compared with the later OVA, but it looks cool in motion, and the manner in which it bonds with its hosts goes hard on the body horror in a manner that makes for some interesting visuals.  This is hardly big-budget stuff, but it's more than efficient, and Hiroshi Watanabe - right at the start of what would go on to be a pretty good and impressively lengthy directorial career - injects a measure of personality without going so far as to distract from the crucial business of bloody violence and naked ladies.

Whether you'll find much enjoyment in Guyver: Out of Control, then, probably comes down to a bunch of variables, and obviously having a soft spot, or at least a high tolerance, for the schlockier end of vintage anime is a vital step in the right direction.  But maybe the bigger issue is your relationship with the Guyver franchise.  No idea what I've been on about for the last three paragraphs?  Then there are similar and better OVAs and movies from the period mining similar material, and in such a condensed form, I doubt this one would stand out to the virgin viewer.  An enormous fan of the series, with every panel of the manga burned into your memory?  Then the liberties taken here and the slight but constant shonkiness will likely drive you up the wall.  But if you're somewhere in the middle, with a degree of fondness but no great loyalty to other entries in the franchise, there's something quite appealing about a bite-sized chunk of Guyver that plays the hits and then clears the stage before it can remotely outstay its welcome.

Baoh, 1989, dir: Hiroyuki Yokoyama

I've been thinking a lot lately about publisher AnimeEigo.  I've always had a soft spot for them, and found their slight amateurishness to be charming: with their rightfully beloved liner notes, their small but carefully curated catalogue, and their obvious passion for those few titles they put out, it seemed unfair to begrudge them their flaws.  But there's amateurishness that's appealingly quirky and there's amateurishness that's more annoying, and their recent reliance on Kickstarter campaigns** for titles that surely could have just been released the old-fashioned way had been something I'd been eyeing suspiciously for a while, and which came to a head when I realised - as someone who'd need to import it to the UK - that I'd been priced out of what I was willing to spend for their Dagger of Kamui Blu-ray, which I'd been hoping for for an age.

All of which is a long way of getting around to how Baoh isn't AnimeEigo's finest moment.  I suppose their putting it out at all warrants a thumbs up, though at the time it must have seemed like an obvious choice, for reasons we'll return to.  But, like a small handful of their output, Baoh would go on to become quite astonishingly rare, which is the first annoying thing: something went very wrong somewhere to make a release this ludicrously hard to find.  Still, every publisher ended up with one or two unfathomable rarities, so we can't judge too harshly on that point - and who'd want to, when I could be getting incensed by some of the most astoundingly poor subtitling I've ever seen?  Granted, I used to do this for a living, so I realise I'm touchier than the average viewer, but I also know what I'm talking about when I say that whoever subtitled Baoh somehow managed to break every rule of the trade, not to mention a couple I'd never so much as considered, because why would you break them?  Why, for instance, when you had three whole words to work with, would you ever think to split them across two lines?  It's lunacy, yet a good three quarters of the subtitles here are operating at that level of stupidity.

Oh, and they managed to mistranslate the protagonist's name, so there's that.

And if the fact that I've spent two lengthy paragraphs without once touching on the actual content of Baoh is making you suspect I don't have much to say, then yeah, you got me.  Baoh is, to be clear, pretty great - which is a large part of why I got so wound up over things so arguably trivial - but it's mostly great at doing things that were all sorts of obvious for its time and place.  There's not a single element anywhere in amongst "moody antihero gets bonded with sentient armour and teams up with a psychic girl to take down the evil scientist who's responsible by punching his way through an army of colourful weirdos" that hadn't been touched upon elsewhere in the world of late-eighties anime and wouldn't be done to death in the near future.  It's just that Baoh does a better job of them than nearly all its competitors, in large part because it's less than an hour long and hardly bothers to pretend these are fresh ingredients when it can cannon-blast them into our faces instead.  I love nuance and subtlety as much as the next person, but I also love a villain so enthusiastic about their mad science that they frequently forget about everything else, and that's very much the level Baoh's operating on.

Granted, I'm heavily biased by the fact that the animation is rather splendid from beginning to end, with a slickness and attention to detail that's accentuated by Yokoyama's enthusiastic direction and sense of style.  Granted, too, that most of that slickness and enthusiasm is devoted to such extremely gross sights as people's faces being melted - Baoh sure loves its melting faces! - and, to a marginally lesser extent, to cool action stuff.  If it's not icky bloodshed or cool action, Baoh isn't much interested, and even then there's really only the one standout sequence, though it's a belter, as exposition and backstory get delivered mostly through the medium of horrible violence, that's then neatly cross-cut with a major moment of character development (and yet more horrible violence.)  And I can't really pretend that one terrific sequence and some overly familiar ideas delivered with an unusual degree of craft and ingenuity make for a reason to track down one of the rarest releases in existence, but Baoh's fun enough that I can at least say it deserved better than the treatment it got.

Shonan Bakusozoku: Bomber Bikers of Shonan, 1987, dir's: Nobutaka Nishizawa, Daiki Yamada

Oh, look!  It's AnimeEigo again, and this time, we get to be a bit kinder about them, because Shonan Bakusozoku is the sort of unusual, non-commercial title that a bigger, perhaps more sensible publisher would have steered well clear of.  And while AnimeEigo didn't exactly back it to the hilt, with a VHS release that's awfully hard to find these days and no subsequent return on DVD, it's nice that they took the chance.

Though the subtitling, it has to be said, is still dreadful.

But unusual and non-commercial I said, and the latter follows directly from the former, in that biker gangs, in the specific form they're portrayed here, are just not a thing anywhere else in the world, and it's one of those subcultures so insular and specific that it's awfully hard to convey it in a manner that the non-Japanese viewer can get any sort of a handle on.  Shonan Bakusozoku gets around this a little by giving us a protagonist with one foot outside of that world - he's really into sewing, a detail the show has the good grace never to mock him for - and a viewpoint character who's excluded from it altogether, and thus also manages to duck the issue of how the rest of the cast and their lifestyle of choice aren't terribly sympathetic.  You might argue that this is trying to have your cake and eat it, but the balance is largely right: we're invited to understand why riding around at irresponsible speeds at the dead of night and getting into bloody fights could be awfully appealing to those who indulge in it, without necessarily being asked to ignore that it makes them kind of jerks.

There's a story in all of this, of course, but that's the point where Shonan Bakusozoku comes a little unstuck, with too many similar characters to keep track of and too much hopping between them - that being what you get when you try and cram a big chunk of a 16-volume manga into 50 or so minutes, I guess, and also what you get when a US distributor only brings over the first of 12 OVA episodes.  Were Shonan Bakusozoku more invested in storytelling and less invested in style and action, this all might be quite a problem, but aside from a brief spell in the middle when I got mildly lost amid the tangle of plot threads, it turned out to not matter much at all.  It's the sort of tale that's clearer in retrospect, once we have the entire cast together for the big action climax, and everything comes together nicely enough that it's easy to forget the odd muddle along the way.

Likewise, some fairly rudimentary animation never really gets in the way of matters.  A degree of visual simplicity is the right fit for the cast and the show's punky attitude, and in that sense I was reminded of the more recent (and highly recommended) On-Gaku: Our Sound, which similarly uses visual simplicity to get to the heart of characters with an equally simple approach to life.  Granted, in the case of  Shonan Bakusozoku, I suspect it had more to do with budget, but that's not to say there aren't a few cool sequences, and they're right where they need to be, emphasising the thrills and danger of the biker gang lifestyle.  Still, it's not a title to seek out for its technical virtuosity, and taken purely on its artistic merits, Shonan Bakusozoku is maybe nothing terribly special.  But as a window into a particular subculture in a particular time and place, it's rather neat, and if you're the sort of vintage anime fan who likes diving down odd rabbit holes, there's definitely something of interest to be found here.

On a Paper Crane: Tomoko's Adventure, 1993, dir: Seiji Arikara

I'd had a bit of an emotional few days, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are a topic I've put a lot of thought into over the years, and even written about, and I'm generally kind of a wimp, so perhaps you shouldn't read too much into the fact that I blubbered through pretty much the entirety of On a Paper Crane's brief twenty-some minute running time.  Nevertheless, I'd be remiss in not mentioning that it absolutely wrecked me, if only because what we have here is a short film designed expressly to be shown to children, and I honestly can't say whether I'd be willing to put anyone in that target audience through the experience.  Which speaks, I suppose, to our culture and the times in which we live, because even as I find Peace Anime no Kai, the organisation that created this thing all those many years ago, hopelessly naïve in their faith that putting out a short kids' movie about one of the most appalling events in human history would turn the world's youth against nuclear weapons and war in general, I 100% agree with their goal and consider it precisely the sort of thing we ought to be doing as a civilised society, trying to steer the little'uns away from our worst mistakes even if that means traumatising the heck out of them a little.

It's fair to say, then, that, more than almost anything we've covered here, your mileage is going to vary with On a Paper Crane, because if you're not at least somewhat on board with its message and intentions, there's not going to be a lot in an openly propagandist mid-budget film of less than thirty minutes that's likely to hold your interest.  The animation is fairly nice, and obviously the work of professionals - not necessarily a given with a project like this - but the simplistic character designs didn't altogether work for me, and since On a Paper Crane is focused mostly on its two central characters, that was something of an issue.  Reijirô Koroku's score is more successful, hitting the obvious note of lots of weepy strings, but hitting it awfully effectively - a large part, I suspect, of why my tear ducts went into overdrive so hard.

Koroku had the right idea, though: subtlety was nowhere on the agenda when it came to the making of On a Paper Crane and nor should it have been, for what use is a film about the bombing of Hiroshima that makes you feel just a little bit sad?  Still, I was taken aback by how up front the film gets about the topic of what nuclear weapons do to a human body, pushing about as far as you could possibly go and still stay remotely on the side of being watchable by small children.  The moment that first set me off is a sequence where our protagonist, sixth-grader Tomoko, who's taken it upon herself to visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum for a school project, is spurred by objects and images in the display to imagine the last moments of those who left them behind.  It's an obvious idea, but that doesn't make it any less effective, or any less distressing, and that's equally the case when Tomoko starts hanging out with the ghost of Sadako Sasaki, who spares nothing in filling her and us in on what it's like to die of radiation poisoning before you've reached your teens.

Which I'm sure is another clue as to whether this is something you'd be remotely interested in, and surely for the majority of people, the answer is going to be a resounding "no" - which I get, I do, because who wants to track down exceedingly rare vintage anime just to be preached at about horrible historic events?  Even if you're on side with what On a Paper Crane has to say, that's not altogether a reason to watch it, and if you've been reading this and thinking, "Man, I really need to get a copy of this for my kids," then I'm kind of worried for you.  Yet I adored it, and it rocked me hard, and I'd like more people to experience it.  That's all the more true because the tape is a lovely artefact in itself, with a case that matches nothing in my collection and an enclosed booklet that's eager to tell you everything you could ever want to know about nuclear war, and then quite a bit more.  But that tape's about as rare as you'd expect it to be, and I can't even find the film on Youtube, and so I find myself yet again in the position of raving about something that's basically lost to the world.

-oOo-

Gosh, that was a good batch, and not all that far from being a great batch, either.  Granted, I suspect I'm overrating everything here, for one reason or another, due to personal bias - and now that I think about it, a much better theme would have been, "titles I was always going to be kindly disposed to and maybe give better write-ups than they entirely deserve."  Nevertheless, I do recommend the lot, and it's nice to be wrapping up 2024 on such a high note.



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

* Now, its sequel, Guyver: Dark Hero, that's pretty great.

** A thing of the past now, apparently, due to a change in management that seems to be bringing some welcome changes, and fingers crossed for a more standard-priced version of Dagger of Kamui arriving somewhere down the line.

After a couple of (for me, anyway) more exciting posts, including the wild highs of the first part of our Studio Ghibli retrospective, we're back now to the usual random, obscure nonsense.  But hey, random, obscure nonsense can be exciting too, can't it?  And if lost gems are too much to expect by this point, there are at least a couple of minor treats in among Megami Paradise 2, Ogre Slayer, Dangaizer 3, and The Abashiri Family...

Megami Paradise 2, 1995, dir: Katsuhiko Nishijima

(Megami Paradise part 1 reviewed here)

It's obvious in retrospect that, in trying to show up ADV for releasing the two half-hour episodes of the Megami Paradise OVA as separate titles by reviewing them that way, I shot myself in the foot more than I scored any points against a long-defunct anime distributor.  For here we are with part two, and what is there to add?  Well, let's start with a spot of good news: my worry at the end of part one was that, for all I knew, this was an unfinished title and that was why not an awful lot happened in part one.  That turns out not to be the case, but the flipside is that there wasn't a lot happening because there wasn't a lot to happen, and while we do get an ending, it's an ending designed primarily to lead into the video game series of the same name, leaving plenty of questions open to be answered there.

Which isn't to say that none of the threads left dangling from the opening chapter come to anything: we do find out what the mysterious villains we met there are up to.  Only, it amounts to, "They're evil and they want to do evil stuff, for evil reasons," and even that still somehow leads to a cliff-hanger, if not a very compelling one.  I'm not convinced I'd have rushed out to buy Megami Paradise the game to find out precisely what those evil reasons were - or, indeed, at all, on the strength of these two episodes.

Because part two is, like part one, perfectly adequate and almost entirely no more than that.  Though it does, at any rate, get to be adequate at somewhat different things in a somewhat different fashion, meaning that we can't dismiss it as more of the same.  The biggest shock is that our main character for part one, the nondescript-apart-from-her-name Lilith, gets taken out of play early and spends most of the running time comatose in her undies, meaning that protagonist duties are split between the remainder of the cast but land mainly on ditzy magic user Rurubell, who I recall considering the best thing about chapter one.  That's not untrue here; I wouldn't want to watch an entire series about Rurubell, but she's fun in small doses, and there's no room for more than that.  Though that would be less true if the structure weren't so weird: there's a chunk of exposition of the "Ha ha, now we will tell you our wicked plot!" variety, a bit where it looks like the baddies are sure to win and largely waste their advantage by inflicting kinky torture on their adversaries, and the inevitable final scrap, which I won't spoil because I have faith in you, reader, to figure out where all this goes.  The weirdness, to be clear, isn't in the structure itself, which couldn't be more obvious, but in the length of time allocated to each element.  Or, to put it another way, if you came for a grand climatic battle, you're likely to be disappointed, whereas if you wanted a scene of two women hung upside down in scanty clothing being whipped, you might well find yourself in (megami) paradise.

Or not, since I assume that even the kinkiest of viewers would appreciate some detail and nuance in their animation, and that sequence, for all that the creators seem to have considered it terribly important from a narrative perspective, doesn't receive anyone's finest work.  Barring the odd lapse, though, the production values are largely identical to what we got last time.  There's no single standout sequence to compare with the one in the first part, but mostly everything is fine and inoffensive to the eye, and the above-par soundtrack continues to keep the energy levels high even when the story is distracting itself with odd digressions.  Which brings us to a conclusion that I'm itching to copy and paste from my part one review, because, again, what else is there to say?  Megami Paradise is resolutely okay, with just enough quirky character to make it ever-so-slightly memorable, but it's hard to imagine anyone would have bothered with it back in the day given ADV's mercenary mean-spiritedness, and it's harder still to imagine why anyone would give it their time now.

Ogre Slayer, 1995, dir: Takao Kato

Let's not make the same mistake again, even if it's a bit hypocritical not to: though Viz Video chose to release Ogre Slayer across two VHS tapes, and though they were sneaky enough to append a two to the second volume, implying that it was a sequel rather than the latter episodes of a four-part OVA, I'm going to cover the lot together and save us all some time.  Though, frustratingly, Ogre Slayer would have been more worthy of two separate reviews, and there was at least some justification in the choice to break it in half beyond, "Woo, twice the money!" - a bit of corporate greed, incidentally, that didn't pay off, given that nobody appears to have paid it the least bit of attention.  Though that may equally well stem from the same cause as my wondering if I shouldn't have treated these two tapes as distinct from each other, which is that Ogre Slayer is essentially an anthology series - and an anthology series of a particularly confusing sort, which probably never stood much hope of setting the mid-nineties anime scene on fire whatever Viz did with it.

I say "confusing", but that's more an acknowledgement of the contemporary reviews, what few there are, than a personal opinion.  Once you get your head around the whole anthology aspect, it's substantially less odd that the person we'd expect to be our protagonist, the titular half-human, half-oni Ogre Slayer - that being both his name and the name of his sword, not to mention his sole occupation - is something of a guest character in his own anime.  And accepting that immediately improves the whole endeavour and gives us something a bit more special than the many violent, sexually exploitative titles that Ogre Slayer resembles at a glance.  I mean, it absolutely is violent and sexually exploitative, and the violence is front and centre throughout, but the anthology format means that it's never just that.

To go into more detail would be to risk spoiling four consistently good, occasionally great stories.  What works reliably is the focus on female protagonists who are used to lives outside of the nightmarish kill-or-be-killed world they each, one way or another, find themselves thrust into.  Probably that choice comes in part from a seedy, exploitative place, yet the result is an emotional depth beyond what we'd get if this were simply about a guy with a cool sword hacking up monsters.  Though paradoxically, keeping the focus away from Ogre Slayer himself does allow him to develop, at least from our point of view, as we learn details that earlier perspectives hid from us, the more so since the first part introduces him as practically an antagonist.  It's all rather neat and surprisingly sophisticated, and firmly the best thing Ogre Slayer has to offer.  Takao Kato's direction is always competent without getting up to anything truly striking, and the same can be said for animation that never impresses with anything besides how much blood and guts it's willing to chuck at the screen, though it does conjure up more atmosphere than many a similarly gruesome title.  Then again, it's Kazuhiko Toyama's score that does most of the heavy lifting on that front, especially when it's leaning hard into traditional Japanese instrumentation.

Ultimately, though, whether or not you're likely to get anything out of Ogre Slayer probably comes down almost entirely to how accepting you are of what it is, and likely that leaves a rather narrow demographic: the short story anthology aspect and the predominantly female cast makes it that bit more thoughtful and emotionally driven than what you might expect from something so eager to hurl gore and nudity at the viewer.  Even then, the theme doesn't leave that much room for manoeuvre; for all that the four tales presented are impressively varied, they all ultimately boil down to ogres and the slaying thereof, putting this comfortably behind its most obvious counterpart, the wonderful Vampire Princess Miyu.  Nevertheless, I for one am always grateful for something a little different, and for all its familiar trappings and uneven success, Ogre Slayer is definitely that.

Dangaizer 3, 1999, dir: Masami Ôbari

I've broken so many of my self-imposed rules by this point that I really have no idea whether or not I out to be covering Dangaizer 3, a four-episode OVA that began in 1999 but ended in 2001, a year even I know wasn't part of the nineties.  But it's awfully exciting to find anything these days I can buy on actual DVDs for vaguely reasonable prices, and more importantly, talking about Dangaizer 3 means we say one last goodbye to director Masami Ôbari, whose work has been a source of ongoing fascination for me almost from the beginning of these articles, to the point where I spent almost the majority of my Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer review discussing him instead.  There I said that, as often intriguing and always individualistic as his projects are, none of them ever reach the dizzy heights of being better than okay.  But is that true here, with his last gift to the world of film-length mainstream anime before a lengthy sojourn in the lands of hentai and serial TV?

I wish I could say yes, and I would have were it not for one factor, which we may as well get out of the way, since I wish I'd known it going in: Dangaizer 3 is unfinished, and not in that acceptable way where it still manages to tell a satisfying and self-contained tale but in that highly frustrating way where it just goddamn stops, with no doubt at least a couple more episodes planned with which to wrap things up.  It's truly galling because, while in many ways Dangaizer 3 is extremely typical fare - our three underdressed heroines co-pilot a giant robot that battles other giant robots belonging to an evil corporation - there are enough wrinkles in the formula to suggest that interesting twists would arrive before all was said and done.  Mostly this comes down to the Dangaizer being an ancient superweapon of last resort designed to sort out social malfunctions in the most drastic way possible, which immediately begs the question of whether the villains are remotely in the wrong, but around that is scattered an unusual degree of world-building and lore that further muddies the moral waters and leaves yet more unanswered questions.*

Aside from that, what sets Dangaizer 3 apart from its contemporaries and from the remainder of Ôbari's nineties work is some superlative animation, which is all the more shocking given how routinely bad animation got in the precise window this was released.  There are signs of computer tinkering here and there, but mostly this has the look and feel of high-quality hand-drawn work, for all that said look probably couldn't have been accomplished without some deft use of computers, OVA budgets being what they were in 1999.  It's a win-win basically, of the sort only a few directors managed to pull off before everyone got their heads around the new technology that was turning their industry upside down, and who'd have thought Ôbari of all people would be the man to get it right?  Yet even that's less shocking than the developments in his character designs, which for once are unmistakeable assets, treading a fine line between distinctive and flat-out bonkers.  And more unbelievable still, while there's the expected amount of nudity and female objectification - really, more than the expected amount, and it's not at all surprising Ôbari would leap into making hentai directly after this - some of the cast have quite realistic proportions and generally look like human beings who might conceivably exist.  You could have told me Ôbari was capable of genuinely good work and I'd have believed you, but that he could draw a woman with breasts smaller than her head?  Now, there I'd have called you a liar.

And if that's faint praise, then so be it.  Dangaizer 3 is good, because it looks terrific and its action is often genuinely exciting and because it complicates its stock plot and cast just enough to add an element of intrigue, but there's reinventing the wheel and there's giving said wheel a bit of a polish and a new coat of paint, and this is definitely the latter.  Nevertheless, it's a nice note to say our goodbyes to Ôbari on, sure proof of what he might have accomplished had he not got so stuck making mediocre fighting game adaptations, and I've not much doubt that it would have got a solid thumbs up if the darned thing had only received a proper ending.

The Abashiri Family, 1991, dir: Takashi Watanabe

My dislike for Go Nagai has cooled over the course of these reviews, in part because anything is going to be an improvement when you start with Violence Jack, but also, let's be fair, because there are a few excellent and quite a lot of pretty good adaptations of his work out there.  So it's a mild disappointment to be parting ways with him on so sour a note as The Abashiri Family, a title that puts most of his worst traits and very few of his better qualities on display, and is a rubbish bit of anime in its own right.

I realise that doesn't leave much space for a nuanced review, but there's so little that's nuanced about The Abashiri Family that the attempt would be a waste of effort.  I'm not nearly familiar enough with Nagai's work to know whether the manga this came from felt like such a rehash of old ideas, but there's nothing here he didn't do better elsewhere and no real hook either, though it seems at first as though there might be.  The first episode offers a setup that could conceivably go to entertaining places, as it introduces us to a future so dystopian that we can just about pretend the titular thieves and murderers are in some strange way heroes, or at least as horribly violent and screwed up as they are because that's how you get by when you live in so nightmarish a world.  Which isn't to say that the script cares terribly about getting us on side with the Abashiris, not when it can impress us with their cool murdering abilities, which range from clothes made out of explosives to flicking bullets up people's butts.

This isn't great, by any means, and it's not helped by animation that fizzles practically the moment it's done with the mildly cool opening sequence that introduces us to how ghastly this particular future is, but it's much better than what's to come.  For the plot, you see, isn't really about the Abashiris and their criminal escapades, but one member in particular.  By the end of that first episode, it's been revealed that sixteen-year-old Kikonosuke is not, in fact, the boy her three brothers took her to be, and that their latest bank robbery was actually some sort of epic, belated gender-reveal party.  But with Kikonosuke's true identity out in the open, her father feels it's time for her to put her life of wanton violence behind her and get an education, a plan she's relatively on side with until it turns out that the particular school she's been sent to is every bit as dangerous as the outside world, what with the teachers being homicidal sadists and everything.

Now, I appreciate that no one comes to Go Nagai for sense, but my goodness does the whole school thing not have a lick of logic to it.  We'll learn in due time that the staff are training their students to be assassins, but also kill the vast majority of them, and nobody ever graduates anyway, and just how exactly has no-one noticed any of this for the presumably numerous years it's been operating?  Heck, we're even led to believe the place has a good reputation, which is patently impossible unless literally not a single parent has ever stopped to wonder why their kids have never come home.  At any rate, the school section, which is effectively the entirety of the remaining running time, is both deeply familiar as far as Nagai's oeuvre goes and a wallowing in most of his worst instincts, with a particular emphasis on sexual violence that's a dreadful fit for the generally glib and cartoonish tone.

That, I think, is the biggest problem.  There's a version of the school material that might have worked, or at least have worked better, but that would have involved treating it more seriously and excising the attempts at humour, since, while Nagai's more successful works managed to wring some gallows humour from similarly dark places, here the results are merely nasty, loud, and tiresome.  Then there's the side business with the Abashiri family - you remember them, the supposed protagonists? - and though that works adequately in the first episode and probably could have sustained a better story had it remained the focus, it gets more and more dysfunctional when put alongside the school subplot.  And while none of this is enough to push The Abashiri Family into the dankest depths of Nagai adaptations, if only because it's all too dumb and insincere for the unpleasantness to have any real effect, the dearth of high points and crummy animation are comfortably enough to make it best forgotten.

 -oOo-

I promised a couple of treats at the top there, didn't I?  And here we are at the bottom and I'm not entirely sure what I was thinking.  Probably that Dangaizer 3 was a bit better than it was, though had it been finished I do think we'd be looking at something kind of special.  But perhaps the only real standout was Ogre Slayer, a title I feel should have a little bit more of a reputation than the one it currently possesses, what with it having being totally forgotten and everything.



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

* Actually, what Dangaizer 3 reminded me most of - and I doubt this was deliberate, because Neon Genesis Evangelion seems to have been far more of a conscious reference point - is late-eighties OVA series Hades Project Zeorymer, reviewed here under its Manga title of Zeoraima.  But it's also awfully reminiscent of the excellent series RahXephon, which would arrive a year after its conclusion.

I've broken practically every rule I set myself to try and keep the scope of these Drowning in Nineties Anime posts at some kind of manageable level, but one I hung on to for quite a while was to steer away from the recognised classics, partly because I was too emotionally attached to most of them to say anything useful and partly because, well, what would be the point?  You don't need me to tell you that, say, Ghost in the Shell is a great movie.  And while that, too, fell to the wayside eventually, there was another line I was less willing to cross.  Because there's classics and there's classics, and some stuff you really don't need me to tell you is good, not when it's reached the level of beloved world classics.

But obsessive completism is obsessive completism, and so here we are, with part one of what will eventually be three posts covering all of Studio Ghibli's pre-2000 output (plus a small cheat, which you'll find immediately below.)  And yes, this is certainly pointless, but it means I get to rattle on about some films that I adore beyond all reason, and then annoy myself by attempting to be remotely critical about them, and what the heck, right?  Let's talk about Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Laputa, Castle in the Sky, My Neighbour Totoro, and Grave of the Fireflies...

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, 1984, dir: Hayao Miyazaki

What struck me most, coming back to Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind on Blu-Ray, was how little the passage of four decades has harmed it.  I guess nobody's ever likely to mistake it for a modern film, but if someone were to adapt Hayao Miyazaki's manga today, staying faithful to his distinctive designs and not leaning too visibly on CGI, the results would be awfully similar to what he put out all those many years ago - though I suppose that's ignoring the fact that only a tiny handful of directors could possibly marshal the sorts of resources these days to produce hand-drawn animation of such astonishing quality.

But that, in any case, isn't really what I was getting at; it's as much, if not more, to do with the themes and attitudes and ethos that the film presents.  And obviously that's partly a consequence of its enormous influence, and the enormous influence of everything Miyazaki would go on to do subsequently, but regardless, there's not a lot from 1984, animated or otherwise, that offers such a complex, fully-formed female protagonist, or such nuanced villains, or such intricate, elaborate world-building, or such a sophisticated, persuasive environmentalist message.  And that last has never really been bettered, except perhaps by Miyazaki himself and his career-long collaborator Isao Takahata, for it's easy to say "We have to learn to exist alongside the natural world or terrible things will happen" and difficult indeed to weave that message into the core of your narrative in such a manner that it's both utterly convincing and barely the slightest bit preachy.

Granted, Nausicaä herself gets the odd speech in that direction, but her attitude is more one of desperation than condescension, and mostly it's the imagery that does the brunt of the work: we're given just enough time to get to know the Valley of the Wind as a location of delicate peace and harmony before it comes under threat, and since we know what the world beyond its borders has been reduced to, there's something profoundly wrenching about the sight of, say, a stray fungus spore attached to the root of a tree.  It's easy to forget just what a spectacularly good director of horror imagery Miyazaki can be, but there are moments of real nightmare fuel in Nausicaä, and the nightmare is one of nature made sick and warped and inhospitable.  Though, notably, the film never tries to persuade us that the insect-ruled wastelands that hem in its few last human habitations are in and on themselves a bad thing.  Indeed, they're routinely portrayed as having their own strange beauty and majesty, and that's nowhere truer than in the case of the enormous Ohmu that comprise its main non-human threat.  They're alien and potentially dangerous, but, as we'll learn, also absolutely necessary - and so, Nausicaä argues persuasively, the only rational response is to coexist.

This is all of a heck of a lot for a sort-of-debut to be even attempting, let alone pulling off with such easy grace.  True, Miyazaki had a ton of TV work behind him, including the splendid precursor that was Future Boy Conan, and of course he'd already made one extremely good movie, albeit one that probably nobody would describe as a passion project; but you can see why, for a lot of people, this is the first Miyazaki movie proper.  This is the point from which everything we've come to think of as the elements of a Miyazaki film began, and even if there would be modifications - the villains, for all their interesting shading, are inarguably villains, a storytelling crutch he'd rapidly abandon, and it's hard to imagine the Miyazaki of later years showing off quite so much of his female protagonist's bum - the vast majority of the pieces were firmly in place from the beginning.

For so ambitious a work, its imperfections are awfully trivial.  The pacing is arguably a bit off, somewhat languid in the early going and rather rushed in the last third, to the point where I always have a slight struggle to keep track of where everyone is and what exactly their motivations are in that moment; there are odd shots that a later Miyazaki wouldn't have let slip through, though that's an absurd standard to hold anything to; and while I very much like Joe Hisaishi's score, and while its main theme is one of his finest, it never quite gels into a coherent whole the way his later works with Miyazaki would, and a couple of pieces are the sole element of the movie that feel distinctly of their time.  But stacked against those small, small flaws are such astonishing achievements!  We've had time to get used to Miyazaki's greatness in the intervening years, but what must it have been like to encounter Nausicaä back in 1984, a science-fictional animated film of a scale, lavishness, intelligence, and emotional breadth so wildly beyond what almost anyone had attempted prior to that point?  Pretty mind-blowing, I'm guessing, and forty years really haven't done a whole lot to dull that impact.

Laputa, Castle in the Sky, 1986, dir: Hayao Miyazaki

I couldn't possibly be more biased towards Laputa: it's the first anime movie I ever saw, way back before I knew what anime was, and even though I came in halfway through, and even though I had no idea what I was watching, and even though I wouldn't learn its title until many years later, it blew my young mind.  It's fair to say that the fact I'm writing this post for this blog series at this very moment can be traced back to that day, and planting the seeds of my anime geekdom was only one of many ways in which Miyazaki's third movie has influenced me.

So while I'll try to be objective, let's accept that it's a fool's errand, and also that any criticisms I manage to provide come from a place of deep and implacable love.  Let's start, then, by acknowledging that, compared with what Miyazaki conjured a mere couple of years earlier, and indeed with almost the entirety of his later output, Laputa feels kind of trivial and goofy.  I don't know that it has any themes beyond "weapons of mass destruction are bad, as are the sorts of people who would use them," and even that it never takes especially seriously.  It's not a very serious film on any level, and if seriousness was all we cared about, we might grumble that it was a step back after the epic gravity of Nausicaä.  Certainly it feels more of a piece with what Miyazaki was up to before that, most obviously Future Boy Conan, which it borrows from in ways big and small; but I'd argue that of his preceding two films, it's The Castle of Cagliostro that Laputa shares most DNA with, for all that, in being a science-fictional action adventure with teen protagonists, it's Nausicaä it superficially resembles.

I like Miyazaki when he's in serious mode, but I'm also very happy indeed with a Miyazaki who's content to cut loose with almost non-stop action sequences that aren't terribly committed to things like gravity and physics when the alternative is to be absurd and thrilling.  There's arguably no real story at all: we learn of the existence of a floating island full of treasures and ancient technologies by the name of Laputa, we meet various folks who'd all like to go there for one reason or another, and then go there they do.  Even the animation is a touch slapdash by comparison with Nausicaä, with a notable absence of shading in places and a frequent descent into cartoonishness, though being a Studio Ghibli film - indeed, being the first true Studio Ghibli film - it's still stunning by any reasonable standards, with a fair number of individual sequences that are practically without peer.  Oh, and while I'm nit-picking, having just praised Nausicaä for its timelessness, Laputa feels distinctly like a product of the mid-80s, albeit in almost entirely good ways.

If this was all Laputa had to offer - charming characters hurtling through gloriously animated, thrilling action set piece after set piece in search of one of cinema's greatest McGuffins - I'd still love it.  Obviously I would!  But then we arrive at the third act, set almost entirely on the titular island, and immediately Miyazaki raises his game.  That's no mean feat given how wonderful everything that's come before is, but my goodness, the third act of Laputa is simply breath-taking, paying off perfectly on what's come before and escalating the action whilst also becoming rich and satisfying and emotive in ways even Nausicaä never quite managed, or at any rate not so consistently.  It's the combination of a truly awe-inspiring location brought to life with flawless imagination - no wonder those robot gardeners have become one of the signature Ghibli images! - and a genius director firing on all cylinders, backed up by a genius composer who seems to have finally tuned in to exactly what the material needs.  Laputa as a whole may have been the film that birthed the greatest animation studio of all time, but it's arguably in its third act that Miyazaki the peerless master of his artform was born, along with one of the greatest director / composer collaborations of all time.  Both would go on to do work that was better as a whole - indeed, arguably in the immediate future! - but for forty or so glorious minutes, Laputa stands toe to toe with any masterpiece of animation out there.

My Neighbour Totoro, 1988, dir: Hayao Miyazaki

Such an integral part of anime culture has it become in the three and a half decades since its original release that it's hard to get your head around what a drastic swerve My Neighbour Totoro was in Miyazaki's career.  Until that point, his trajectory was certainly interesting and varied, but there were plenty of common elements between his major projects, and particularly between Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Laputa, Castle in the Sky, both of which were grandiose, elaborate fantasies with a heavy element of science-fiction centred around young adult characters and their perspectives without necessarily slanting towards younger viewers, and both were pretty damn long by anime movie standards.  Then in 1988 came a Miyazaki film that was practically none of that: one set primarily in our own world, one with child protagonists, one on a much more intimate scale and with a comparatively brief 86-minute running time.  And accordingly, but shockingly if you're watching these things in order, even the character designs shifted toward a simpler aesthetic - toward something that, arguably, looks kind of like a kids' movie, albeit one that still has some truly lavish animation by any reasonable standards.

Fortunate, then, that My Neighbour Totoro is a stone-cold masterpiece, and pity the poor viewer who can spend more than a few minutes in its presence and still rue the fact that Miyazaki had no intentions of being anything approaching a one-trick pony.  I confess that everything he did up until this point is theoretically more up my alley, but I'd also argue that that's perfectly okay given that Totoro definitely is a film aimed first and foremost at children.  And its miracle - one of its miracles, rather, since it's a fairly miraculous piece of work from top to bottom - is that it manages to be that in a manner that's still completely inclusive to an adult viewer.  Or this adult viewer, anyway; I can't speak for everyone, though I've never met anyone who doesn't love this much-loved film, so I reckon the point holds.

And the thing of it is, Miyazaki gets there by about the hardest route imaginable.  Though there are adult characters too, a small handful of them, we're never really encouraged to treat them as our point of engagement.  I undoubtedly have more in common with Satsuki and Mei's father than I do with either of those young girls, yet never once while watching have I felt the urge to line myself up with his perspective.  No, while I'm watching, it's always little Mei I'm on side with, and to a marginally lesser extent her older, slightly wiser sister.  And that, when you think about it, is a heck of a thing, the more so since Miyazaki doesn't really try and soften the pair to fit in with an adult sensibility.  Mei is absolutely a toddler, with all the wild energy and mercurial moods and mad tangents of thought that entails, and yet somehow - again, I'm inclined to just put it down to magic and leave it at that - we're caught up in her view of the world almost from the off.

This is crucial for making My Neighbour Totoro that rarest of things, a true family film - rather than a children's film with the odd rude joke thrown in to keep the parents from getting too bored - but it's also crucial to how the fantasy works.  I said Totoro was set in what's recognisably our world, albeit quite a few years in the past and in a rural part of Japan I imagine would be unfamiliar to even many native viewers, but it remains a fantasy movie of a different kind.  And something that always strikes me when I watch it is how almost any other director would have encouraged us to doubt the fantastical elements, to chalk them up to childish dreams or imagination, whereas in Totoro, the very notion of suggesting that Mei and Satsuki's strange brushes with the otherworldly are anything but real feels like a cruel betrayal.  That's partly because those otherworldly elements are so absurdly delightful and off-kilter that we want them to be real, and partly because the grown-ups are so willing to accept the possibility of their existence even though it's made clear that adulthood has shut them off from such encounters forever, but ultimately it's down to how determinedly Miyazaki erases the easy distinctions between reality and fantasy, physical presence and metaphor.  Totoro is a force of nature in the most literal sense; he's also so thoroughly tangible that you can practically smell him.  And to Mei, and to Miyazaki, and to you the viewer while you're caught up in Miyazaki's tale, there's no contradiction in that at all.

I could go on and on: for all that it's not even an hour and a half long, My Neighbour Totoro feels bottomless in the way that it always manages to surprise me, however many times I come back to it.  It's awfully shapeless and plotless in the early going, tied up in something that's almost but not quite dream logic, and that makes it hard to piece together in retrospect.  But by way of one last thought, I'll just note the extent to which the film, for all its sweet, kind, good-naturedness, doesn't shy away from darkness.  Its third act is driven by the possibility of death, and by the fact that Mei is just barely old enough to conceive of a world in which death could snatch away her mother, and later, Satsuki is made to reckon with a similar possibility, leading to a scene that's almost heart-stoppingly distressing if you pause to think about it too hard.  (I'm trying to avoid spoilers, so suffice to say it involves a shoe and a pond.)  The fantasy stuff is a little scary too: Totoro is never exactly a safe presence, and the catbus is awfully close to being the stuff of nightmares.  But it's okay, because Miyazaki isn't trying to tell us the world is safe and free of dangers, only that it's full of wonder and goodness if you're willing and able to look.

Grave of the Fireflies, 1988, dir: Isao Takahata

I spent the entirety of my latest watch of Grave of the Fireflies feeling faintly puzzled that it wasn't having more of an emotional impact on me.  Hadn't it hit me like a freight train in the past?  Hadn't I put off this rewatch precisely because I wanted to schedule it for an evening when I felt emotionally sturdy enough to take it on?  But here I was, dry eyed.  And then the final scene arrived - I won't talk about it, except to say that I'm baffled by the comments I've seen suggesting it's in any way a happy ending - and something finally broke, and there I was, sobbing my heart out.  And not good sobbing, not the cathartic kind that leaves you feeling as if you've worked something out of your system; no, this was hopeless, physically painful even.  I didn't feel one iota better by the time I finally got a hold of myself, and how could I?  We live in a world where children die slow, painful deaths, and more, a world in which those deaths can pass practically unnoticed.

Any movie that can provoke that kind of an emotional response isn't one to be approached lightly.  But the flipside of that is, any film that can provoke that kind of an emotional response is one you absolutely need to experience, when so much art makes us feel nothing, and so little is willing to leave us a little scarred and wounded if that's what it takes.  If Isao Takahata was a master of one thing - and obviously, he was a master of a whole heck of a lot of things - but if we really had to strip down his genius to one single element, it would be his ability to treat emotive material with a certain unflinching sentimentality, almost a pragmatism, that makes it connect with us in a manner almost unequalled in cinema.

Grave of the Fireflies never really prods at us to feel sad, and though there are what we might describe as sad scenes, they're arrived at honestly: they present us with necessary details rather than merely sitting there tugging at our heartstrings.  But then, it's a film about two young children trying to survive in Japan in the last days of World War 2, and by extension of two young children failing to survive, a fact made exceedingly clear to us in the opening sequence, and what need could a director of Takahata's calibre have to try and make us feel sad?  Honesty is more than enough.  Heck, Takahata barely even insists on our sympathy.  Throughout, Seita makes his share of questionable decisions in his quest to protect his little sister Setsuko, and a couple of those decisions are actively frustrating to the point where you want to yell at the screen.  But that in turn forces us to acknowledge that we have the advantages of both adult knowledge and the wider context on our side, and so we can recognise, for example, that the odds of Seita and Setsuko's sailor father returning to rescue them are slim indeed.

Then again, wider context isn't something the film is especially interested in.  This explains, I think, one of my few quibbles, which is that at times the animation is lacking in the sort of background detail you might expect, with still images of smoke and flames standing out particularly.  Conceivably it was a cost-cutting measure, but I suspect the intention was rather one of limiting anything that might distract us from the character animation in the foreground, which has to do so much of the emotional heavy lifting and so ably meets the challenge.  Always, Takahata's focus is on his two protagonists, for all that they barely register as characters in the usual sense: beyond some trivial details, we learn little about their past circumstances, their hopes and dreams, their likes and dislikes.  We never really get to know them, yet we feel as if we do, because Takahata keeps us in such inescapable proximity to them for ninety minutes.  And that's not to say Seita and Setsuko are abstracts, stand-ins for every child that suffered a similar fate - though the final scene does go there, somewhat, and that's part of why it left me such a blubbing mess.  But for the vast majority of its running time, the tale Takahata's telling isn't that of Japan's last, tortuous months of being on the losing side of a war, but rather, and with singular intensity, the small, inexcusable, soul-rending tragedy of two children that wouldn't live to see its end.

-oOo-
And there we have it, part one of the Drowning in Nineties Anime Studio Ghibli special  For anyone wondering, part two will be coming with post number 145, and I'm saving up the last entry for the big 150, our probably final post.  Spoiler alert, there are no pre-2000 Ghibli films I don't complete love, so don't expect much in the way of drama and controversy!  More gushing praise, on the other hand, now that there'll likely be a fair bit of...



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Before we get to the big 140 and the beginning of something a bit special that I've been planning for ages, there's just time for a little diversion that I've also mulling over for quite a while now.
Having been at this nonsense for the better part of a decade, I think it's fair to say that I'm not the same vintage anime reviewer I was when I started out.  In particular, I'm much more of an animation nerd these days, and a bit more informed about the craft that goes into these things.  On the flip side, I've also probably got a bit less discerning, or else more forgiving of the sorts of flaws that were endemic to anime way back when.  As such, there are plenty of older reviews I'd like to go back and tweak.  Fortunately for my sanity, since I started providing scores on the summary pages, I sort of can without going all out and writing a fresh review.  But there are certain titles where my opinion has changed not just slightly but radically, and where I simply can't stand by my original reviews.  And that aside, there are anime releases that are available in a variety of forms of less-than-equal value, and I didn't always get to the best version on my first go round.
Therefore, hopefully as a one off, lest this all get even more out of hand than it already is, this time through I'll be revisiting four titles I reviewed in the dawning days of these posts, those being Black Jack: The Movie, X, Armitage III, and Metal Skin Panic Madox-01...
Black Jack: The Movie 1996, dir: Osamu Dezaki

Way back in 2015 - and seriously, have I been at this for nine whole years? - I had very little nice to say about the first motion picture adaptation of Osamu Tezuka's feted manga Black Jack.  Indeed, so unimpressed by it was I that my hostility carried over into a general dislike of everything else I came across by director Osamu Dezaki that stayed with me for the longest time, and only really dissolved in earnest, ironically, when I encountered the Black Jack OVA series from which I take the film to have been a sort of spin-off.  Now my feelings toward Dezaki are a good bit kinder, and that, combined with the fact that distributor Discotek  brought the movie out in a proper, remastered, anamorphic edition*, seemed reason enough to give it another chance.
Of the two factors, maybe that second one is the biggie.  Up until Discotek rescued it, the only edition we had of Black Jack: The Movie was the crummy non-anamorphic one Manga put out way back when, which, like many of their screw-ups, could only be watched in a double-letterboxed window in the middle of your widescreen TV.  And when a film relies on its visuals as heavily as this does, that's ruinous.  Manga couldn't, of course, make it look bad, but they could certainly suck a lot of the impact from it, since even the finest animation doesn't benefit from being squinted at.  But watch it as was intended and the quality is often gob-smacking.  One thing that struck me is the extent to which Dezaki refuses to rely on the traditional cost-cutting measures that make anime commercially viable: extensively reusing backgrounds, looping sequences that are just long enough to hide the repetition, that sort of thing.  There's a crowd scene toward the end, and I'd swear every background figure was individually animated, though it's the kind of detail you'd never notice unless you were really looking.  But look that closely and Dezaki's attention to detail is remarkable.
Which is an odd thing to say given that one of my main criticisms last time around was that the film felt random and slapdash.  What can I say?  I was wrong.  Dezaki makes plenty of weird choices across the movie's ninety minute run time, and I'd struggle to argue that every one is right or sensible, but on a rewatch, it was clear that at the very least a good deal of thought had gone into every scene and edit.  Indeed, the general feeling is that Dezaki was directing as though this were live action, choosing his shots first and figuring out how the medium could keep up afterwards, as a very secondary concern.
And then there's the plot, which I was also pretty mean about, and also for reasons I struggle to figure out in retrospect.  Here, perhaps the decisive factor is having a portion of the OVA under my belt, because Black Jack is a series that largely plays by its own rules, and knowing them going in is a definite advantage.  Still, it's hard to see how I could have been so hostile to the tale presented here: it's deep, smart stuff, asking meaningful ethical questions and finding notes of real, wrenching horror in its answers.  And its lead character is fascinating: that's not rogue surgeon Black Jack as you might expect, incidentally, but another doctor and surgeon, Jo Carol Brane, who drags the film's namesake into her investigation of the supposed superhumans who've begun to appear, only to decay at a startling rate.  Like Black Jack, she's neither hero nor villain, and it only became apparent in this reappraisal the extent to which the plot is a duel between the two, professionally but more so morally.  Certainly the actors come alive when they're paired together, and for the first time I really appreciated just how good Akio Ôtsuka's performance as Black Jack is.  There's a one-word line reading - an outraged "nani" in Japanese, "what?" in English - that he nails so perfectly that it literally sent a shiver up my spine.
All of which is to say, at some length, that I don't know what the hell I was thinking when I first reviewed Black Jack: The Movie, though in fairness I'm sure it had a lot to do with trying to get past the limitations of Manga's subpar release.  At any rate, I'm happy to call myself a convert: this is one of the most unique, stylish, and intelligent anime features to come out of the nineties, and if you can lay your hands on the Discotek release, I recommend it wholeheartedly.
X, 1996, dir: Rintaro

At the risk of letting on just how long I've been cobbling this post together for, it was watching Harmagedon that made me want to revisit X.  I suppose I figured that if I could find enjoyment in that, with all its obvious flaws, then there'd be something more to be had from a release I'd only really criticised on a single point: that for all its obvious virtues, its relentless nihilism rendered it no fun to watch.  My expectations remained low, but I happened upon a copy for fifty pence, at which point the decision rather made itself.

And, I don't know, maybe I just caught it in the right mood that second time around - which was to say, a rather dark one - but I was so much more impressed that it's ridiculous.  Now I'm hovering around calling X a masterpiece, and I suspect that if someone would replace Manga's traditionally crummy non-anamorphic release with a blu-ray edition, I'd go there.  I remember noting the first time through how good it looks, but I hadn't seen anywhere near as much anime at that point and so didn't fully appreciate how consistently gorgeous Rintaro's movie is.  It really is exquisitely animated, and the director's visual imagination, which I've come to appreciate more and more despite his frequent failings as a storyteller, ensures that every scene is hypnotic in its own right.  So even if I were to accept the point of the earlier me that there's nothing going on here except for stunning animation, I'd still have to recommend it, wouldn't I?  Stunning animation isn't something to be sniffy about, no matter how much the story it tells is basically a nose-dive into the depths of hell.
Here's the thing, though: yes, X is unrelentingly dark, and yes it delivers no tension.  We're told the world will end, we're told approximately how, and then we watch those events unfold, with all the subtlety and surprise of an executioner's axe falling.  You can respond to that in one of two ways, I suppose, and I'm not about to say my reaction was altogether wrong the first time; X is thoroughly brutal and that brutality isn't pleasant to experience.  Yet it's also far from straightforward: one thing I apparently failed to note, for example, was how neither side of the conflict that's set to annihilate Tokyo and then the world are categorically wrong, or even categorically bad people.  Oh, perhaps they're a bit too eager to follow absolute ideologies, but then they're not the ones setting the rules.  And from that perspective, X is rather fascinating, and intelligent as well.  It has a lot to say, most of which I apparently missed or ignored.

Heck, I even don't dislike the CLAMP look of big eyes and pointy chins anymore!  In fact, I found the character designs as impressive as the rest of the visuals.  Oh, and how did I not mention the soundtrack?  It's extraordinary, and as Rintaro notes in the interview provided on the disk, it's the beating heart by which he paces every other aspect of his movie.  X is a tough watch by any measure, but what I realised coming back to it is that it's not violent and nihilistic for the mere sake of being so, and it offers a host of compensating pleasures.  The day it gets a proper release it will become indispensable; for the moment, I'm only promoting it to highly watch-worthy.
Armitage III, 1995, dir: Hiroyuki Ochi

I'd very little bad to say about the movie Armitage III: Polymatrix, which I reviewed way, way back in December of 2015.  As cut-down film versions of anime adaptations go, it's startlingly respectful and successful, and the presence of two genuine stars in the lead roles does it little harm.  (In the first draft of this review, I quipped, "even when one of them is Elizabeth Berkley" at this point, but you know what, I genuinely like Berkley's take on Armitage.  And she's great in Showgirls too, so there!)  Nevertheless, I did note back then that "...another half hour, a bit more time for the story and relationships to cook, and we might really be looking at a classic."  And ever since, that prospect nagged at me: I'd returned to Polymatrix a couple of times since, and grown awfully fond of it, but I always ended up with that same sense of being ever-so-slightly short changed.

What do you know?  I was right.  Well, not about everything; I overestimated how much cut material there was, for a start: ignoring the credits, it's probably not even quite that half hour.  But what there is makes a heck of a difference, albeit a subtle one, if that makes any sense.  Put simply, it turns what's very much an action movie into far more of a science-fiction mystery, and an absorbing one at that, even for the viewer who thought they knew the story backwards and forwards.  In its OVA incarnation, Armitage III is notably more plot-driven, and indeed surprisingly action-light; this, by the way, is no bad thing, given that the action's as good as it is.  In fact, the moments of violence are a good deal more impactful for the otherwise slower tone, not to mention the greater investment in characterisation.  And, as someone who'll always prefer a sub over a dub, it's great to hear the original Japanese performances.  Hiroko Kasahara, in particular, is a subtler, less emotive Armitage, and for all that I don't want to knock Berkley's interpretation, that restraint does benefit the character considerably.
Elsewhere, everything is precisely as good as it was in Polymatrix - only, again, with less emphasis on pace and more room in which to absorb the outstanding soundtrack and superlative design work.  I don't know that I'd entirely appreciated how gorgeous the background art in Armitage III is, or how wonderfully realised its futuristic Mars setting; there's a sense that's rare, in anime or elsewhere, of a place that might actually fit together and have been built by human beings for a genuine purpose.  It's a stunning world, a visual treat but also rich in depth and history.  Along with some of my favourite character designs anywhere in anime, and the strong writing, and the excellent performances, it's enough to make a somewhat pulpy science-fiction tale into a work of real heft and heart.

Which is still not to say it's a classic in the way that, say, Ghost in the Shell is a classic: Ochi has an excellent handle on his material, but he's no Oshii, despite having such distractingly similar names that I wish I'd picked a different film to compare with.  It's merely an excellent bit of science-fiction anime, and in the higher echelons of what the decade would produce.  (Oh, and for my money, a vastly better sequel to Blade Runner than the one it actually got, and which is founded on exactly the same conceit that Armitage III covered more authoritatively two decades earlier!)  Nevertheless, I'd urge anyone with the vaguest interest in the genre to track down a copy.  Watch Polymatrix if you have to, since it's infinitely easier to get hold of, but if you can find it, the OVA is comfortably the superior version.
Metal Skin Panic Madox-01, 1987, dir: Shinji Aramaki
To some extent, Madox-01 is here as yet another of that wealth of titles I covered when they were only available in unsatisfactory editions and failed to imagine how good they might be if only their distributors hadn't let them down.  That certainly couldn't be truer here: Madox-01 in its original Japanese and in a high-definition print is a world away from what Manga dropped out long ago as part of their budget Collection range.  But that's not the whole of the truth, because, whatever you do with it, Shinji Aramaki's directorial debut remains something a bit special, and in suggesting the precise opposite on my first go around, I thoroughly missed the mark.
Perhaps, though, you need to be something of a hardened vintage anime fan to really get the best out of a title that feels very much as though it was made both by and for that particular demographic.  It is, to be clear, a perfectly fine short science-fiction film, and that's not nothing: indeed, every time I watch it, I'm a little more impressed by the extreme economy with which Aramaki and co tell a complete tale with a beginning, middle, and end and some moderately developed characters and what feels like about half a dozen big action set pieces and somehow cram the lot into 42 minutes counting credits.  But still, come for the story and you may find yourself feeling mildly let down, as I did on my first encounter: it is, after all, quite a silly one, and if there's one thing you definitely can't accomplish in 42 minutes, it's making the notion of a teenager accidentally trapping himself in a suit of experimental robot armour and using it to track down his girlfriend before she vanishes off to live abroad seem more plausible.
Mind you, I doubt any number of minutes could have truly sold that concept, and I doubt, too, that plausibility was high on anyone's list of priorities.  No, what I suspect was in the forefront of everyone's minds was coming up with a unique, cool-looking mechanical design and chucking it into plentiful battles, and that Madox-01 does with great aplomb.  The narrative machinations needed to get us there may not be terribly believable, but the Madox itself certainly is, as much so as any comparable design that's ever come out of anime.  And if you're of a certain inclination - which is to say, if you're a big old nerd for meticulously thought-through mecha designs - then it's a joy to behold, the more so since Aramaki himself is evidently nerding out as much as any viewer possibly could and wants us to see as much of his cool robot suit as possible, doing as many cool things as possible.
Madox-01, then, is a title that does one thing extremely well - two if you choose to separate out the mechanical designs and the action sequences they're flung about in - and while that wasn't enough for me way back when, especially with Manga's dub working to distract me from those virtues, it more or less is now.  Actually, watching in the original Japanese perhaps did more to change my opinion than the uplift to Blu-ray: Madox-01 got one of Manga's less bad dubs, but its great mistake is to make the comedy the core of the thing, where the Japanese cast are content to play the straight scenes straight and not worry about a spot of tonal whiplash, meaning that, for example, we get a much more compelling villain who actually feels like a meaningful threat.  But what I started to say is that, if you're to enjoy Madox-01, you really do need to be there for the robot action, because everything around that is merely good.  Nonetheless, now that AnimEigo have gifted us with a shiny Blu-ray, I'd certainly err towards saying give it a chance regardless: it's no masterpiece for the ages, but Madox-01 has earned its place in anime history, and there aren't too many movies of a comparable length I'd rank above it.
-oOo-
This was probably a bad idea - in that I'm already wondering what else I desperately need to revisit! - and yet I'm glad I got to set the record straight in more public fashion than my usual sneaky tweaking of the scores page that probably no-one ever looks at.  These reviews have never been meant to be anything but wildly subjective, but still, there's wrong and there's completely, stupidly wrong, and I definitely strayed towards that latter with a couple of the titles here.  Now, let's just hope I got it more or less right this time, eh?  I really don't want to have to do this again in another few years...



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* Which, sadly, is now out of print and pretty rare in its own right.