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Saturday, July 19, 2008Felidae Release Year: 1994Country: Germany Starring the voices of: Ulrich Tukur, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Mario Andorf, Helge Schnieider, Wolfgang Hess, Gerhard Garbers, Ulrich Wildgruber, Mona Seefried, Manfred Steffen, Uwe Ochsenknecht, Michaela Amler, Christian Schneller, Tobias Lelle, Frank Roth, Alexandra Mink, Michael Habeck Writers: Martin Kluger, Akif Pirincci Director: Michael Schaack Music: Anne Dudley Producer: Hanno Huth The German-made animated feature Felidae has, at least at first glance, the slick commercial look of the type of Hollywood productions we're used to seeing from the likes of Disney and Don Bluth. If you're anything like me, that might prove to be a bit of a stumbling block, because, being that I'm no big fan of mainstream animation, that's not the type of cinematic experience I tend to seek out. And indeed, during its first few minutes I had some serious doubts about whether I was going to enjoy Felidae. Then came the moment when the film's protagonist, a feline detective by the name of Francis, stumbles across his first horribly mutilated kitty corpse, and I quickly realized that there were quite a few shades of difference between Felidae and Fievel Goes West. Based on the first of a series of novels by author Akif Pirincci, Felidae starts out like an especially grue-spattered boys' adventure (but with cats) and quickly turns into a bleak apocalyptic noir along the lines of Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (again, but with cats). In the service of this dark vision, the filmmakers pile on the extreme gore and nightmarish imagery, still managing all the while to deliver a complex and compelling mystery. Needless to say, this isn't one to show the kids, and I would hesitate to recommend it to the more sensitive cat lovers out there. However, feline enthusiasts of a bit more two-fisted nature might find much to like, especially in the obvious respect and care that the filmmakers bring to the task of representing their titular creatures ("Felidae" being the name for the biological family to which cats belong).     Both Pirincci (who scripted) and the animators charged with bringing his words to life do a pretty good job of providing their furry cast with feelings and motivations recognizable to humans without simply turning them into humans in cat drag. While these cats speak to each other in complete sentences and have an awareness of human doings far beyond what one might expect, there is no doubt that theirs is a world entirely "other" from the one that their oblivious owners inhabit. There's also been an effort not to sentimentalize the beasts; these tabbies, for all their anthropomorphic antics, are just as likely to casually display their buttholes, gulp down a passing fly, eat garbage and piss wherever they please as your own little Whiskers or Tigger. Oh, and they also screw -- and, as in life, it's no candlelight-and-Barry-White-on-the-stereo affair, but rather the same brutal spectacle of hissing, biting and forced penetration that plays out every day in suburban backyards from here to Munich and beyond. Felidae begins with Francis, who is gifted with an inquisitive temperament beyond that of the typical house cat, moving into a new neighborhood where a feline serial killer appears to be on the loose. While his newfound friend, a battle-scarred and foul-mouthed tom by the name of Bluebeard, shares the belief of the other cats in the neighborhood that the bloody murders are the work of a human, Francis thinks that the evidence points to another cat, and sets out to sniff out the culprit. His search brings him in contact with a messianic cat cult who worship a perhaps mythical super-feline martyred at the hands of a sadistic human scientist (and who express their worship through a ritual of mass self-electrocution); and later leads him to discover that the very house he and his owner have moved into may have been the site of the fabled atrocities -- which in reality go way beyond what anyone could previously have imagined.     Francis is guided in his search by a series of vivid dreams which make up some of Felidae's most memorable -- and horrifying -- moments. I challenge anyone who has seen this film to forget the mentally scarring spectacle of a gigantic Gregor Mendel rising up from a vast feline killing field to wield hundreds of mangled cat corpses as marionettes. Another indelibly disturbing image occurs when Francis and Bluebeard stumble upon an underground catacomb filled with decomposing and skeletal cat remains -- at which point they realize that, contrary to what they thought, the killer they've been tracking is responsible for the murder of, not just several, but hundreds of their brothers and sisters. Images of mass graves and genocide abound in Felidae, as do references to eugenics and racial purity, and it is one of its flaws that its approach to allegory is just a bit too on-the-nose. (And, seriously, all you Germans who are far too young to have had any direct involvement in the Holocaust? We forgive you. Honestly.) Another for me is that, for a noir protagonist, Francis comes off as just a bit too bland and innocent -- bushy-tailed, if you will. An over-dependence on catnip might have been a nice touch in this regard, and in lieu of that, we might have at least got a better sense of the effect that Francis' descent into darkness has had on him. He appears to be less cynical about humans than the other cats in his new neighborhood (he is at first unfamiliar with the local term "can opener", which refers to humans in terms of what the cats see as their only useful function), and while he appears troubled by the human cruelty he witnesses, we don't really get much of a sense of him wrestling with any dissonance between his old and new perceptions.     Still, these are all minor complaints in light of what Felidae accomplishes. Given both its concept and execution, its novelty value is guaranteed. But that it goes beyond that to deliver such a solid and involving mystery, rife with powerful moments and some nasty shocks, is something to be celebrated. One might think that having cartoon kitty-cats prancing across the screen would work against the consistent atmosphere of oppressive dread this story calls for (even if those kitty-cats are doing some pretty awful things), but the finished product proves otherwise. Furthermore, on a technical level, Felidae is -- if a little slick at times for my taste -- gorgeous. A glance at the various credits of the large, international crew of animators who worked on the film indicates that they were among the most accomplished professionals in the business at the time. In addition to the solid character design and studied believability of the movements, the backgrounds are beautiful without exception -- rich with color and lush detail to an extent that they sometimes threaten to upstage the foreground action. Given that high level of technical artistry, I'm glad that Felidae was made in 1994 -- rather than today, when it would undoubtedly have been done with CGI. CGI is to me intrinsically post-modern, always seeming to be about nothing so much as itself -- constantly, by way of its very resemblance to live action, calling attention to the trick that it's pulling on the audience as it's doing it. As such, it might be fine for films that are just an episodic series of gags, but in service of a sustained narrative -- especially one that requires the attention to detail that Felidae's does -- it's just a distraction. Drawn animation is definitely the ideal medium for creating the kind of enclosed reality that's needed for us to invest ourselves in a vision as quirky as Felidae's. Given that, this film should stand as a testament to the viability of that medium in the face of the increasingly indistinguishable CGI features that hog our theater screens each holiday season.     Felidae, though in German (the original voice cast includes a number of noted German actors, including Klaus Maria Brandauer), oddly features an English language theme song sung by Boy George. There also exists a perfectly acceptable English language dub, which can be found on the German DVD release (which, sadly, doesn't include English subtitles for the German language version). All of this indicates that it was made with an eye toward an overseas release, which is not surprising given the obviously high financial investment that went into it. Yet chances are that you have never even heard of it, much less seen it. That it never received a theatrical release in America is a no-brainer; distributors would undoubtedly have hit a mental logjam trying to market a movie that looks on the surface like a family film but plays out like an angst-ridden version of The Aristocats as imagined by Eli Roth. But surely there are enough people here in the states who would love this orphaned little cinematic tabby -- who would take it into their homes, let it curl up in front on the fire, and then rip their throats out -- to merit it's release on domestic DVD. Labels: Anime and Animation, Country: Germany, Film Noir, Year: 1994 posted by Todd at 5:23 PM | 7 Comments Tuesday, January 29, 2008Space Transformers
Korea/Austraila. Honestly, I have no idea. Joseph Lai produced it though, and do you really need to know anything more?
It's been too long since we last visited the bizarre world of cut-rate Korean cartoons made by a Chinese guy using Japanese robots and characters and marketed toward Australian television, so let us once again steel ourselves for the bad acid trip that is a Joseph Lai produced cartoon. Lai, to bring up to speed those of you who don't know him, was a producer most famous for taking bits and pieces of cheap Hong Kong movies and splicing them together to form a new movie, usually augmented by freshly shot scenes of white people in ninja outfits. The films border on works of absurdist art masterpieces. With titles like Ninja Phantom Heroes, Ninja Demons Massacre, and Diamond Force Ninja, Lai's films -- often created in conjunction with shadowy men of mystery Godfrey Ho and Thomas Tang -- did far more than make no sense at all. They attained a rarefied air of complete and utter incoherence that has remained largely out of the reach of even the most incompetent of filmmakers. In the early 1980s, a series of bargain bin Korean cartoons started showing up on Australian television. Like a snake eating its own tail, one movie would freely and generously recycle footage from the others, allowing what had probably been a couple separate movies to then blossom into six or seven movies. And there, at the beginning of every one, was the name of Joseph Lai, set majestically against a disco light backdrop. Lai had purchased the original Korean movies, dubbed them, and sent them off to unsuspecting Australians, who being trapped on their own island-continent, had nowhere to flee. These films have recently been rediscovered and achieved a certain degree of infamy for a number of reasons.
First, they are just awful. I mean, mind-blowingly awful. The stories rarely make a lick of sense. The animation is beyond crude, making even the flagrant lack of attention paid to the Challenge of the Superfriends seem diligent by comparison. Second, and of more importance to the fans who stumbled across these movies in the dollar bins of Wal-Marts across America or on Australian afternoon television back in the day, although the animation and artwork was original, the robots and characters who populated these films were often copies of more famous Japanese counterparts. Anything from Raideen to Gundam to the Space Battle Cruiser Yamato being piloted by the Voltron crew could show up in one of these things. Playing spot the source material becomes almost overwhelming, so multitudinous are the blatant violations of intellectual property. Since Japanese material was banned from South Korea for a long time, Korean audiences wouldn't know the difference (thank to anonymous poster in the comments section of Space Thunder Kids for filling in some of the gaps in our info). I hope that, as we continue to work our way through the other titles that serve to flesh out this animated Joseph Lai universe, we will continue to pick up bits and pieces of information about the films and how they came to be. At this point, I guess we know they were originally made for Koreans who couldn't watch Japanese stuff, and then were purchased and dubbed by Joseph Lai to distribute in Australia. Somehow, someone got a hold of most of them and put them on DVDs that could only be sold at Wal-Mart.
Of the films in this series, Space Thunder Kids is probably the most mind-blowing, as it was assembled entirely out of the pieces of the other films, presumably by ten different groups working in ten different locations around the world, with no contact between them. It's possible that the various pods and hatches in Lost are actually the hermetically sealed locations where Space Thunder Kids was assembled. So colossal is the ineptitude of this film that it can scarcely be communicated using any human language, though I did my best when I reviewed it a while back. Space Thunder Kids actually ceases to be a movie at some point, and becomes an entirely different form of art so advanced that we humans can't even conceive of it. It is like the high art of advanced race of alien gods, and we have no frame of reference we can use to wrap our heads around it. Short of asking yourself what existed before the universe, "what the hell does Space Thunder Kids mean" is perhaps the most perplexing question of our time. Hot on the heels of Space Thunder Kids came Solar Adventure, a feature that mixes live-action footage with animation and features a number of robots stolen from The Transformers, among others. Many scenes from this movie also show up, within a different context, in Space Thunder Kids, including the evil machinations of a green alien and a dastardly, goiter-sporting communist leader meant to be Kim Il-sung. Now we turn out attention to yet another member of this elite family of animated wonders, Space Transformers, which dares ask the challenging question: is a microscopic giant robot still a giant robot?
As with most of the films in this series, the earth is under attack from sinister, crudely drawn aliens. We meet them at first when they attack an orbiting space platform that looks suspiciously like the Super Dimensional Fortress Macross, or like the orbiting space platform that showed up at the beginning of Space Thunder Kids. These aliens look human and command robots that pilot larger robots that shoot meteors and carry axes. Why you would need to carry an ax if you can already shoot meteors is a bit of a mystery, but then I reckon you need something for close quarters combat. After the attack has begun, the space fleet gets a transmission from Ivy, the world's most special girl, warning them of an eminent alien attack. Her ability to warn people of things that started happening a few minutes before she warned people of them somehow makes her the lynchpin in Earth's plans to defeat the aliens. Exactly how this helps in the fight against aliens or why Asians are always pinning the hopes of the galaxy on twelve-year-olds is never really explained. Unfortunately, evil alien leader Tonga knows Ivy is the Earth's most special girl, and so he sends assassins to earth to eliminate the only threat to his dreams of conquering Earth. Meanwhile, Earth's giant robots seem pretty adept at destroying Tonga's invading fleet. But why root for the giant robots when Ivy could save us all by telling us things that are already happening. Despite being guarded by a crack team of giant robot pilots and scientists, aliens manage to infiltrate the hospital where Ivy is hiding and shoot her, thus ending her threat and dashing the hopes of all mankind. No wait, how silly of me. They shoot her, yes, but rather than just using a bullet and killing her, they use a virus ray that causes her to lapse into a coma as she is slowly killed by the disease with which they have infected her. Luckily, this gives the humans time to devise a plan to save Ivy's life. Eventually, they decide the most logical way to deal with the situation is to shrink some giant robots and their crew down to microscopic size, inject them into Ivy, and let them travel through her body on a mission to destroy the disease and save her life. So basically, it's The Fantastic Voyage but with giant robots and Robin Hood's Merry Men. Oh wait, I didn't get to Robin Hood's Merry Men yet.
But you see, once inside Ivy's body, we learn a number of important things about the human anatomy. For example, we are full of planets and suns and swirling spiral galaxies. Some of those planets are inhabited by suspicious but ultimately friendly medieval guys with monk haircuts. And Keebler elves. Other planets are inhabited by green goblins in loin cloths -- presumably the viruses injected by the aliens into Ivy -- who enslave the good peoples and force them to perform random tasks of physical labor when they aren't throwing them into a pit containing a man-eating octopus. Still other planets are populated by sexy women who like to fly around on space platforms and command giant robots and super deformed Gundams who like to watch her take showers. So begins a series of thrilling battles between giant robots, as well as a scene of a smart-alec little robot (I mean littler than a microscopic giant robot) kicking the hot, evil chick in the butt over and over again, until something completely weird happens in the end which, I think, results in some or all of the heroes dying or something. Or they don't. And then everyone gets out of Ivy, presumably after having usurped the goblin conquest of her internal organs, and the giant robots fly off to beat the alien armada -- without any help or battle plan from Ivy, who they just spent the entire film saving, presumably because only she knew how to beat the aliens. Incidentally, at some point, the aliens go from being human in appearance to being green guys with blue bowl cuts, but at this point in our journey through Joseph Lai productions, this hardly even phases me.
Incredibly, Space Transformers is even more bizarre than Solar Adventure, and while it is more decipherable than Space Thunder Kids, it certainly approaches that film in terms of sheer lunacy. Among other things, it taught me a lot about the human anatomy and what sort of crazy stuff goes on inside the body of a pubescent girl. It is at least as accurate about teen bodies as those old films we watched in middle school, where a boy would think about kissing a girl and as a result, he gets horrid, acid-spewing lesions on his penis. Space Transformers also posits a more hopeful future for human infection, envisioning a future where an infestation of spear-toting goblins and cackling evil hot chicks on flying discs can be taken care of via tiny transforming robots and their sass-talking human crews. Anyway, I can't help but admire the crackpot imagination behind this scenario. I don't know if these fights actually count as "space" battles." I mean, they are battles that take place within a defined space, and the backgrounds are all Milky Ways and Saturn, but technically, we are inside a teenage girl's body -- a statement which is going to mislead a lot of Google searchers. The body as universe is hardly a new metaphor, but I don't know that anyone has taken it quite as literally as Space Transformers, where the human body literally contains a universe, complete with medieval societies, elves, and spaceships. And of course, the asteroid belt surrounding Uranus. Sorry, but there was no way I getting through this review without at least one Uranus joke.
I doubt that anything will ever unseat Space Thunder Kids as the king of the Joseph Lai animated titles, but Space Transformers comes awful close. It's packed with action, as most of the films are, and everything about it is just so weird. And the culmination of the in-body battle is just bizarre. Suddenly, everything gets super melodramatic and full of tragedy, and there's a nuclear explosion, which can't be good for Ivy. Then everyone inside her dies. At least I think they do. Honestly, it's pretty hard to tell what actually happens. And it doesn't really matter since, in the end, Ivy has absolutely nothing to do with the war against the aliens. Still, there's plenty of space battles, or whatever space battles are inside the human body, and plenty of robot fights. It lacks the green alien with the big head and Kim Il-sung with his bulbous tumor, but it replaces that with gut goblins and epic spaceship and robot battles, so I'm good. Labels: Anime and Animation, Anime: 80s, Science Fiction, Series: Joseph Lai Crap Anime posted by Keith at 5:09 PM | 5 Comments Friday, April 20, 2007Solar Adventure
DIGG THIS ARTICLE. Korea/Austraila. Honestly, I have no idea. Joseph Lai produced it though, and do you really need to know anything more?
Not too long ago, I was sitting on a couch with our friends from the Ninja Consultant podcast, watching the final few minutes of the Mithun Chakraborty Bollywood ninja epic Commando, when Ninja Consultant Erin said that she couldn't believe that, given all the great and important films she still needs to see, she couldn't believe that she watched Commando instead of one of them. Of course, like me, I'm sure you can all see the logical fallacy in her lament: Commando is one of the great and important films in the history of cinema. But still, I understood her point, even if I didn't empathize with it, and tried to make up for making her watch Commando by loaning her Disco Dancer and going, "Here, I swear this one is good." Surprisingly, both she and Noah still consider me a friend, even though this now means I am responsible for them having seen Commando and Disco Dancer (presuming they watch it), AND the first thing I ever did when I met them was give them an extra copy of Space Thunder Kids. As I have never made that many friends in New York City, I am eternally grateful for their continued willingness to be seen with me despite the horrible, horrible things I've done to them and will no doubt continue to do in the future.
I tell you this story primarily to echo Erin's sentiments regarding the time well spent watching Commando (if she feels bad, think about this -- I've seen Commando four times now). In the whole wide world of cinema, I could have followed up watching Space Thunder Kids by watching something really respectable and worthwhile. Even within the genres I love, there are still so many films I haven't seen, especially among the old noir titles. But instead of watching In a Lonely Place or Out of the Past, instead of watching any number of great films, I quietly took the Space Thunder Kids DVD out of my player and immediately inserted Solar Adventure, another Korean cartoon spawned by the same batch of animation commissioned by some Australian company and produced by Hong Kong cheapskate crap film mogul Joseph Lai. The difference, however, between Erin and I is that while she seemed to genuinely regret the short-changing of artistic merit that occurred that night, I went blissfully forward into Solar Adventure without any notion that anything was the slightest bit wrong with my decision. Similar cavalier attitudes flown brazenly in the face of common sense have also resulted in things like me staying in a hotel room with a hole cut in the floor leading to a stucco bucket I was meant to use as a toilet.
Solar Adventure certainly isn't a hotel room with a hole cut in the floor leading to a stucco bucket I was meant to use as a toilet, but it is perhaps somewhat similar to what you might expect to find as the contents of such a stucco bucket. But if Solar Adventure is largely a bucket full of piss, crap, used condoms, and cigarette butts (and I fully expect "Solar Adventure is largely a bucket full of piss, crap, used condoms, and cigarette butts" to be a critics' blurb appearing on the next release of this film), then it's lucky that I have a very high tolerance for such things so long as they are not being rubbed into my hair. And while Space Thunder Kids may set the bar for incompetent glory so fabulously high that it becomes nigh unattainable, Solar Adventure is no slouch in the incompetence field, seeing as how Joseph Lai took his cut and paste style of filmmaking to the next level. As discussed in the Space Thunder Kids review, Lai was the impresario behind a string of movies created by splicing a couple of other movies together more or less at random, inserting some footage of white guys pretending to be ninjas, and calling it a new film. Along with Thomas Tang and Godfrey Ho, Lai created dozens of films out of a mere few, and not a single one of them made a lick of sense. When some Australian company requested a fistful of cheap cartoon filler for, I assume, some late-night or early-morning hole in the broadcast programming schedule, they tapped Lai who, in turn, hired a bunch of overworked Korean animators to crank out a couple film's worth of animation. Lai then proceeded to cut and recut that footage into a half dozen or more separate movies running about an hour in length, save for the epic Space Thunder Kids, which clocks in around 90 minutes.
A couple years ago, these cartoon features started showing up on budget DVDs at Wal-Mart, and daring anime fans mistook them for old Japanese cartoons -- which was an honest enough mistake, since the Korean animators ripped off a whole host of established icon characters of the Japanese anime industry, including giant robots like Mazinger, Raideen, The Transformers, Robotech, and Gundam, as well as space opera fixtures like Captain Harlock and Yamato. Even more confounding, Space Thunder Kids also prominently features characters and animated sets copying the ground-breaking and still under-appreciated live-action scifi-fantasy Disney film TRON. Solar Adventure -- in which nothing happens that would have anything to do with a solar adventure, other than to say that many of the events depicted in the cartoon do indeed occur in the sunlight -- managed to remain unique in its own right among the quilt-work series of films of which it is a part, and this is because it is the only where Joseph Lai goes completely bonkers and splices together the usual assortment of animated bits (fans of Space Thunder Kids' fat general with the weird goiter blob thing on his neck will be overjoyed by his major role in Solar Adventure) but also splices in footage from a live-action, low-budget Korean action film. It's like he got confused at some point at spliced in footage meant for one of his ninja movies.
Sadly, the live-action sequences in Solar Adventure feature no ninjas, but they do feature some ugly, irritating kids and, at some point, a couple guys with machine guns. I have no idea if this footage was shot specifically for Solar Adventure or if Solar Adventure simply came about after Lai found the live-action footage lying around. It's clear one came from the other, though, because of the way the film segues from its live-action footage to the animation. Before any of that, though, we get to enjoy a credit sequence illustrated by lots of surprisingly competent space illustrations like you'd see from visions of the future a la the 1960s. Although none of the locations depicted in these illustrations will ever be employed in the actual story of Solar Adventure, they are still quite nice and prove that at least someone involved with this project had some genuine artistic talent. They just didn't see fit to employ it in the service of Joseph Lai's fly-by-night production company.
The fun proper begins in a Korean classroom, where bored kids are learning about those evil, devious commies to the North. Although the teacher does her best to impress upon the children the gravity of this commie Sword of Damocles hanging over their respectable, hard-working country, the kids seem more interested in farting around. Actually, so does the teacher, because as soon as one of the brats stand sup and says, "Teacher, this is boring. Can we have a nature trip instead?" she immediately agrees and suddenly her a few kids from the class are hiking through the world's ugliest, weed-strewn field en route to a scummy, brackish lake where they will all be camping and sleeping piled on top of one another in a single tent. Truth be told, the grubbiness of the landscape could be the fault of the crummy film stock and lightning. If these end up being the heroes of the film, then we're in pretty sorry shape for saviors here on planet Earth. I wasn't sure if the nerdy kid with glasses and fat, mincing nemesis were ugly little boys or ugly little girls, and it's possible they're a bit of both. Whatever the case, I really wish Asia would stop entrusting the fate of our planet and the competent operation of the world's giant robots to kids like these. Surely there must be some grizzled veteran out there who would be better suited for such tasks, leaving the children free to spend their time instructing the military on the proper handling of various Gamera-related monsters. I mean, I may have really disliked Godzilla: Final Wars, but at least they had the good sense to let their super weapon be piloted by a big, grumpy dude decked out in Joseph Stalin's old hand-me-downs.
When the group learns that there might be Communist agents prowling about the lake, they seem mildly distressed, but not so distressed that they cancel their camping trip just because a lot of guys with machine guns are wandering around. And so, after some "hilarious" hijinks involving a skinny nerdy kid and a fat nerdy kids (all these kids are pretty nerdy) they all pile in for a well-earned night's sleep, during which they'll have plenty of time to ponder the benefits of bringing more than one tent with them next time they all go camping in the field next to the ugly lake. Or, they'd have time to contemplate that if it wasn't for the fact that a space helicopter crashes in the lake. When they hear the ruckus, the kids and their teacher emerge and suddenly, they are all cartoons! They bear vague but fair resemblance to the live-action actors, except that the teacher is a totally different person, and one of the fat kids is now a hulking, muscular he-man. The space helicopter -- and that's what it is, a helicopter that flies through space -- contains two green-skinned humanoid aliens who explain that they have come to the earth to help fight against the evil President, who even now consorts with the North Koreans to take over the planet. And for some reason, they decide to enlist the aide of this completely random bunch of dopes to help them out.
And then we cut to the President and the evil North Koreans, and hey! What do ya know! It's that green dude with the big forehead and the general with the giant neck lump, last seen loitering around during the Dark Emperor's attack on earth in Space Thunder Kids. In that movie, these boobs didn't do anything but sit around and talk about maybe launching an attack. Then the blob neck general shot the green dude and drove his tanks into a tunnel, never to be seen again. This time, they stand around in the same room, using the same animation, only with a lot more scenes of the two of them drinking martinis, which is pretty cool. If a green alien came down and said he was going to conquer Earth in between martinis, I'd roll with it. As if going to be the case in pretty much every one of these Joseph Lai produced cartoon abominations, the only thing standing in between The President and conquest of the universe are a couple of the Earth's giant robots. At first, The President thinks he can just steal the robots and use them for his own nefarious schemes, but it turns out you need some secret emotional soul key bullshit to make them go, so The President just decides to melt them down and do something else with the metal, like make more tanks or something. The kids from the camping trip somehow get recruited to pilot the robots, because once again, there's nothing you want more as your last line of defense than giant robots piloted by ten-year-olds who spend most of their time slapping each other in the head. I suppose, really, the kids are about an even match for The President and the goiter neck general. When last we saw these two, they never really got around to accomplishing much, and this time around, it looks like more of the same. Their whole plan for conquering the Earth seems to hinge on running around in the woods around that lake, then attacking the people who own a couple giant robots. I'm no military genius sipping martinis with my green-skinned alien accomplice, but I say launch an attack on a city somewhere, then let the robots come to you. It's gotta beat a systematic attempt to conquer the world based on the conquest of South Korea's least attractive state parks and camping grounds.
As you would expect ten-years-old to do, they leap into battle and immediately get their asses kicked, so Solar Adventure is nothing if not completely and totally realistic. Luckily, one of the kids manages to escape by hiding in a barrel that magically changes dimensions depending on what angle from which it's being drawn. He gets over to one of the robots and begins the movie's stand-out sequence, in which a gigantic metal robot sneaks silently through the North Korean military base, stopping from time to time to squash soldiers in amusing fashions. He manages to free the other children, and then some serious robot fight action breaks out, and we discover that the good guy robots can combine into a super weapon. What is the super weapon? An even bigger robot? A giant spaceship? A huge cannon? No. You're not thinking outside the box. The heroic robots combine to form a...camera. Of course, the camera shoots a laser beam out of its lens. If you have some sort of logical problem with giant robots piloted by children, and the robots combine to form a camera, and then the one remaining robot has to press down on the shutter button -- which is the head of one of the other robots -- and that causes the camera to shoot a laser beam out of the lens (and, presumably take a photo), then maybe you just aren't open-minded enough for the non-conformist, convention-challenging avant-garde art of Solar Adventure.
Once the big robot ass kicking is delivered, the movie suddenly cuts back to the live action footage, as the kids wake up and clamber out of their tent. It was all a dream! Or was it? Whatever the case, the movie loses interest and so cuts to some footage of some dudes in camo shooting some other dudes, and then all the kids skip behind their teacher as they hike along a hilltop in the one thing that really makes this film special: a direct rip-off of the final shot of Ingmar Bergman's Seventh Seal. Now that, my friends, is Joseph Lai at his finest. This one isn't nearly as wacky as Space Thunder Kids, but it's pretty good once it gets rolling. The live-action shenanigans go on for way too long, but once the aliens show up and robots start squishing North Koreans, things pick up. The green guy President drinks a lot of martinis in this one. In fact, in almost every scene, he's drinking a martini. And then he gets shot by the general, who betrays him again as the movie recycles that same footage we saw in Space Thunder Kids. At least this time we actually see the general's tanks get destroyed.
With a running time of right about 60 minutes, there's no real time to get overly bored once the animation kicks in, though I can see the live-action intro losing a lot of people right off the bat. But if you soldier through that, you get to watch robots squash people, then turn into a camera which shoots a death ray for no good reason. I mean, each of the three robots was already armed with assorted lasers and death rays, so changing into a camera death ray that has to be operated by the final robots means your reducing your total number of death rays form three or four to one. This is sort of like how Megatron in the Transformers was a giant robot with a huge fucking cannon on his shoulder, but he'd always transform and turn into a little gun that then had to be fired by another Transformer.
All in all, this is a more coherent movie, with more consistent animation. We don't switch crews or robots from one frame to the next, and while the dudes still don't draw humans very well (what is the deal with the teacher? I'm not even fazed by the general's weird elongated, pot-bellied, hunchbacked, goitered appearance at this point -- after all, that's what evil communists look like anyway), we still get lots of giant robot fighting action, a chase scene between two space helicopters (not exactly thrilling), and that green dude sipping martini after martini. The only real continuity error is that his martini changes colors pretty frequently, but I just assumed that's because he was finishing so many and pouring himself another one, probably because he was having a hard time looking at the horribly malformed North Korean general. Why didn't this guy pick a better earthly agent? The robot designs this time around shirk ripping off the famous Japanese giant robots and instead focus primarily on the Transformers. Speaking of transforming, the main robot, while he doesn't change from one robot to another from shot to shot as we got from so many of the robots in Space Thunder Kids, still manages to exist as a fine example of the total lack of interest on the part of the filmmakers in anything relating to continuity. One second, he's got a little yellow "W" on his chest, and the next shot, there's a big white "W" on his chest, and then later on, there won't be any letter at all, and he'll have wings on his calves, or maybe not.
These are pretty minor, though, considering what we saw and will continue to see from other films in this outstanding series. The robots themselves look like some weird blend of Transformers, Go-Bots, and probably something out of some other cartoon I've never seen. I do know that when the heroic robots are basically Reflector, the evil Decepticon camera from The Transformers. Funny thing is, although this time he's a good guy, the camera gets to kill a whole lot more people than the evil original version. I'm sure other people better versed in assorted robot designs will spot other stolen designs. Solar Adventure is fun. It's not Space Thunder Kids fun, but few things in this world are. As with pretty much everything in this series, it's well worth the dollar, even if for no other reason than that "sneaky robot crushes people" scene and all the shots of the evil guys sipping martinis. What crazy animated adventure will Joseph Lai have up his sleeve next? We can't say for sure, but you can bet that, between Space Thunder Kids and Solar Adventure, you've probably already seen most of it. Labels: Anime and Animation, Science Fiction, Series: Joseph Lai Crap Anime posted by Keith at 6:50 PM | 7 Comments Wednesday, April 18, 2007Space Thunder Kids
DIGG THIS ARTICLE. Korea/Austraila. Honestly, I have no idea. Joseph Lai produced it though, and do you really need to know anything more?
You know, some people would sit down with pen in hand and engage in multiple viewings of a great and respected movie, taking meticulous notes pertaining to various aspects of said film that would promote intellectual dialog amongst high-minded luminaries in the field of film criticism and analysis. I, on the other hand, did much the same thing with Space Thunder Kids, and by "high-minded" I mean low-brow, and by "meticulous notes" I mean drunken ranting, and by "pen" I mean bourbon.
Trust me, a bottle of bourbon is all that's going to get you through the brain-frying glory of Space Thunder Kids, a film so utterly confounding, so dazzlingly inept in every single way imaginable, that it achieves an undeniable aura of the sublime that glows so brightly it threatens to blot out the rest of existence. And if you are worried that, perhaps, drinking an entire bottle of bourbon during a single movie could be detrimental to your health or to your comprehension of what you are watching, I say to you, "Have no fear, for Space Thunder Kids defies comprehension, and by the end of it you will be mopping up your own brain, which will have melted and oozed out the corner of your eyes as you vomit up your own intestines Lucio Fulci style." The bourbon only makes it hurt less. Now if that isn't a good review, I don't know what is.
Truth be told, I did sit through multiple viewings of Space Thunder Kids, and I did do it with a pen and paper and a dedication to taking notes. I wasn't taking notes because Space Thunder Kids was so full of meaning and subtext that it demands to be studied. I was taking notes so that I could have running documentation of every completely bizarre moment in the movie, of every Japanese robot and anime character that appears via a cheap knock-off simulacrum, of every time the movie becomes a completely different movie, with different characters and robots, and without any explanation whatsoever. I was doing my best to keep up, sweating furiously as I scribbled out page after page of mind-boggling insanity. And then the dudes from TRON showed up, and I decided to thrown in the towel.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me start at the beginning, or as close to the beginning as I've been able to trace. It all started one innocent, carefree day when an email from my friend Bill showed up, urging me to get out to Wal-Mart and pick up a copy of a movie called Space Thunder Kids. He also mentioned that he moved to Korea, which would eventually turn out to be an important piece of synchronicity, if indeed synchronicity comes in pieces. I replied that I had not seen Space Thunder Kids, and that I generally avoided movies with the word "Kids" in the title, because I almost always don't like them -- Ninja Kids being the big exception since it contains no kids but does have a bunch of full frontal hooker nudity in it before Alexander Lou puts on a little button-down cap and kicks the shit out of some ninjas. And besides, I wrote, this is New York City. We don't have a Wal-Mart here, because they are an evil corporation that destroys the small-town, mom-and-pop quaintness that is so important to a city like New York, where there are no evil corporations.
A few days later, Bill wrote back and, after praising the commitment of young Korean women to miniskirts even when the temperatures were well below freezing, he urged me once again to do all I could to get a copy of Space Thunder Kids. Ebay it if I had to, or pester friends, or just drive upstate to the nearest Wal-Mart. Eventually, I broke down and decided to mount a quick search for the movie. A dollar and a week's shipping time later, I had a copy, along with two similar DVDs: Defenders of Space and Protectors of the Universe -- or as it's known in its own opening credit sequence, Protectors the Universe. All three titles, along with a couple others I got later thanks to my buddy Todd in Atlanta (Hotlanta to you), showed up a couple years ago on the racks of Wal-Mart's discount dollar DVDs, alongside the usual assortment of Max Fleischer Superman cartoons and old Amos 'n' Andy shorts. Although these types of DVDs get sold in all sorts of places (much to the delight of people like me, who enjoy the occasional Flash Gordon serial or movies where Julius Harris is the main star), it seems these particular anime titles were only available at Wal-Mart. The initial assumption is that these are just old Japanese cartoons dubbed and dumped on the market for peanuts. Indeed, flipping the DVD over and looking at the artwork on the back would seem to support this assumption. Isn't that Mazinger, after all? So these must be old Go Nagai cartoons or something, like that Robo Force thing I got on VHS a long time ago. But wait, I thought as I continued to peruse the snapshots on the back of the Space Thunder Kids DVD -- isn't that guy in the picture below him one of the Transformers? And is that the Space Battleship Yamato? And is that...is that Sark from TRON?!?!?
It turns out that Space Thunder Kids and the rest of the titles in this esteemed collection were actually made in Korea -- where my friend Bill had to go before he was allowed to tell me about them, as if on some Space Thunder Kids pilgrimage. All of the animation is original. Well, sort of original. Some anonymous bunch of Koreans drew it all (their names have been replaced on the credits), but they used existing icons of the Japanese animation industry as "models," sometimes putting one character's head on another's body, sort of like those cheap bootleg toys down in Chinatown where you get things like Spider-Man's head on a Power Ranger's body, with Batman's cape. In a way, I guess this is really no different than when porno movies feature someone with a name almost like some famous celebrity's name. So the Space Thunder Kids robot is to Mazinger what, say, Britney Spheres is to Britney Spears, though maybe that's a bad example since, at this point, it would be hard to guess which one is the respectable person (it's Spheres, in case you were wondering, even if that's not an actual porno star. She should be, is all I'm sayin').
Space Thunder Kids is full of moments when one movie stops and a completely different movie begins (sort of like the piecemeal bodies of the robots in the movie), complete with different film stock, grain, and art style. This is largely because Space Thunder Kids is assembled Frankenstein style from various bits and pieces of the other films in the series -- which themselves borrow scenes pretty heavily from one another. Trust me, if you watch all of these movies, you are going to become really familiar with the evil general (sometimes he's Chinese, sometimes he's North Korean, sometimes he's from space) with the giant goiter or roll of fat or whatever the hell that is supposed to be hanging off the side of his neck. But unlike any of the other titles, only Space Thunder Kids was willing to put the guys from TRON in it. Now, I may dismiss this simply as "batshit insane" filmmaking were it not for the fact that the very first credit to appear when one sits down to experience Space Thunder Kids proudly proclaims it to be a Joseph Lai production, accompanied by grand music and some crazy disco lighting.
Anime fans, who seem to be the bulk of the people who have stumbled across this lost work of art, may not have any idea who Joseph Lai is. They wouldn't even think to suspect that having his name attached to a project is in any way significant. Ahh, but we fans of old kungfu B-movies -- we know better, don't we? And we can impart our knowledge to the purely anime fans who have not ventured into the dark realm of crappy slapdash ninja films. Lai forms a mysterious triumvirate along with Thomas Tang and Godfrey Ho -- indeed there are those who swear the three men are actually the same man, or are some sort of super-being that can split a single consciousness into three separate entities with, I assume, cheesy 1970s pencil-thin mustaches and Amber-vision sunglasses. Lai (and when I refer to Joseph Lai, I am by default also referring to Thomas Tang and Godfrey Ho) Is best known for coming out of relatively nowhere to produce an unheard of number of movies in an extremely short period of time. Binding these films together was the presence of ninjas. And there's no doubt that they are ninjas, even if they're white guys (most often, Italian b-movie staple Richard Harrison) because they often wear headbands that say "Ninja!!!!" on them, in that jagged "Oriental" font. The Tang/Ho/Lai uni-mind was able to produce, direct, and distribute so many films because their style of filmmaking was to buy up a couple cheap Hong Kong or Filipino films, splice them all together, then inject some new scenes of white guy ninjas and try, via dubbing, to tie the whole thing together into some sort of story that might flirt on occasion with coherency without ever actually committing to the concept.
The movies they used were almost always dirt cheap nonsense, though from time to time I have seen one of their ninja movies and recognized at least one of the films that served as the source. Aside from splicing films together, dashing off a new script, and inserting random scenes of white guys in shiny metallic purple or red and yellow ninja outfits into the proceedings (and all movies could benefit from such insertions), they'd also steal music cues from whatever movie happened to be popular -- which, to be fair, was hardly unique to the poverty row Lai/Tang/Ho operation, as even big budget films from Hong Kong during the 80s were known to lift cues and entire musical scores from other films. But while some films, say John Woo's The Killer or Hard Boiled, lifted scores people might not recognize (save for the ten people in the world who rushed out to buy the Red Heat soundtrack). The cheaper films usually just used Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Mix all these ingredients together, and you literally have a nearly endless reservoir of movies than can be made, quite literally, in a few days. And so the world is blessed with titles like Ninja Phantom Heroes, Ninja in the Claws of the CIA, Ninja Diamond Force, and countless others. You could probably write a thousand-page tome by doing nothing but reviewing these ninja films, for their numbers are so great.
That Lai saw fit, for a brief spell, to turn his attentions to anime, or at least to animation, isn't really surprising, given what I have to assume was a keen sense of how to make a fast buck. The results also aren't surprising. From what I can tell, Lai basically made one or two movies, cheaply and sloppily animated by a bunch of Koreans chained to their desks, and then cut and recut those movies into eight or nine separate movies. All of the films rely on the popularity of giant robot animation from the late 1970s and early 1980s, though they hardly restrict themselves to it. And like the ninja films, it seems that these movies were produced largely for a foreign -- as in Western -- market, to be dumped cheaply onto home video or to fill late-night television programming holes. The majority of these cartoons actually make some rudimentary type of sense. The plot is almost identical in each of them -- a belligerent alien race, most likely blue or green in color and sometimes both from one shot to the next, depending on who was coloring in that frame (shades of the sloppiness so prevalent in the old Super Friends cartoon, where costumes would change colors and pieces randomly, and The Flash could, on occasion, fly) attacks the earth with a space armada, usually enlisting the aide of a nefarious human general with a lot of tanks. The earth can only be saved by a group of people dressed like Robotech characters and piloting giant robots. In between the initial assault and the eventual victory for the earth forces, there's pretty much nothing but lots of scenes of spaceships and robots fighting each other. Usually, it's the same robots and spaceships and fights, because they just loop the footage. Still, a crappy cartoon full of robots and space ships fighting each other is better than a good romantic comedy.
But Space Thunder Kids is a horse of a different color. In fact, it's several horses of several different colors. It never makes any sense at all. Ever. And although it relies on the same basic plot as the other cartoons, it hardly matters since it gets buried beneath so much totally random weirdness. Not only do things like uniform and skin and hair color change from frame to frame -- sometimes the entire cast changes from frame to frame. One minute, we're looking at five people in blue uniforms inside a giant robot. We cut to a shot outside, probably of the robot swinging a giant chain while flying through space, and then when we cut back to the crew, there's three of them and they're in completely different uniforms. Plot points are introduced out of nowhere and vanish immediately. Entire armies are set on the march, and we never hear from them again. Characters come out of nowhere and then transform into other characters. Space Thunder Kids represents that point in the space-time continuum where every single law of logic, coherency, and physics -- not to mention the simple, basic concept of competent animation and film making -- are rendered meaningless.
Now under normal circumstances, I wouldn't rely on quoting ad copy from the back of a DVD cover, but these are hardly normal circumstances, so if you will permit me (keeping their typos in place): The Dark Empire is determined to conquer the Universe and get rid of anyone who acts against it. The Space Thunder Kids, made up of three valiant youths, are responsible for patrolling space and obstructing the invasion of the Dark Army.
I quote this because, after two viewings, one of which was spent taking some notes, I had no idea that this was the plot of Space Thunder Kids. Some of the names were recognizable to me, but I didn't and still don't even remember any of this stuff being explained. I didn't even know there were any space thunder kids in the movie, let alone that they were supposed to be rescuing anybody instead of just flying around in a giant robot, and sometimes in a giant spaceship, randomly fighting with other giant robots and spaceships. I guess, upon breezing through it a third time, you could claim that the things indeed could have happened even though it is never expressly stated in the movie itself -- sort of like how some assholes will lay all sorts of Star Wars nonsense and back story on you, and when you tell them, "That dude didn't even have a name in the movie," they get all huffy and explain to you that if you'd read the biographies of the Mos Eisley cantina aliens that was available in the Star Wars screensaver from 1995, you'd know this basic information. I guess I never got the fucking Star Wars screensaver and didn't know that a screensaver was a legitimate avenue for fleshing out the back story of a movie. Are Burger King glasses considered canonical, too?
Anyway, whatever claims the DVD case makes regarding a plot can be easily disregarded since the movie doesn't seem to care about it. Besides, you'll be too distracted with counting the sheer number of gaffes, animation oddness, and stolen robot and character design on display. Space Thunder Kids may be cobbled together from animation that was also used to make a bunch of other movies, but all that animation was still original, in that it was drawn specifically for these features. What isn't original is that the artists rely pretty heavily on just copying existing Japanese character designs, including but not limited to: Space Battle Cruiser Yamato, Captain Harlock, Queen Emereldas, Mazinger, Gundam, Getter Robo, Transformers, Raideen, and, ummm, TRON. TRON is the real stand-out here, because it's even more non-sequiter in its introduction than anything else. At least the Japanese stuff is all robot and space opera stuff from the same general source. What the hell possessed them to suddenly cut to a scene in which a bunch of TRON guys fight Sark and then team up with a Queen Emereldas rip-off in Captain Harlock's ship to destroy the Master Control Program, which is inhabited, apparently, by Captain Ahab in a Kentucky Colonel ribbon tie. If Joseph Lai was in the room right now, I'd kiss him. It takes a lot of work to turn every single scene in a movie into its own plot, largely disconnected form any other plot presented up to that point.
If ever a movie defied description or competent critique, this is it. It's hardly even a movie. Forgive me as I lapse into "play-by-play" commentary for some of this review, but it's worth it, I think, and since you can't actually describe and then comment on the plot, I thought I would simply recreate for you, here, the notes and comments I made so I could remember and try to sort out the sheer madness I was witnessing on my television screen: The action begins on an orbiting space fortress, though I can't tell whether or not it's super dimensional. The fortress is lorded over by a pipe smoking captain and a room full of people who always look angry or constipated. They might be angry because their entire computer bank is made up of VIC-20 computers that do nothing but display those staticky wave things. A sudden meteor shower causes a guy to groan and fly backwards through the control room, even though nothing actually hits them, but that's OK because he apparently noticed himself that he jumped the gun, because he does the exact same fall again a couple seconds later, only this time some debris also falls. It would seem that this freak meteor shower is actually an attack, but when the presumed attacker disappears from the radar where he just saw it blinking, the captain decides it was all just the fault of the jackass running the radar.
When the same mysterious disappearing ship attacks a space station lorded over by a guy with a pencil thin mustache, his female radio operator attempts to identify the sauce (her words, not mine). Oh no, wait, this is an entirely different UFO messing with this space station. The UFO is part of the Dark Emperor's armada, and he is keen on conquering the entire universe, but especially Earth, because the Earth is awesome and every guy on the planet wears either a blue suit with a green tie, a brown suit with a dark blue tie, or a green disco shirt and blue jeans. Even though he has a vast armada armed with death rays at his command, the Dark Emperor sends a giant monster to smash cities, because giant monsters smashing cities is awesome. Meanwhile a trio of heroes -- maybe these are the space thunder kids, I don't know -- fly around in a giant robot. Not fighting the aliens destroying the earth or anything. When they are attacked by the UFO that apparently lost interest in menacing that space station (even the Dark Emperor knows not to mess with a man with a pencil thin mustache), the crew of the robot -- which looks an awful lot like Mazinger -- finally throws down by pulling out his handgun. Wait -- you build a giant robot that can fly around in space, and you make him use a handheld gun instead of just building guns into his hands? Oh hey! He can also separate into three different pieces!
This robot is apparently called Solar Mac 1, and the Dark Emperor hates Solar Mac One so much that he sends the blue-skinned, bearded Commander Dolly to demand that the Earth turn over the one weapon they have that can defeat the Dark Emperor. And just to be a dick about it, Commander Dolly unleashes a giant fanged robot monster thing to blow up the UN and cause volcanoes to erupt. It turns out that the earth actually has three kick-ass giant robots: Solar Mac 1, Zortek 2, and Tiger SX-3, which looks just like Solar Mac 1 but drawn at a slightly different angle. With those robots under our command, the Earth refuses to capitulate. Further hijinks are being mounted by someone who is maybe called General Mon, who is a green-skinned alien with a giant forehead. Working with a nefarious human general with a mysterious blob protruding from his neck, Mon decides that the key to success is kidnapping Dr. Sun, creator of the giant transforming robots. Considering that he's already built the robots and the crews are already trained and flying around in the robots, I'm not sure what kidnapping Dr. Sun will accomplish. But whatever. It's a plan hatched by a green dude with a giant head and a fat guy with a goiter, so I guess that they can do anything at all should be impressive. And it doesn't really matter anyway, because these guys never get around to kidnapping Dr. Sun, and I don't think there's even a a character in this movie by that name.
Meanwhile -- and this movie has a lot of meanwhiles in it -- some more blue guys are about to attack a satellite moon, whatever that may be. This spaceship also has a hot chick on board, just for the hell of it. Unfortunately for the forces of the Dark Emperor, two of the generals -- who I think are named General Shark and General Tim -- hate each other and are always trying to show one another up, and commanding officer Saga loves messing with them (just wait until commander Dolly finds out about this tomfoolery!). When it comes to this competition, though, my money is on the guy whose name is General Shark. It turns out this isn't a good bet since shark, Tim, and Saga all seem to trade names and appearances every other scene. How three guys can be drawn in five or six completely distinct ways is just part of what makes the Dark Emperor's army so dangerous. The satellite is taken by surprise, and it makes one wonder why these places even have radar if all it does is warn you when a vast enemy armada is about ten feet away. But then, maybe if the guy manning the radar actually payed attention, instead of sitting there staring blankly at the screen until another guy walks by and goes, "What's that? Oh no, it's an attack!" Some actual astronaut looking astronauts launch a missile at one of the marauding space ships, but when that ship vanishes, the missile heads straight for China, which upsets some American military guy standing in front of a map of what I assume to be Asia, labeled "America. Map." Maybe that's not a designation of what the map shows but is instead simply a label of ownership. Given many of the things about the people in charge of our military, you might think that the American general would be pleased with this whole "errant missile hits China" situation, but when Earth is threatened by an outside we all band together except for that fat guy with the goiter and a green alien friend. So America launches what I'm pretty sure a guy calls a "patriarch missile" while the general sieg heils madly. Man, there's enough material for a "politics and cinema" and "women in cinema" class right there, what with the phallic patriarch missile and all. Oh wait. Yeah. Patriot missile, but it sure sounds like patriarch, so that's what I'm going with. For some reason, this makes the Chinese ambassador to the UN -- didn't they get blown up at the beginning of this film??? -- scream and beat his show on the table, until the American ambassador -- who, in a fit of eerily accurate premonition, looks and acts just like infamously antagonistic US ambassador to the UN John Bolton -- tells him to "Put your shoe back on! You're stinking up the General Assembly!"
Meanwhile, fucking Sark from TRON shows up out of nowhere in his glowing battle cruiser to make a speech about some secret power source. Meanwhile, we're back with General Tim and General Saga, who was called General Shark the last time we saw him, and General Saga was the guy pitting them against each other. Whatever. One of them has also become a bald guy with a Fu Manchu mustache all of a sudden, when last we saw him he was just some fat dude with shaggy hair. Once again the aliens sneak up on Earth -- you kinda gotta think that maybe we deserve to be conquered at this point -- and launch a bunch of fighter ships and some giant robots armed with bazookas. They blow some random shit up, as giant robots armed with bazookas are wont to do. Our weapons seem powerless against the forces of General Tim or Shark or Saga or whoever the hell is leading this attack. All I know is one of them has a pencil-thin handlebar mustache. Whatever happened to our guy in the space fortress with the pencil thin mustache? General Mon also has a pencil thin mustache, which means the Dark Emperor now has Sark and two guys with pencil-thin mustaches under his command, while all the Earth has is a guy with a big bushy cartoon mustache. If it was a bushy mustache like Burt Reynolds or Maurizio Merli had, we might be in better shape, but it's not one of those.
Just as it seems the mustache gap is about to doom Earth, three little kids launch the sleepy-eyed Zortek 2 to combat the alien armada. Seriously, this robot's eyes make him look half-awake and stoned. No, wait. He's not fighting the armada at all. He's nowhere near that fight. No, he's fighting that blinking monster from earlier, the one that destroyed the UN General Assembly but apparently didn't. well,t hat's what happens when you send a stoner out to defend the earth. And while that monster was smashing cities a little while ago, now he seems to be hanging out by himself on a tiny uninhabited volcanic island. Zortek 2 gets his ass handed to him by the monster, which is probably what you should expect when you let teenagers pilot your giant robot. But then they shoot a crescent moon shaped razor off the top of their head and cause the monster to explode. Hooray! But wasn't this robot supposed to be fighting General Tim or whoever? Well, no worries, because some guys in Battlestar Galactica helmets show up for a dogfight in space with a fleet of Yamatos. I have no idea who these guys are or who's on whose side. But space battle dogfights are always cool, so who cares?
Then we cut to a couple space pilots standing in some guy's office, and their faces are doing this really freaky flickering thing I can barely even describe. I thought these three were the pilots of Solar Mac 1, but now they're in charge of Tiger SX-3, which is neither a promotion or demotion since it's the same robot. Oh wait, now Tiger SX-3 is a completely different robot than the last time they showed him. And one of the crew is a little kid who has no experience with any type of combat, including but not limited to flying around in a giant robot. That's exactly the sort of crack squadron you want manning your last, best hope: a child with no experience at all. But what do I expect from a race that designs radar that warns you of enemy attack only after the attack has already started? What's awesome is that this spaceworthy flying robot gets inside a giant spaceship of its own and then sits at the controls to fly it around, which means to get from here to there a crew of three has to get inside the giant robot and pilot it to get inside the giant spaceship and pilot it.
Then it's back to that battle between the Galactica guys and the fleet of Yamatos, and I still have no idea who these people are. Oh, OK, the Galactica guys are the humans I think, because they're not blue and Tiger SX-3 shows up to smash the Yamato ships before taking on...I think that's General Tim, but maybe it's Saga. Whatever the case, he sends out "Super Shark with the Iron Ball" and "Super Lynx with the Thunder Axe," two more giant robots armed with a ball and chain and an axe. You would think that if you had super giant transforming robot technology, you could come up with a more useful outer space weapon than a medieval axe and mace, but then, a giant robot flying through space while swinging around a big-ass axe looks pretty awesome. Oh yeah, at this point Tiger SX-3 becomes an entirely different robot. Now he's a Transformer. I forgot which one. The one that turns into a fire truck, I think. Also, he's being piloted by an entirely different crew than the last one we saw a couple seconds ago. After this fight, we cut to another robot and another robot crew, and another radar being manned by a sleeping guy even though they're in the middle of a war. And once again, the radar warns them when the evil armada has already started attacking. Baffled by this radar reading, a crew member asks for a visual even though they're sitting in front of a giant windshield. This is when we find out that we're back to Solar Mac 1, although he looks completely different than the last time we saw him, and this is a different crew. But that's okay because a couple seconds later they show him again, and he's back to being the robot with Mazinger's head, and it turns out the problem was just that for a few frames, someone forgot to draw his head on him. Solar Mac One is fighting a fleet commanded by some guy we've never seen before, except that when they show the commander again, it's back to being General Saga or Shark or whoever the blue guy with the handlebar mustache is. As a last ditch effort to defeat Solar Mac 1, he calls out Super Lynx, who you will recall was destroyed a couple minutes ago in a different battle being commanded by a different person. But no worries, because now Super Lynx is a completely different robot yet again. In fact, he's Raideen, but red and with abs, because nothing completes your giant robot quite like adding abs that shoot out missiles. It's way cooler than Solar Mac 1's lasers that pop out of his boobs. At some point during this battle the crew of Solar Mac 1 becomes an entirely different crew, but at this point, things like this shouldn't even phase you. Solar Mac 1 also has to fly down to earth and fight another robot with a big hook hand. This fight is awesome, and you know it's awesome because the artist drew in some lens flares.
Anyway, after Solar Mac 1 beats that other completely unexplained robot -- as if you ever need an explanation for a fight involving a giant purple robot with a hook arm -- we cut to some dude we've never seen before who is apparently the sole surviving commander of the Dark Overlord's forces. This guy looks human and commands some blue guys in stupid hats. He tangles with Tiger SX-3, which is back to being piloted by the first crew we saw. Unfortunately, I don't know what Tiger SX-3 looks like this scene, because this commander's forces are so lame that Tiger SX-3 doesn't even have to get out of his spaceship to beat them. Meanwhile, that general with the lump on his neck double crosses General Mon and decides that the war between the Alliance and the Dark Emperor has left the Earth ripe for the plucking. So even though all this guy has is an animated loop of the same tanks driving through the mountains, he launches his own assault on planet Earth, which consists of driving his tanks through a tunnel and never being heard from again.
So now it all comes down to a showdown between Sark and some guys who look like the good guys from TRON. This leads to the inevitable battle involving the hurling of light discs. And no, we've never seen anything like these good guys before, and there's no explanation as to how they infiltrated the deepest inner sanctums of the Dark Emperor and Sark. And yeah, at this point, this pretty much becomes the single greatest movie ever. But then, because Joseph Lai loves us so, down swoops Captain Harlock's ship, the Arcadia, piloted by a sexy Emereldas rip-off named Sheila. She sounds like someone with a nasally British accent trying to speak with an American Southern accent. Sheila joins forces with the TRON dudes after proclaiming both them and the Dark Emperor her enemies, but whatever, man. Fuckin' TRON dudes! The Dark Emperor doesn't stand a chance against Space Pirate Sheila, so he flees in order to praise his atomic reactor thing, which looks like the MCP from TRON. I should also mention that Sheila's sister is a deformed, diminutive robot thing. Sheila and the TRON guys -- who show up out of nowhere and now include a couple old guys and a chick and no sign of the black guy who was with them earlier -- finally blow up the Dark Emperor and his evil atomic devices! Hooray! The war is over! And then we cut to Flint from GI Joe leading a commando raid on...wait. Who the hell is this? Oh, it's that evil human commander of one of the fleets, the one who presumably got blown up by Tiger SX-3. I guess he escaped somehow, and now it's up to the commandos to take him down. And just for the hell of it, a bunch of evil giant robots get launched, and Solar Mac 1 kicks their asses, only now Solar Mac 1 looks like the second version of Tiger SX-3, which I guess is only fair since the first time we saw Tiger SX-3 he looked just like Solar Mac 1.
When this general discovers the Dark Emperor has been defeated, he surrenders and is forgiven and we all learn a valuable lesson about peace, the abolition of weapons of mass destruction, and how the leaders of the world should bend to the will of the people, and not the other way around. Hey! Wait a minute! There was no Doctor Sparta! There was no scientist kidnapped and rescued by the Space Thunder Kids! There may have been a Doctor Rhodes, but it was hard to tell. As bad as Space Thunder Kids may be, there are a number of things that are good about it -- and remember that when I say it's bad, what I'm really saying is, "Holy Christ, this is the greatest thing I've ever seen!" For starters, you can't say that the thing isn't action packed. Minus some conversations here and there, almost the entire running time of this movie is taken up watching space ships and robots blow the unholy hell out of each other. Secondly, while the animation is cheap and relies heavily on looping, static shots, and repeated sequences, some of the artwork is actually pretty cool. Whoever drew this couldn't really draw human/humanoid faces, resulting in some mighty peculiar looking visages from time to time, but then there are moments when the artist was apparently inspired and comes up with an absolutely gorgeous slow-motion bit of some perfectly drawn and shaded dude getting blown up. And I guess I can say the mech designs are cool, but given that most of them were stolen from other sources, I'm not sure how much credit can be given to the artists here. Third and finally, Space Thunder Kids has only two goals in life: 1) make Joseph Lai yet another bushel of cash to add to what I assume is already a Scrooge McDuck like vault in which he swims on a daily basis, and 2) keep kids entertained. As a kid, all these logical shortcomings and artistic faux pas would have meant nothing to me (they barely mean anything to me as an adult). All I would have cared about is that there were a bunch of robots and spaceships blowing up. I probably wouldn't even have noticed the repeated footage and looped animation, just as it was years and dozens of viewings before I caught on that Godzilla's Revenge was comprised largely of stock footage stolen from earlier movies. And even though I do notice and poke at all of Space Thunder Kids' sundry short-comings now, at the end of the day, I had a blast. I live in fear of only a few things: being tortured, ending up in a situation where I have to eat disgusting bug-oriented food lest I enrage and insult some tribal chieftan, and becoming disillusioned with the wide world of weird cinema. So far, I have managed to avoid all three, and Space Thunder Kids is yet another glorious example of the fact that, no matter how much I see, I will never get to the point where I've seen it all.
Think of it as a bold experiment in deconstructing the myth of the linear narrative. Or think of it as the most accurate adaptation of the stream of consciousness James Joyce novel, Ulysses. Even actual adaptations of Ulysses can't come close to capturing the randomness of Joyce's scatterbrain stream-of-consciousness style as well as Space Thunder Kids. In fact, given the nature of Ulysses, I would say that any attempt at faithfully recreating the events in that book instantly become an inaccurate representation of that book, and so indeed, Space Thunder Kids is the best and only true capturing of both the stylistic spirit and plot of Ulysses. So there you go. Fifty years from now, this movie will be lauded as an avant-garde masterpiece, and hunchbacked film students (hunchbacked because they spend too much time sitting with bad posture, but also because of the Spore Wars of 2050) will pore over its ever frame in search of meaning the same way current students are forced to scrutinize every shot in The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick or Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. For now though, anyone who is a fan of colossally, brain-fryingly bizarre and incompetent films, anyone who is a fan of old anime and will love playing spot the influence (and sometimes you can spot a couple influences on one robot, as bodies and heads are switched with reckless abandon), and I guess anyone who would want to see a giant robot space opera that randomly cuts to a whole strange TRON sequence, then Space Thunder Kids is well worth the dollar. Or even a couple dollars. Sure, you could be watching Super Dimensional Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love, or Yamato, or Harlock, or some other great and classical work of anime. But why do that when you can watch like fifty anime titles all at once, plus TRON, simply by watching Space Thunder Kids? Labels: Anime and Animation, Science Fiction, Series: Joseph Lai Crap Anime posted by Keith at 5:36 PM | 7 Comments Monday, February 05, 2007Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend
DIGG THIS ARTICLE. 1989, Japan. Starring Yasunori Matsumoto, Koichi Yamadera, Yoko Asagami, Daisuke Gori, Tomohiro Nishimura, Maya Okamoto, Hirotaka Suzuoki, Yumi Takada, Norio Wakamoto. Directed by Hideki Takayama. Written by Sho Aikawa.
I was having a hard time starting this review, and I'm not sure why. I don't mean that I was caught in some moral dilemma, wondering if I should dare discuss such a filthy, irredeemable piece of trash -- I think we all know how such a moral dilemma would hash out if I'm involved. I guess it was just a case of writer's block, or exhaustion. Or maybe it was the fact that there were just so many things to say, so many approaches that could be taken in discussing the source material, that I was overwhelmed. Perhaps even spoiled for choice. And under a bit of pressure. An epic as vast and sprawling and serious as this demands an appropriately grave and serious demeanor. Would I do the subject justice? Would my review be deserving of such a monumental work of art? In the end, I simply had to accept that sometimes words don't come easy, even to a rambling windbag like me, but like the titular character of the Overfiend, while words may not come easily, they must come never the less. Which brings me to the disagreeable preface that must be applied to a review of a film of this nature. As regular readers know, I pride myself in ardently defending the standards and decency of the community. Luckily, since the community to which I refer is the Internet, which means pretty much anything short of Hitler jerking off on Jesus while the Savior makes sweet love to a little boy can be considered decent and acceptable. Still, even with the community standards of the Internet thus established, I feel like I should warn some of our less seasoned and no doubt happier readers that the movie about which we're going to talk today is a work of questionable morality and ill repute.
At this point in my career, I don't think any recreated act on film or video could manage to shock or offend me. Amuse, perhaps. Disappoint, sure. But when you've been at this for as long as I have, the disconnect between make-believe and reality becomes crystal clear, and once you've managed that, there's not much point in getting offended by goofy make-believe sleaze. But I understand that not all of you share this particular immunity toward offense, for a variety of valid personal reasons, so allow me to warn you now: Legend of the Overfiend is utter and absolute filth. Unless, like me, what was human in you died a long time ago, you will find this series inexcusably tasteless, offensive, and perhaps even upsetting. In a couple weeks, I'll be reviewing the ridiculously fun and enjoyable Bollywood caper Shaan, and I suggest that if you have heart or soul left in your being, you simply rejoin us then and give this whole horrible Legend of the Overfiend thing a miss. On the other hand, if you find cartoon tentacle porn more absurd than upsetting, and if you want to slog through a film that is indeed filthy and wretched, but also one of the single most important titles in the history of anime in the United States, then steel yourself, make sure your boss isn't working (I'm writing this at work -- I don't see any reason why you shouldn't be reading it there), and prepare to submerge yourself in a series that is impressive both for how callously offensive and perverse it strives to be while also striving to be colossally epic and vast in scale -- sort of like the Old Testament.
When, during the summer of 2006, Teleport City decided to dig about in the waters of anime from the 1980s, we mentioned on more than one occasion that the eighties were probably the most glorious decade of unfettered excess and decadence in the anime world. The giant robots and melancholy space pirates of the 1970s gave way to hot chicks in battle armor, exploding heads, and the now infamous birth of tentacle porn, among other things. While today's anime market may be choked with cheap hentai titles full of tentacle rape and nurses pooping on each other, it's neither as shocking nor as notable today as it was in the eighties, for two main reasons. First, the eighties did it first, and just about everything that happens today is derivative of the sleazy pioneers of the 1980s. Modern sleazeball anime may have plumbed further into the depths of human perversions and replaced magical demon bodily fluids with actual human bodily fluids, but given how mainstreamed porn and sexual deviance has become (and God bless it!), even the most shockingly sick and twisted modern hentai lacks the punch of its forefathers, if for no other reason than we've seen it all before. I don't know what it says about me or society that a title like Cool Devices can come out, and my reaction is a decadent sigh of boredom and, "Oh, ho hum. He's peeing on his sister." Second, modern hentai (for you people who don't take time to acquaint yourself with esoteric terms, "hentai" is what people call porn anime so they don't have to call it porn anime) exists largely and almost exclusively within the confines of the porn ghetto. There is very little, if any, cross-over between hentai and the more mainstream world of shrieking blonde ninjas in orange jumpsuits telling me to "believe it!" Of course, I speak only of official production anime; if one needs to find the crossover between porn and mainstream anime, one need only turn to our dear old friend, the Internet, which will allow you to access a whole world of fanfic in which the characters of Naruto lick each others buttholes while fending off an endless attack of bad grammar and spelling mistakes. But that's fanfic, and it's a ghetto all its own. Only Dragonball filk is lower.
There was plenty of underground hentai in the 80s, of course, but there were also several titles which crossed the line (in more ways than one) and either flirted with or achieved legitimate mainstream crossover success. Here in the United States, when anime broke in the latter half of the Reagan era, it was defined primarily by three titles, though only two are ever really acknowledged as having reigned supreme, while the third is filed away as sort of this guilty curiosity that no one really saw, but don't let that sort of anime history revisionism fool you. There were three king hell titles: Akira was the obvious top of the heap, followed by the OVA Bubblegum Crisis, which dominated the home video market for reasons I still cannot fathom to this day. I guess it was all we had at the time, and it was better than watching MD Geist. The third title comes to us courtesy of one of the creators of the classic anime series Yamato, aka Starblazers in the United States, and even though Akira is named time and again as the defining moment in 80s anime and one of the landmark accomplishments in the history of anime as a whole, it was the bastard son of a writer-director-producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki -- The Nish, as he has become known lately -- that really defined anime in the mainstream press. In between creating Starblazers, delighting generations with Odin: Photon Space Sailer Starlight, and shooting cannons off on his private yacht, Nishizaki found time to serve as producer for a new series which, unlike all his previous ideas, wasn't just a rehash of Yamato. Following the lead of Lovecraft-inspired horror that flirted with graphic sex presented to us in Wicked City, Nishizaki decided that the one thing wrong with that movie was that it only featured some sex thrown in with its violence, and never had the guts to show full-on penetration of a woman by a gigantic demon penis.
And so, as the 90s came to a close and the window for getting a high-profile work of such decadence and depravity was closing, Nishizaki collected together a crew that included director Hideki Takayama (still brand new to the game in 1989, but he's since gone on to direct all sorts of screwed-up demon rape porn, and for some reason, Sakura Wars) and writer Sho Aikawa (who was fresh off the popular title Vampire Princess Miyu and would go on to write for Fullmetal Alchemist), and together, they made a little OVA series called Urotsukidoji, more popularly known as Legend of the Overfiend. This is a pretty dubious assembly of talent, and one sort of has to stretch the meaning of the word talent to really fit them all in. After all, Nishizaki hadn't really come up with anything memorable since Starblazers, and he seemed to be batshit insane in addition. Sho Aikawa -- who I'd like to think is the same Sho Aikawa who would go on to acting fame in Takashi Miike's Dead or Alive trilogy, but I'm pretty sure it isn't -- may have achieved some degree of respectability with Vampire Princess Miyu, but that was flirtation with respectability, at best, and you have to do much better work if you want to make people forget about you also having written Dog Soldier and Angel Cop. And director Hideki Takayama? Other than becoming the go-to guy for Overfiend sequels and rip-offs, he doesn't have much to offer. But the fact remains that while they may not have been impressive names, they were still names, and they had some legitimate work under the belt. And The Nish, crazy or not, still had Yamato era clout that helped make his own private exploration of ridiculously grotesque and pornographic extremes more of a high profile release than the average piece of hentai naughtiness.
But whatever respectability the Overfiend saga -- and porn aside, it is a saga, complete with a vast and ambitious personal mythology and epic scope -- may have squeezed out in Japan is nothing compared to what happened to the thing when it hit the United States. It became a cult phenom that, for a brief time, very nearly rivaled the status of Akira, albeit with a decidedly different tone in those who talked about it. I remember seeing it for the first time in 1990, when a friend who was heavy into trading VHS tapes to get obscure horror films, ended up with a copy on a tape where it shared space with some Japanese porn movie about a woman pursued by a garbage bag containing her murdered husband, and an underground video of some chick performing "hanadensha," or "pussy arts," such as blowing up balloons, shooting a dart gun, smoking a cigarette, and, umm, filling herself up with squirming, live eels. Yeah, I really don't have any excuse whatsoever, other than it was pretty late, and we sure did laugh a lot. It was just the first episode of Overfiend, fuzzy and with no translation, so all we really knew was that there was a spectacle on the screen the likes of which we'd never really seen, not even in Wicked City. And we weren't the only ones. Bootleg copies of this "ridiculously screwed up thing from Japan" were circulating like wild fire throughout the cult film underworld, and while many looked on with awe-inspired disgust, that doesn't change the fact that many looked on, always corrupted by a friend waving a VHS tape and saying, "Dude, you have got to see this!" So many saw it, in fact, that the Overfiend eventually crept into mainstream consciousness and became the poster boy for how hideous and corrupt anime was. Not just porn anime, but all anime. It didn't matter if it was the gender bending shenanigans of Ranma 1/2, the turgid teen romance of Kigamure Orange Road, or the epic science fiction of Akira. Overfiend, as far as the local newscaster was concerned, embodied them all, and all anime looked like and was as perverse as Urotsukidoji. If only. I might have finished Kigamure Orange Road if that had been the case.
Of course, it's not like anime was totally innocent of the charges. The 80s were, as we've said, pretty packed to the gills with messed up stuff. If anything, The Overfiend was simply the trends of the 1980s taken to their most logical extreme, or as logical as Nishizaki was ever capable of being, and exploding in the final year of that decade with all the gruesome force of the Overfiend's orgasm blowing some chick's head off in a messy splash of blood, brains, and semen. It was the last gasp of the twisted, free-for-all of the 1980s. After that, anime settled down, and the porn settled to the bottom of the barrel. In time, when old timers would go back and talk about the seminal movies of the 1980s, they would neglect to mention the most "seminal" of them all. If Urotuskidoji was mentioned, it was usually as an offhanded aside, or a sneering condemnation of how this tasteless abomination ruined anime and made everyone thing anime fans were all a bunch of murderous pervs. Rarely will they mention that, for better or for worse, damn near everyone who watched anime in those days saw it. Rarely will they mention that it was, again for better or for worse, a defining title of the era, and that among other dubious claims to fame, it was the first anime feature (when the OVA episodes were edited together to create a feature film) to be released in both dubbed and subtitled format not just to U.S. home video -- but to U.S. movie theaters as well.
The Overfiend gets no respect, and frankly, it doesn't deserve much. The animation is sometimes hit or miss, occasionally nicely realized, and in some cases bordering on great; the story is scatter-brained; and yes, it's packed full of misogynistic violence toward women, underaged sex (though the warning at the front of the film swears the high school characters are all over the age of nineteen), and rape that culminates in exploding heads. It's just not very good. But it does have its moments, and good or not, it played a huge role in defining the formative years of anime, and deserves, if nothing else, to be recognized for its contributions (be there good or ill) and its rightful place in the history of anime. So it was that I decided that, while I wasn't going to champion the series (I save my Nishizaki championing for Odin), I would at least try to put it in it's proper context, and I would do so with the help, should they chose to offer it, of the great and mighty torchbearers of celebrating "old school" anime, the Anime World Order podcast. Of course, they're a podcast, and I'm a written review website, so I don't know exactly how this collaboration will work out, but that's all part of the fun.
Of course, as soon as Gerald from the AWO took me up on the offer, I had to figure out exactly how I was going to deal with such a notorious and admittedly irredeemable piece of filth. The Overfiend, I mean, not Gerald. In my younger years, I would have simply indulged in it with reckless abandon, celebrating the filth and the fury with slimy screencaps and interminable gusto. I am older now, and not so prone to adolescent fits of petty offensiveness, but I'm also still not offended by things that are saucy or stupid, or in the case of Urotsukidoji, both saucy and stupid. And in the end, Urotsukidoji is definitely stupider than it is offensive. In fact, I find the whole thing so absurd, so totally ludicrous as to be inoffensive, because seriously, man, how can anyone take this crap seriously? There are much scarier things in the world and much scarier things in the world of anime, and they are called moe and harem shows, but we'll come to those later. So in deference to my more sensitive readers who do not share my callous disregard for what you humans call morality, I'll do my best to exercise some degree of restraint, which may be an odd thing to do in the case of Urotsukidoji -- but only just barely, because while I may claim that the purpose of this review is to put this much maligned piece of trash in its rightful place in the pantheon of anime, my real motivation is simply to have a good laugh, which ultimately, is about all you should get from something as completely goofy as the Overfiend.
Our story begins with narration courtesy of a guy who seems to be competing with Tomisaburo Wakiyama as Ogami Ito for the deepest voice in the world. He lays out the basics for us -- demon world and human world, one intruding on the other -- the usual. And there's a chosen one who will rise up and cleanse the world and unite us all while demons with six breasts do it doggy style to clue parents in to the fact that they shouldn't have rented this movie for their kids, even though the kids themselves are no doubt appreciative. Right away Nishizaki clues us in to the fact that there's not going to be much in the way of originality on display in this story. We then meet the nominal hero of our story, a goofy peeping tom named Nagumo, who alternates his days between peeking in the girls' locker room and being licked on the cheek by the number one ace hero of the basketball court during some weird Japanese high school sport in which basketball games are accompanied by a girls' gymnastics routine. Watching everything from up in the rafters is Amano, the new kid at school who no one seems to notice has catlike whiskers. Amano is searching for the titular Overfiend, the super-being foretold by prophecy to be the savior of the world. Amano is pretty convinced that it's that cheek-licking basketball guy, but Amano's sexy sister Megumi is convinced that it's someone else, possibly nerdy perv Nagumo. Either way, once again we see that ancient beings relying on a "chosen one" is always a stupid idea, because the chosen one is always some kind of a chump. Here we get a face-licking basketball star or a masturbating nerd. Nice going, prophecy of old. When next we meet the brave and noble Nagumo, he is slinking into the school to peep on Ameki, the sweet girl next door on whom he has a crush, and one of the female teachers. When it turns out that the teacher intends to sex up the young student, Nagumo assumes his standard position of peeking in. But when it's further revealed that the teacher is, in fact, a hideous demonic monster that is going to rape Akemi via a twitching tangle of giant tentacle penises that spurt glowing neon goo, well, Nagumo still just sort of squats there peeping through the crack in the doorway. It's not until Amano shows up that the sexual assault is halted thanks to some good ol' magical intervention that results in exploding heads.
The good thing about Legend of the Overfiend is that it doesn't try to trick you into thinking it's something it's not. If you are going to be offended and disgusted by the movie, it makes sure you know that from the very first few minutes. That way, at least you haven't wasted your time. Pretty much everything that will jam pack the rest of the series running time is put up front for your consideration in this opening scene, so you can't say Nishizaki didn't warn you. Personally, as I said before, the whole scenario is so utterly silly and juvenile and presented in such an over-the-top manner that it's really hard for me to feel offended in any way. I would have loved to have been sitting in on The Nish and his crew when they were writing the story for this absurd exercise in the extreme. Although the story itself is presented in a serious fashion, I can't imagine anyone taking it the least bit seriously when they were writing it. But then again, Nishizaki is batshit insane, so who knows? Whatever sexual and psychological hang-ups he and the society in which he lived might have had are certainly laid bare in The Overfiend. There is an obvious fear and lack of understanding in regards to women. Lesbians are all secretly drooling demons who have hidden their giant penises behind a veneer of femininity. And even as they paint a terrified phobia of homosexuality, they fetishize the penis to a degree that would even make Tom of Finland blush. If you are the type to analyze such things, it's worth noting that The Nish made his millions working on the Yamato series. The original battleship Yamato was a massive World War II ship that was supposed to be the pride and joy of the Japanese people and a symbol of their might. Its construction bankrupted the Japanese military, and during it's first major combat operation, it was sunk by American airplanes. Still, however, the Yamato is held up by many -- mostly men -- as a great symbol of pride despite it being a catastrophic failure. More than a few people have said that the Yamato was nothing more than the "big dick" syndrome. Theirs was the biggest and that made them the baddest. Never mind that the thing turned out to be impotent.
So decades later, Nishizaki resurrects the myth of Yamato's grandeur by creating a cartoon series in which the original ship is recovered from its watery grave and turned into a spaceship that will save humanity. If The Nish had his history straight, then there would have been tremendous fanfare and pomp as the space battle cruiser Yamato was launched. Then it would have been shot down by aliens a few minutes later. But that would have been a pretty lame television series, and since Yamato is one of my favorites, I'm glad Nishizaki didn't go that route. And ultimately, I reckon championing the old Yamato battleship is no different than any other country championing their lost causes. Anyway, after Yamato, Nishizaki made a show about a submarine that's turned into a spaceship -- completely different from the Yamato series, right? Anyway, you may notice that Nishizaki -- who also happens to be a gun and cannon nut, as well as sporting a fondness for speed boats and big yachts -- seems to have a preoccupation with things that are long and cylindrical in shape. And then comes The Overfiend...I've never seen Nishizaki naked, and likely never will, so I can't say what he's compensating for. However, it's pretty obvious that the man has built an entire career around his obsession with his own penis. Overfiend is just the most overt example.
Anyway, having established that this movie is going to be an affront to all that is decent and tasteful in the world, Overfiend then goes on to lay out the rest of its plot, which has got to be one of the most complex and sprawling mythologies ever grafted on to cheap animation and porn. Nishizaki may be obsessed with dicks, he may fear and/or hate women, he may be ripping off Wicked City, but no one can say that the man didn't have vision or put work into the back story of his infamous masterpiece of the grotesque. Spread over the first few episodes of Legend of the Overfiend, we get a story that spans thousands of years and involves everything from depraved captains of industry to Nazi madmen, to peeping tom high school students. As Amano and Megumi continue to try and ferret out the Overfiend -- or Chojin -- other forces from the demon realm seek to do the same. This includes such demon assassin hits as messing with that basketball guy during his orgy, offering up a giant possessed demon penis that will make the school's resident nerd ultra-potent and powerful if he chops off his own useless little member and replaces it, and finally sending a wizardy uber-being out to kill Amano. Just when you think Overfiend can't possibly get any sillier, it finds a way.
Eventually, Nagumo realizes his destiny, but to the horror of Megumi and Amano, it's not the destiny they expected -- and for all that is ridiculous about Overfiend, the final revelation that basically, the people who believed in the prophecy just got it all wrong, is a pretty nice writing touch. The series ends on a cliffhanger of sorts -- with Amano shedding his human disguise and attempting to take on the Overfiend himself while vowing to survive the carnage that comes from the inevitable destruction of the world. Unfortunately, the series is never fully resolved. The final two episodes of the OVA end up being post-apocalyptic side stories that don't really go anywhere, and subsequent sequel series' were equally pointless. Eventually, the final Urotsukidoji series was just a remake of the first series. If you've seen Odin and suffered through its non-ending, then you might pick up that this is sort of a thing for Nishizaki. Unfortunately, Overfiend does not end by randomly cutting to a Loudness music video.
Not all the blame (or credit -- whatever) for Urotsukidoji can be laid at the feet of Nishizaki. Urotsukidoji was actually created by manga artist Toshio Maeda in 1986. Maeda was working as a porn manga artist and had gotten bored, he says, with drawing the same mundane crap over and over. He decided that what erotic manga needed was a dash of grotesque fantasy. Blending his erotic manga with a Lovecraft-esque sense of the horrific, Maeda more or less invented the tentacle porn genre -- yes, it's a genre now -- with tentacles and nightmarish abstractions of the penis standing in for actual sexual organs as a way to skirt Japanese censorship laws. When Nishizaki seized upon Urotsukidoji as the source for his next masterpiece of anime, Maeda's position as the father of sick and twisted cartoon porn was cemented. Maeda went on to create several more of the more infamous high-profile hentai titles of the early 1990s, including the terrible Adventure Kid, Demon Beast Invasion, and La Blue Girl. Maeda is infinitely proud of his legacy and has reportedly even said that he wants "Tentacle Master" inscribed on his tombstone. Urotsukidoji remain his defining "masterpiece."
You know, Urotsukidoji is an absolute mess. Although the high concept is interesting and intricate, the execution leaves a lot to be desired. And it's still largely just a pornographic rip-off of Wicked City with a bit of Akira thrown in (the scene in which the Overfiend comes full into power and decides to destroy the world is very reminiscent of the finale of Akira). It draws from the same Lovecraftian/H.R. Giger vision of horror as Wicked City. The characters are ridiculous -- after being raped in every orifice by a teacher who turns into a slobbering monster, Akemi shows up for school the next day and is basically no more freaked out than, "Boy, that sure was weird." Nagumo is completely impossible to like as a character. I guess the story is ultimately about Amano and, to a lesser degree, Megumi, which is OK since Amano is the only halfways decently developed character in the whole thing. The animation is often incredibly cheap, with limited motion in most scenes. Effort seems to have been put into the big battles and the demon rape, but that's about it. But for someone as awful as me, there's a perverse enjoyment to be extracted from the nonsense. For one, I admire the ambition of the story. Most of the tentacle porn that would follow in the footsteps of Urotsukidoji was incredibly weak -- basically, they would say, "There's a demon world, and they rape humans and some people fight them," and leave it at that, knowing that the ultimate goal of their little film is to get some lonely perv off, and he's probably not even going to listen to the plot. That wasn't good enough for Nishizaki. The man had created an expansive universe for Yamato, and even for Odin, and he saw no reason that Urotsukidoji shouldn't enjoy the same epic mythology. Never mind that it was an endless parade of filthy porn and callous rape; he was still going to weave a monstrously complex tapestry to serve as the backdrop Also, as cheap as the animation is in most scenes, one does have to admire the imagination that went into the monster design. There are, after all, a lot of monsters in Urotsukidoji, and no two of them look alike. From hulking wolfman-like monsters to grotesque toadmen that dress like Humphrey Bogart, the sheer number of drooling ghouls the art team dreamed up is fascinating. Of course, at the end of the day, it's all about the giant screaming (sometimes literally) cock, but still, points for wickedly sick imagination.
Finally, there's the finale. Although it leaves almost all of the plot threads dangling and is a weak resolution to the story as a whole, the scenes of mass destruction and carnage as the fury of the Chojin and the whole demon world is unleashed on earth are pretty impressive. They obviously cut costs on the rest of the series so they could deliver on the finale, and at least in that respect, Urotsukidoji doesn't disappoint. But it's still pretty foul. I wouldn't really recommend it, although I was just as enthusiastic in the old days about convincing unsuspecting friends that they should watch it. But there is something grotesquely fascinating about the whole artistic abomination. The incredible insanity and over-the-top spectacle of it all trumps the nasty misogynistic edge and juvenile penis-obsession and really transforms Urotsukidoji into a sleazy carnival sideshow. You hate yourself for looking, but you can't turn away. It's that car wreck everyone slows down to gawk at. As wretched as it may be, it has a strangely hypnotic power that can draw even decent people into its world of laughing demons and spurting bodily fluids.
It might be worth watching just so you can see the cast list for the English dub. Apparently, whoever worked on it was a little embarrassed, so the English cast list includes names like Chris Courage, Rebel Joy, Rosie Palmer, and my two personal favorites, Lucy Morales and Jurgen Offen. I would assume that the use of such names is perfectly in tune with Nishizaki's high school locker room level of discourse. The dubbing was done primarily for the theatrical cut of the film, which combined the first few OVA episodes into one film and cut out all the scenes of actual penetration. The Japanese cast (most of whom elected to have their names left out of the credits) actually includes a lot of experienced actors, including a lot of people The Nish roped in off the Yamato series and other Leiji Masumoto works. Tomohiro Nishimura, who voices Amano, even worked on My Neighbor Totoro! It's sort of reminds me of all the respectable actors who showed up in Caligula. If you are interested in the history and evolution of anime, you can't help but pay attention to it. The dang thing played in American movie theaters, for criminey's sake! Newspaper and TV reporters held it up as the sole defining example of "anime," resulting in crusades to have anime banned and all anime fans branded as slobbering perverts, while at the same time, apologists tied themselves in knots trying to write pieces that deconstructed and analyzed the film and trumpeted its artistic merits (it's a cautionary tale about teenage pregnancy or a cautionary tale against blind faith, depending on who's writing the analysis). It was an absolute fiasco, and if nothing else, I always enjoy a good fiasco. As alarmist and shocked as the reaction in the U.S. was, it was even more sensational in England. In the U.K., things were a little more serious. Urotsukidoji practically destroyed the anime market in England, which was only just coming off the high of its infamous Video Nasties years. It took a long time before anime fandom in the U.K. could rebuild itself. Like its titular character, Urotsukidoji destroyed the world so it could rebuild a new and better one in its place. But the fact that it gutted the industry and made anime so incredibly difficult to obtain for many people might be the main reason, far more so than the actual pervy content of the series, so many people harbor a lingering distaste for this anime atrocity. For me, personally, it didn't make much of a difference. I didn't suffer any of the "anime is all porn and anime fans are all perverts" stigma because, frankly, no one at my high school even know what anime was or was in any position to even hear about Overfiend or anime. everyone in Buckner, Kentucky, was too committed to the new Bocephus album at the time. So I have a much better sense of humor about this series than many other people who did get branded as freaks on account of it may have -- even if they were Miyazaki fans and had never seen Overfiend. I mean, hell, as far as anyone I knew was concerned, if you were watching cartoons, period, you were just a nerd.
At the end of the day, Urotsukidoji is all those things and more -- and less. It is filth. It is irredeemable. It does have artistic merit. It lacks artistic merit. It is shameless and offensive. It is ridiculous and harmless. It was the logical illogical extreme and the culmination of the increasingly outrageous nature of anime in the 1980s. You should avoid it like the plague. You should absolutely see it. There's really no way to make sense of the controversy and jungle of opinions surrounding the series. At the end of the day, you really just have to see for yourself. Me, I think it's mildly entertaining in spots and ultimately harmless. In fact, as outrageous as the porn aspects of Urotsukidoji may be, when held up against certain aspects of the modern anime landscape, it seems to be little more than goofy doodling -- quaint, almost, perhaps even innocent. And that's because everything is presents is so preposterous that it can't be taken seriously or really looked at as a corrupting agent. No one is going to go out and mimic the Chojin, after all. Compare that to something like the modern moe or harem show -- things that may not feature a giant demon raping a woman and making her body explode with his semen, but instead paint a world where an unlikable loser with no redeeming qualities never the less finds himself in control of a group of slavishly devoted women who worship him like a god. Or moe, in which female characters are so overly precious and innocent and doe-eyed and pre-pubescent that the whole thing reeks of child pornography. These types of shows are far more insidious and perverse than the flashy, over-the-top idiocy of Urotsukidoji. They often appeal to a segment of the population that really does relate in some way to the lead male character and really does let the portrayal of women and little girls affect their opinions of the real world. I don't see Urotsukidoji operating in quite the same fashion. So yeah. Whatever man. Urotsukidoji is the tawdry piece of pornographic trash you've heard it is; it's also not all that fiendish or corrupting. It's just silly. But it is a major milestone in the history of anime, so if you are the type who needs or wants to understand the evolution of anime, then you pretty much have to deal with Urotsukidoji. It's really not as painful as you think it might be. I mean, I wouldn't watch it with my parents or invite a date over to watch it, but come on: it's so loopy, so genuinely cracked in the head, and so unabashedly over-the-top, and so epic and ambitious that it really stops being offensive porn and starts being nothing more than a laughable freak show. And it does try to be something more than cheap porn. It tries to be really lavish, complex porn. earlier, I made a passing reference to Caligula. Overfiend is definitely the Caligula of anime -- fitting, even, since both films were funded with Penthouse money. They both contain about the same degree of perversion an twisted grotesquery (I'm pretty sure that's not a word -- but it is now!). Labels: Anime and Animation, Anime: 80s, Horror: Just Plain Weird, Sexploitation, Year: 1989 posted by Keith at 2:16 AM | 8 Comments Tuesday, September 26, 2006Lupin the 3rd: Castle of Cagliostro
1979, Japan. Starring Yasuo Yamada, Eiko Masuyama, Kiyoshi Kobayashi, Makio Inoue, Goro Naya, Sumi Shimamoto, Taro Ishida. Directed by Hayao Miyazaki. Written by Hayao Miyazaki and Tadashi Yamazaki. Buy it now from Amazon.com
 .People who are not familiar with the character of Lupin the Third are still likely to have heard of and perhaps even seen this movie thanks entirely to its being the feature film directorial debut of Hayao Miyazaki. Even many non-anime, non-animation moviegoers know Miyazaki's name thanks to the man having single-handedly directing more "timeless classics" than the entirety of the Disney animation studios. These films include My Neighbor Totoro, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Kiki's Delivery Service, and more recent films like Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and Howl's Moving Castle. Several of his films (most notable Mononoke and Nausicaa) consistently rank among my top films of all time, and I've never let a friend have a little kid without me sending them a copy of My Neighbor Totoro as a gift (usually accompanied by a copy of Godzilla's Revenge, as both should be required viewing for any wide-eyed and adventurous kid who needs to be brought up proper). But before Miyazaki became the greatest animation director of all time and left footprints of glittering gold everywhere he went, before he waved his hand and magically made the streams of Japan run rich with gumdrops and chocolate and all the Kit-Kats that kids taking school entrance exams buy for good luck, Miyazaki was naught but a lowly grunt director for the hugely popular Lupin the 3rd television series during its 1970-1971 run. At this point, I'm going to assume you are already familiar with Lupin III. If not, why not take this as a prime opportunity to familiarize yourself with him and his accomplices via our sort of half-assed history of the character in the previously posted review of Lupin the 3rd: The Mystery of Mamo? Miyazaki was one of several directors who worked on the series, alongside Yasuo Otsuka, who was to be the animation director for this movie. Otsuka had a long career in animation, stretching back into the 1950s and including work as an animator on 1960's animated Monkey king adventure Saiyuki -- released in the United States as Alakazam the Great -- and Puss in Boots. In 1971, he became one of the directors for the Lupin television series, then went on to work on Panda! Go Panda and Future Boy Conan.
The script was written by none other than Japanese cinema maverick Seijun Suzuki. There are quite a few anime fans whoa re unfamiliar with live action Japanese cinema, and thus aren't familiar with Suzuki's reputation or his groundbreaking and delirious films. Similarly, quite a few fans of Suzuki's films don't realize that he dabbled in anime, working with his team to provide scripts for the Lupin television series as well as directing episodes of the 1984 run and the 1985 feature film, Lupin III: Legend of the Gold of Babylon under the pseudonym Kiyoshi Suzuki (unfortunately, one of the Lupin movies that is missing in action on domestic DVD as of this writing). Suzuki's oddball yakuza films like Branded to Kill and Tokyo Drifter are often sited as being inspiration for Lupin creator, Monkey Punch, along with the original French pulp tales of Arsene Lupin, obviously (Lupin III being his great grandson). Unfortunately, Otsuka didn't seem to care for Suzuki's script. He brought in Miyazaki as director for the film, under the condition that Miyazaki provide him with an entirely new plot. I have no idea what Suzuki's script was about, or if portions of it were salvaged for his later Lupin adventure. Even with Miyazaki's new script approved, however, the movie had to be significantly altered during production due to a ridiculously tight shooting schedule that left them only four months to finish the film. According to Miyazaki, the finale was a much grander affair in the script than we got on screen -- which must be something, since the finale is pretty spectacular as is. Still, Miyazaki has frequently expressed disappointment that an overly demanding timetable forced him to go with what he saw as a substandard sequence. As for what he originally had in mind, I can't say, because I don't think Miyazaki himself has ever said. In one of those twists of fate, the third Lupin film was originally slated to be directed by Mamoru Oshii (who would go on to greater fame with Patlabor and Ghost in the Shell, among others), unitl Oshii's treatment was judged too weird, causing producers to give the job to Seijun Suzuki. Who would have every thought that Suzuki, of all people, would ever be brought into a project to replace someone who was deemed too freaky?
Shooting schedule aside, the film Miyazaki eventually made is Castle of Cagliostro, and it is consistently hailed as one of the hallmarks of anime and animation in general, which is an honor that would soon become synonymous with the work of Hayao Miyazaki. In Castle, one can already see the soon-to-be familiar Miyazaki style emerging in both the character design and the story. After the lusty, bawdy Mystery of Mamo, Castle of Cagliostro is a decidedly more innocent take on the film, and just as fans who know Lupin exclusively through Cagliostro must have been shocked the first time they sat down and watched Mystery of Mamo, likewise fans of the television series and first film must have found Miyazaki's big-screen interpretation of the anti-hero thief a bit of a shift in gears. However, Miyazaki remains true to the spirit of the character and his cohorts (though we've rarely seen and would rarely see again Fujiko wearing such modest outfits) and plants them in the midst of what is undoubtedly one of the finest action-adventure yarns ever spun for the cinema. We pick up, as is often the case, with cat burglar Lupin (Yasuo Yamada) and former yakuza hitman gone freelance Jigen (Kiyoshi Kobayashi) having just pulled off a heist that results in their tiny European style car being filled to bursting with stolen cash. The instant you see Jigen and Lupin in one of those little European cars, you know you're about to get a chase scene. The little European car chase scene is a staple of the Lupin series, and every bit as integral to the formula as the ski chase is to Bond movies. For the record, Lupin favors the 1969 Fiat 500 from Italy. Lupin and Jigen soon discover that the loot they've just stolen is all counterfeit, but this seeming setback puts them hot on the trail of a set of legendary counterfeiting plates that are so perfect that there's practically no way to tell real money from counterfeits made with these plates. The trail soon leads them into contact with an innocent young woman, her boorish snob of a guardian, and a conspiracy that has affected the world's monetary markets for centuries. Needless to say, the adventure will also cause Lupin and Jigen to cross paths once again with brooding samurai Goemon (Makio Inoue) and big-bosomed sometimes-competitor, sometimes-partner thief Fujiko (Eiko Masuyama), who manages to keep her clothes on for the entire film, as opposed to the last movie, where she was constantly falling out of whatever garment she half-heartedly threw on. Despite its status as an animated feature, Cagliostro is still one of the most breathtaking, pleasing, and flat-out fun swashbuckling adventures ever filmed, stuffed to the gills with sword fights, guys scaling castle walls, dungeons full of skeletons, hijinks in a gyrocopter, secret chambers, and other quality adventure staples. The movie is set in magical Miyazaki-Land. Drawing on fairytales and Japanese misconceptions about what it must be like in Europe, the world of Castle of Cagliostro is all twisting medieval roads, rolling green fields, glittering lakes, crumbling ruins, and majestic Bavarian style castles. It's a dreamlike fairytale amalgamation of Europe past, present, and purely imagined, complete with a knight in shining armor (or at least in a garish seafoam green blazer), an usurper to the throne (or the fortune), and a damsel in distress who gets locked away in the tall tower of a castle. Just as Western films tend to present idealized and stylized representations of Asia, here we get a highly stylized hallucination of a Europe that doesn't quite exist but seems imminently believable since so much of the iconography is so familiar (European films themselves would create equally fairytale like representations of their own past in the sword and sandal adventures of the 1960s). Miyazaki spares no artistic expense in bringing his modern fairytale Europe to life. Every hand-drawn frame is stuffed with detail. The characters are constantly in motion (Lupin is, as usual, a flailing bundle of gangly limbs) and backgrounds are lush and colorful. As with all of Miyazaki's work, Castle of Cagliostro is a testament to the potential of classic, hand-drawn, pre-computer assisted cel animation. For my money, only Akira and some of the films from director Rintaro can match Miyazaki for the sheer amount of gorgeous detail they fit into each frame.
Beautiful artwork can only get you so far, however. The rest is up to the characters and the story. The script written by Miyazaki and Tadashi Yamazaki (aka Harauya Yamazaki, who would go on to work on Space Adventure Cobra) is a perfect blend of fairytale romance (in the purest definition of what the word used to mean), comedy, and action setpieces that are highlighted by the aforementioned car chase, a battle with razor-clawed ninjas (or whatever the Frenchy butler equivalent of ninjas would be), and the climactic clock-tower showdown. Miyazaki keeps the film quick-paced without ever glossing over detail or skimping on character development. What I really like about the script here is that it is scaled back. There is always a tendency when a character makes the transition from television (or manga, or American comic books) to movies to make the story in which they find themselves a huge "save the whole world" sort of affair. Mystery of Mamo definitely gave in to that temptation (though it was still an incredibly good movie), and while it's fun to see the character operating on such a grand stage, I appreciate that for the second film, rather than go even bigger and more outrageous, things were reigned in. Cagliostro is a much more intimate film, which allows for greater character development, but at the same time it boasts action scenes that are even better and more thrilling than what was seen in its more sprawling predecessor. Although the implications of the counterfeiting conspiracy could potentially affect the whole world, at its heart, Cagliostro is simply the fairytale story of a hero rescuing a damsel from an evil jackass. Each of the primary characters is easy to like, even when they were at their greediest and most ribald in the previous film, but Cagliostro really excels at making Lupin and his crew into characters about which you care, which makes the story and action much more enthralling. They're helped to no small end by Count Cagliostro himself, who is the picture perfect brutish, rich jerk that fans of Lupin so love seeing their hero take apart. Caught in the middle of it all is poor old Inspector Zenigata (you didn't thin they would leave him out, did you?), voiced as usual by the superb Goro Naya. As would become common in the cinematic adaptations of Lupin, Zenigata starts out the film determined to arrest Lupin at all costs, only to later be forced into an uneasy truce with the thief when he discovers a far greater evil than Lupin's sticky fingers.
Miyazaki's experience with the characters through working on the television show is obvious, as is his desire to do something a little different with them. Cagliostro isn't what you'd call a reimagining of the characters, but it is markedly different without every betraying what draws people to this lovable cast of rascals. Lupin is still a rascal, but his fiery loins are temporarily in check as he throws himself into rescuing Countess Clarisse (Sumi Shimamoto) from her overbearing and abusive guardian, Count Cagliostro (Taro Ishida), who can only maintain his hold on the Cagliostro fortune by dominating young Clarisse. In fact, Lupin seems even more committed to the welfare of this young woman -- completely without sexual advances, for once -- than he is to uncovering the secret of the counterfeiting plates. Although knight errant a departure for Lupin, the story makes the shift in motivation is well explained and completely believable. For once, he truly is a gentleman thief. Even Fujiko also seems less interested in the double-cross. Jigen and Goemon are their usual gruff, lovable selves, but all of the characters seem infused with a more innocent energy than we've seen before. Countess Clarisse (named after the original French pulp novel Lupin's wife) does little more than fulfill the doe-eyed damsel in distress role and foretell Miyazaki's lifelong obsession with young princesses. She looks almost identical to Nausicaa (though most of Miyazaki's young female protagonists look similar), and the design of her character stands out somewhat compared to the design of Lupin, Jigen, and Goemon. Lupin had a long-standing established look, but Miyazaki also possesses a very strong sense of how he wants his material to look. For the most part, he manages to adapt each of the characters to his style, keeping them looking like they should, with just a few tweaks here and there. Clarisse, however, is pure Miyazaki. And even though she's the weakest of the characters, it hardly matters since it's up to Lupin to carry most of the story anyway. And he's written to do so with a refreshing gusto. Even though they are only cartoons, it's easy to forget that and see Lupin as an actor who is absolutely excited about the movie and giving his role every ounce of energy he has. If you have ever doubted the ability of an animated character to really act, then Castle of Cagliostro should banish those thoughts from your mind. It's not just the voice acting, either -- Miyazaki and his staff put tremendous effort into facial expressions and body language. It is far and away the easiest time I've ever had forgetting that what I was seeing was animation. This was the final go-round for Miyazaki in the Lupin universe, save for returning to direct a couple episodes of the 1980 run of the series, under the pseudonym Tereki Tsutomu. He worked a bit more in television during the first half of the 1980s, then in 1984 directed one of my absolute favorite films, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. In 1986 came Laputa, Castle in the Sky, followed in 1988 by My Neighbor Totoro. After that, the sky was the limit, and Miyazaki became one of the biggest -- if not the biggest -- name in Japanese animation in particular and Japanese film in general. During the dark days of the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the Japanese film industry seem to crumble entirely, Miyazaki films were the only domestic productions Japanese moviegoers would bother to go watch in the theaters.
Which is ironic in a way, because Castle of Cagliostro was an infamous flop upon its initial release, panned by filmgoers for being too sweet and childish and not at all what they demanded from the thieving rakehell with whom they'd fallen in love. It was a family-friendly version of Lupin, albeit family friendly in the classical sense of the word, which meant you could still have smoking, shooting, skeletons, and ninjas with razorblade claws. Like the films of Akira Kurosawa, Cagliostro didn't find any success until it sought it overseas. It was the first animated film to ever be screened at Cannes, and Western fans, unfamiliar with the Lupin III character but able to recognize the European backdrop and universal adventure appeal of the movie, championed its cause. Decades later, the initial cold shoulder given the film has been all but forgotten and Castle of Cagliostro has taken its rightful place among the upper echelons of animated classics. Even people who find Lupin irritating can probably rally behind this film. It's packed with everything good adventure filmmaking should have. There are plenty of films in the world that have been tagged with the "one of the greatest films ever made" hype, but Cagliostro is the rare movie that really lives up to the hype. It's not often that you can find a movie that is this energetic and fun. It's hard not to grin like an idiot through the whole thing, because it's such a recklessly enthralling joy ride. Labels: Anime and Animation, Anime: 80s, Director: Hayao Miyazaki, Espionage, Series: Lupin III, Year: 1979 posted by Keith at 4:42 PM | 4 Comments Monday, June 26, 2006Lupin the Third: Mystery of Mamo
1978, Japan. Starring (original Japanese language) Yasuo Yamada, Kiyoshi Kobayashi, Eiko Masuyama, Makio Inoue, Goro Naya; (English dub) Tony Oliver, Richard Epcar, Michelle Ruff, Lex Lang, Jake Martin. Directed by Soji Yoshikawa. Written by Atsushi Yamatoya, Soji Yoshikawa. Buy it now from Amazon.com
 .I had the bright idea of getting a three-part series review done, but it was a hard road to walk, and I was badly in need of some shut-eye after a night that ran on until four in the morning and involved four pints of Newcastle at a local pub washed down by three science fiction cocktails that glowed unnatural colors, bought from a posh bar hidden in a back room of a Japanese udon restaurant. An hour train ride home in a slightly tilting world was followed by some cold water and a viewing of Space Thunder Kids, which did more to screw me up than any amount of drinking could ever accomplish. I finally managed to drift off to sleep at precisely the same moment the alarm went off to wake me up. An hour of the snooze button, a cold shower, and eight ounces of skim milk and whey protein later, and I'm out the door on the way to work, buried in a Kem Nunn book for the duration of the train ride that takes me to a day at the office that passes sluggishly. After work was supposed to be more of the same, and thirty-four is neither too old nor too young but it is the sort of age you hit and realize that you can't keep going like you used to be able to. So I cashed in early and bowed out of a second night of decadence and debauchery and unclad gyrating strangers sitting on my lap while I downed a scotch and watched another twenty dollar bill vanish, and I decided to simply hit the pavement and head for home where the scotch was cheaper and the music was better. But you guys and dolls are our loyal readers, so you know the Teleport City lifestyle. This is how we roll. One night it's all Japanese bartenders in tuxedos and women slinking around poles while I trade wit and whiskey with a dame in a short black dress, and the next day it's off to work then home to watch and review a Lupin the Third movie as I work my way steadily through a bottle of Soca rum and a bag full of limes and split my brain between analyzing an old Japanese cartoon and trying to account for the hours of four and six in the morning, until I remember that I was watching Space Thunder Kids and finishing off a bottle of Orangina while doing my best to figure out what was in the glowing red drink I'd had just a couple hours earlier. It was, to say the very least, a strange way to start an anime review, but this is me we're talking about, and the anime is Lupin the Third, so it all seems fitting somehow. Let this be a lesson to you though. If you live the life the way I encourage you to live the life -- full of fast women, cheap movies, and free-flowing booze -- make sure you space the nights out a little better. Lupin the Third is something we should have talked about a long time ago. If I was ever to put together a list of movies that would serve as examples of how a man should live his life, Lupin the Third would be at the absolute top of the list, right next to the Sean Connery James Bond movies, Danger; Diabolik!, and that scene in The Ambushers where Dean Martin's bed slides forward and dumps him and his hot chick of the week into a bubbly hot tub with a bar that drops down from the ceiling. Anything less is unbecoming of a man.
Created by Japanese artist Monkey Punch (surprisingly, not his real name) in the 1960s, Lupin the Third was a mixture of James Bond, Matt Helm, Cary Grant from To Catch a Thief, and whatever guy you can think of who grabs boobs a lot. Bill Clinton, I guess. Lupin the Third was meant to be the globe-trotting super-thief great grandson of Arsene Lupin, a much beloved French pulp story character who was very much the "gentleman thief." Lupin the Third jettisons the gentleman part most of the time but excels in the thievery department. Quite in contrast to his famous relative, Lupin the Third is a crass, horny, occasionally sleazy, always smart-alec guy with a weakness for beautiful girls. Together with his parters in crime Jigen (a former yakuza hitman and reportedly the greatest crack shot in the world) and Goemon (a guy who identifies a little too heavily with the romantic ideal of the mysterious, wandering samurai), Lupin trots the globe in search of treasure to be found, banks to be robbed, chicks to be nailed, and smug rich guys to be kicked in the jaw. Complicating Lupin's life are two more characters: dogged Interpol inspector Zenigata, whose entire life revolves around finally arresting the wily Lupin; and Fujiko (whose name means "peaks"), a big-breasted flirt who is sometimes Lupin's partner, sometimes his rival, and usually both.
And there you have the simple set-up for one of the longest-lived characters in Japanese pop culture. Lupin the Third dominated manga and television for years before finally making the jump to a feature film, The Mystery of Mamo, in 1978. Castle of Cagliostro followed shortly thereafter, and then much later and after a few other films, another movie called Dead or Alive was released. Since then, a whole slew of Lupin movies have been released, some better than others, all highly enjoyable if you are a fan of the series (some enjoyable even if you aren't). We'll be looking at abovementioned three films because: 1) the first one was the first one; 2) the second one marks the feature film directorial debut of regular Lupin television series director Haiyo Miyazaki, who would go on to create such critically- and fan-acclaimed films as My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, and Fist of the North Star (I could be wrong about that last one, butI'm pretty sure); and 3) Dead or Alive is directed by Lupin creator Monkey Punch. So each one has its own historical significance, as well as being snapshots of how a character can evolve with advances in anime technique and storytelling while also remaining essentially the same, unchanged character that everyone loves. Well, everyone but my friend Lyn, who I thought would be a huge Lupin fan until I brought it up and she flew into a rage and boldly proclaimed that she would rather be forced at knifepoint to watch a One Piece marathon than ever waste another second on seeing anything involving Lupin the Third. Man, just when you think you know someone...
Mystery of Mamo marks the first time Lupin appeared on the big screen (unless you count the live-action film, which I guess counts, so it's the second time, but first in pure animated form), and coming hot on the heels of the revival of the television series in 1977, that meant that the movie was going to basically do everything the series did, only bigger and with more bared tits. Lupin was snottier, the heists were crazier, and Fujiko was nakeder -- what more could anyone ask for? How about knockout action setpieces, great animation, a funny script, and a plot that manages to be completely over-the-top weird yet somehow still manage to work in the world of Lupin, which was always grounded in reality -- or at least the kind of reality that allows you to drive little European cars up the side of mountains or down pyramids. Mamo begins with the death of Lupin the Third, which comes as a major shock to Lupin the Third when he hears about it. This initial puzzler sends Lupin, Goemon, and Jigen on a wild quest that brings them face to face with the United States Navy and a mysterious, reclusive billionaire named Mamo, who happens to look like one of those freaky blue kids from Akira, only with bad "aging record label executive" hair and a lavender leisure suit worn with white platform shoes and a bow tie. One thing the Lupin franchise has always been is a challenging roadmap to high fashion. If you watch this movie then follow the advice doled out by Walt "Clyde" Frazier in Rockin' Steady: A Guide to Basketball and Cool (sample: "I slap cologne all over my body -- lookin' good, smellin' fine"), then you, too, will soon find yourself raiding pyramids and making time with busty cat burglars or suave international men of action. Mamo, it turns out, is up to far more than setting fashion trends, and before the end of things, Lupin and crew will find themselves in a race to save the whole of human race from annihilation.
Secret of Mamo crackles with fun and action. It's every frame is infused with kinetic energy and a lusty gusto that makes the movie a ton of fun from beginning to end. The jokes are good, the action is spectacular, and the characters are expertly written and used. No real surprise there. With Monkey Punch's brilliant original creations to work with, scriptwriters Atsushi Yamamoto and Soji Yoshikawa (also the director) had excellent source material. Yamamoto was already a highly regarded screenwriter, having penned the script for the outrageous, ground-breaking Seijun Suzuki-directed gangster film Branded to Kill in 1967 and the wild girl gang exploitation classic Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter from 1970 and starring exploitation film goddess Meiko Kaji, best known for her role in Lady Snowblood, the live-action films based on the Kazuo Koike manga of the same name, and the Female Convict 701 Scorpion films. He also wrote and directed a 1967 film called Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands, which is something I know nothing about -- and I do sorely regret my ignorance. He was a screenwriter with one foot in the avant garde Japanese new wave and the other in sensational pulp exploitation. Stray Cat Rock was directed by one of our favorites, Yasuharu Hasebe, a protege of Seijun Suzuki and also the director of the trippy go-go spy adventure film Black Tight Killers, as well as the Female Convict films, Bloody Territories, and the old Specterman series that only I seem to love. Obviously, he was a superb candidate for writing a big screen Lupin adventure, even though he'd had no real experience with anime. Despite being a cartoon, Lupin is a perfect fit with Yamamoto's list of credits. It allows him to blend outrageous action, psychedelic art design, saucy sexploitation, and cutting-edge wit to a world brimming over with cool hitmen, boob-grabbing super-thieves, and insane Interpol agents, as well as a weird blue guy with Edgar Winter hair and white loafers.
Equally inexperienced with anime -- and inexperienced with just about all aspects of filmmaking -- was director and co-writer Soji Yoshikawa. Mamo was his first -- and apparently only -- credit as a director, though he did go on to write scripts for Lensman and Armored Trooper Votoms during the eighties. His inexperience doesn't show, though, as Mystery of Mamo is crisply directed and magnificently paced, taking full advantage of the inherent chances for action, tension, and comedy in every scenario. The world of Lupin is larger than life, and the team of Yamamoto and Yoshikawa work in perfect harmony with character designer Yuzo Aoki (a veteran of the Lupin television series) to breathe life into the brightly-colored world of ridiculously curvaceous dames and amusingly-contorted men. Lupin is all flailing limbs and flapping blazers, just as likely to run away screaming from a situation as he is to stand his ground and deliver a knock-out punch to some chump's jaw. And Fujiko -- frequently unclothed during the film -- seems like an obvious influence on other "hot thief with a heart of gold" characters -- namely Cowboy Bebop's Faye -- and Lupin bears more than a few similarities with that same show's Spike Speigal (they even have similar dress sense and footwear). Ditto Jigen and Jet, who sport similar bizarre facial hair and gruff attitudes. However, I don't know that you'd really say stoic samurai throwback Goemon is especially similar to Ed. The acting is uniformly top notch. They just hired all the same people who worked on the series, including Yasuo Yamada (Lupin), Kiyoshi Kobayashi (Jigen), Makio Inoue (who joined the Lupin series in 1977 as the voice of Goemon, replacing Chikao Otsuka), Eiko Masuyama (as Fujiko, also from the 1977 series, replacing Yukiko Nikaido -- although it was Eiko who voiced Fujiko in the original promotional clip that was used to sell the series in 1971), and the venerable Goro Nayo as Inspector Zenigata (Nayo was last seen around these parts in our review of Crusher Joe). Obviously, each of these people is intimately acquainted with the character they inhabit, and the transition from television to the big screen is smooth and seamless.
The English-language dub is also quite good. The voice actors for the Lupin series are, by this point, almost as familiar with the characters as the original Japanese cast. The English language cast includes Tony Oliver (who always does a superb job as Lupin and was last heard here when we mentioned the English dub on Golgo 13: The Professional), Richard Epcar as Jigen (now doing the English dub voice of Bato in Ghost in the Shell and also credited as directing the English-language version of Mamo), Michelle Ruff as Fujiko, Lex Lang as Goemon, and the hilarious James Martin as Zenigata (gotta admit I actually like his voicing of Zenigata more than the original Japanese). All of these people had experience dubbing the 1977 Lupin series, and although Mamo and Lupin came very in the careers of each performer, they're all exceptional at their job (which is why they're all still doing it). I generally prefer the original language, but truth be told, I have absolutely no problem listening to any of the above English language actors. They do a top notch job and have, in many was, become every bit as definitive a chorus of voices as the original actors. Some parts of the movie seem to have been redubbed for the recent DVD release. An American representative sounds (and looks vaguely) like Henry Kissenger, which given the character design, I assume was part of the original plan. But the voice of the President of the United States is decidedly George W. Bush-ian, and I have a pretty rock solid belief that that's not how it was originally. If it was, then that's just amazing! Still, given the quality of dubbing from the main players, it's a minor gripe (and I rarely consider leaving the original language off a disc to be minor), and you will quickly forget as soon as you get caught up in just how much fun Mystery of Mamo is. Without a doubt, one of my favorite anime movies, and one of the high water marks for anime. It's got action, jokes, insane escapes, plot twists galore, lots of boobs, and a brash, snotty aesthetic that seems straight out of punk rock. Amazingly, things would get even better, although markedly different, just one year later when the second big screen Lupin adventure was brought to life. Labels: Anime and Animation, Anime: 80s, Espionage, Series: Lupin III, Year: 1978 posted by Keith at 1:02 AM | 0 Comments Friday, June 02, 2006They Were 11
1986, Japan. Starring Akira Kamiya, Michiko Kawai, Hideyuki Tanaka, Toshio Furukawa, Tessho Genda, Hirotaka Suzuoki, Norio Wakamoto, Michihiro Ikemizu, Kozo Shioya, Tarako, Tsutomu Kashiwakura. Directed by Satoshi Dezaki and Tsuneo Tominaga. Written by Moto Hagio, Toshiaki Imaizumi, Katsumi Koide. Purchase from Amazon.com.
They Were 11 continues a recent trend for me, which is visiting old anime titles that, for one weird reason or another, I never actually got around to watching back in the day. In the case of Crusher Joe, it was because I didn't think the title sounded interesting. Realizing how wrong I'd been about that movie after finally watching recently, I decided to investigate another title I'd skipped over for an even more bizarre and nonsensical reason. I have no idea why I thought this, but for years I labored under the false impression that They Were 11 was another "team of spunky girls save the galaxy" type OVAs in the spirit of Gall Force or Dangaioh. I have absolutely no idea why I ever got this notion stuck in my head. It's made all the sweeter by the fact that not only is They Were 11 not a "spunky girls saves the galaxy" movie, but there aren't even any girls in it period. Well, not really. I'll get to that. I'm trying to remember why I ever though it was another Gall Force sort of thing, but about the best I can come up with is that I should chalk it up to seeing the old VHS box art from a distance on a day when I wasn't wearing my glasses. And it was hot. And maybe I was drunk, even though it would have come at a time when I was going through my straight edge phase. So I was blind, uninformed, and drunk on sobriety when I spied the box from across a parking lot and thought to myself, "Hmm, that looks like it'd be sort of like Dangaioh. I didn't really find Dangaioh all that interesting. I think I'll watch Crystal Triangle instead."
Once again, however, the polite suggestion of friends and the good graces of the DVD industry have conspired to convince me that I really should have seen this movie a long time ago, back when I was wasting my time by doing things like watching stupid Guyver OVAs instead of watching Crusher Joe and They Were 11. Not that I condemn people who liked The Guyver. I know there were a lot of fans of the show back in the day, but it never really did anything for me. Of course, I could just be suffering a case of sour grapes, as I still harbor a grudge over the fact that no television network was interested in my idea for the McGuyver television series, in which a high school science teacher finds the Guyver bio-suit and proceeds to don it while using the practical application of Mr. Wizard-style science to solve a variety of crimes and cases of espionage, or in the instances when scientific ingenuity can't provide a solution to the week's predicament, he shoots a bony spike out of his elbow and through some guy's skull. They Were 11 is an interesting take on sci-fi anime from the eighties, and definitely a marked departure from the vestigial space operas overflowing from the previous decades and the wham-bam sci-fi actioners that defined the eighties. There is really only one action scene in the entire movie, and that's a pie fight. Yet despite the dearth of robots on roller skates shooting cannons at each other, They Were 11 is an engaging, tense, and engrossing piece of science fiction that makes you feel like it's action-packed even though it isn't. The basic premise was derived from an old Japanese short story (I believe) about a group of children at a playground who suddenly realize that there is one more child there than there should be. There's a good chance the extra kid, whichever one he may be, is some sort of monster. In They Were 11, we have a group of potential space cadets vying for coveted spots in the galaxy's premiere space flight school. After passing a variety of tests, the cadets receive their final assignment: a group of ten are to board a derelict space craft, get it semi-operational again, and successfully staff and maintain it for a certain length of time. The only contact they will have with the outside world is via a panic button which, if pushed, will call in a rescue squad but also automatically fail everyone on board and disqualify them from obtaining entry to the academy. Upon arriving at the ship, the cadets -- who have never met one another -- realize there are eleven people on board. The first assumption is that a simple administrative mistake has been made. Then it's posited that this mysterious extra person is part of the test. But when the cadets discover bombs strewn about the old ship and begin to uncover its doomed past, a third possibility emerges: that the eleventh member of the team is a terrorist. Unwilling to forfeit their chances at passing the test by pressing the panic button, the eleven cadets split their time between trying to solve the mystery of what happened to the ship with trying to solve the mystery of who is the false member of the team. Although They Were 11 falls pretty frequently into the classification of space opera, it's really less of an opera and more of a space parlor mystery, the sort of thing you'd find on a British stage or an Agatha Christie book. It's a potboiler. There's plenty of the typically cool future tech we expect from eighties' anime movies -- lots of cool spaceships, laser guns, weird spores, and so forth, but the concentration is really on the characters. We're told in the prologue of the film that rapid expansion throughout the galaxy has resulted in centuries of war between various planets and factions, and that the violence is only just now beginning to simmer down. So tensions are still strained between various races already. The fact that one of the cadets is potentially a saboteur only makes matters edgier. The story's protagonist is the young Tada (Akira Kamiya, who did voice work on the Yamato series, a bunch of those Go Nagai giant robot shows, Macross, Urusei Yatsura, and Record of Lodoss War, though he's probably most beloved as the voice of Ryu Saeba in City Hunter and Kenshiro in the heartwarming animated children's film Fist of the North Star), an ace cadet with emerging telepathic powers that enable him to detect whether or not a person is lying. He runs this test on the rest of the cadets, but two problems immediately emerge. One, no one is lying when they say they aren't the false member of the team; and two, since everyone but Tada (who can't test himself) has been proven innocent, suspicion inevitably falls upon the young telepath. That he seems to have an intimate knowledge of various aspects of the derelict ship only deepens the suspicion of the others. And then an explosion knocks the ship into a decaying orbit that causes the temperature to rise, which causes spores growing all over the ship to germinate and produce a deadly virus. And you thought your American history final was hard. The other two strong personalities amongst the crew include the arrogant but not unlikable King Maya (Hideyuki Tanaka, another North Star alumnus), the lavender-haired ruler of a planet who has submitted himself to the academy entrance exam in order to prove his worth as a leader, and Frol (Michiko Kawai), a hermaphrodite who hails from a planet where your sex isn't decided until later in your life. Men get all the glory, and women get to stay home and have babies. Frol is assigned to be a woman but isn't looking forward to a life of meek servitude. Passing the entrance exam means she will get to reverse the decision of her planet elders and become a man. King leads the pack in being suspicious of Tada, while Frol emerges as the young man's ally and potential crush, though the dual-gendered nature of Frol leads to some mental confusion for Tada. Although there is very little action, there is plenty of tension in the story, and the movie is well-paced and smartly plotted. The whodunit nature of the story is subverted somewhat by the fact that everyone can prove their innocence and no one is even sure if anything has been done to get all whodunit about. The interaction and behavior of the characters is engrossing and believable. This is one of the rare instances when characters in a movie act and react and think in a way that actual people in a similar situation might act and react. And best of all, the plot keeps you guessing and serves up twists that you can't really see coming but also make perfect sense when they happen. I really hate plot twists that make no sense at all and were thrown in simply because they would "catch you off guard." For some reason, certain writers liken "you didn't see that coming" to an idea actually being good when, in fact, it's more akin to being sucker punched in the back of the head by a complete stranger while walking down the street. Just because you didn't see it coming doesn't mean it was good. They Were 11, however, manages to be unpredictable and puzzling without ever relying on utter incoherence or out-of-the-blue nonsense. It's a very different sort of sci-fi anime movie, but one that is enjoyable despite the lack of shoot-em-up action.
They Were 11 was directed by Satoshi Dezaki, listed sometimes as the brother of famed animation director Osamu Dezaki (last seen around these parts during our review of the touching romantic comedy Golgo 13 -- and by "touching romantic comedy," I mean it pulls your trigger, lovingly and softly). Other times, Satoshi is listed as a pseudonym for Osamu. I honestly have no idea which is correct. If Satoshi is a brother rather than a pseudonym, the influence of the elder Dezaki can be seen in the animation style. Although the cast is entirely male with the pseudo-exception of Frol, there's a definite feminine quality to many of the characters, chief among them the King Maya, who looks sort of like Edgar Winter. Osamu Dezaki sort of pioneered the "girly boy" frilly style of character design in his film Rose of Versailles, which is a direct influence on the modern yaoi (rhymes with zowie) trend in manga and anime that boasts high stylized and very feminine male character designs with flowing hair and long eyelashes and watery doe-eyes like in those old seventies paintings of waifs. They Were 11 absolutely does not fall into the realm of yaoi, even if the potential romance between Frol and Tada blurs the gender lines, but it would be remiss not to mention that there is a seed of that sort of character design that no doubt came from Osamu and infected Satoshi like one of those puffing spores in this movie. And if I've gotten some facts wrong about yaoi, you can write to correct me if you really want, but I won't care. Yaoi just ain't my bag, baby. To be honest, as much as I love this movie -- and I thought it was spectacular -- I didn't really care for the character design. The animation and backgrounds are gorgeous, as you would expect from an eighties feature film, but something about many of the character designs just didn't click for me. Tada looks OK -- a pretty standard seventies style design with a dash of Osamu Tezuka in it, but some of the other characters (like Red Nose ) are kind of unappealing to me. They're still well-written, just not well-drawn. This is, however, just an opinion, and the character design is certainly not so bad that it in any way ruins the overall effectiveness of such a wonderful film. The script was based on a comic by a woman named Moto Hagio, and the fact that she's not a writer I'd ever heard of doesn't mean much since I only know a few manga writers. A little research (we do it from time to time) turns up that, while I can't claim any sort of familiarity with her work, she is considered by some to be the mother of shojo (girlie) manga, but once again while They Were 11 does have an obviously more "feminine" touch in some ways, it's hardly shojo. It's feminine in the same way that Chu Yuan kungfu films (such as Clans of Intrigue, Legend of the Bat, and Magic Blade) are feminine. They're still full of bad-ass fights and cool characters. It's just that from time to time, a swordsman in a white robe will drift across a misty river in a swan boat and give another swordsman a flower. You're not going to argue with the swordsmen, because it's Ti Lung and Yuen Hwa and they can fly and split people in half from fifty yards away, but there's a certain delicacy and grace beneath the action. To continue to wander through the kungfu film analogy, because I do love wandering through kungfu, They Were 11 is to the bulk of otherwise macho, action-packed and violent sci-fi anime (even the ones where spunky chicks save the galaxy) what Chu Yuan films are to the more macho, gorier films of Chang Cheh. They Were 11 doesn't really have the weepy melodrama of shojo or even space opera, but it does have a realism in its emotion that sets it apart and makes it a more intimate and believable sort of film than, say, Fist of the North Star, though I'd like to market Fist of the North Star as "the bittersweet exploration of one man's lonely search...for love...for acceptance...for a punch that will turn your bones into jelly." This is not the only time Moto Haigo played with gender in one of her works (just to belabor the point further, Chu Yuan also loved playing with gender roles and homoeroticism in his films), though my unfamiliarity with her comic X+Y means I can't really compare this to that in any greater detail. Frol's predicament is handled in an interesting fashion. Either she become s a woman and acquiesces to a life of housewife servitude, or she becomes a man and lives a rollicking life of sweeping space battles and Buffalo wings. In this is one of the key issues in analyzing the role of women in anime and action films. Anime, and in the nineties, action films, like to pat themselves on the back for providing audiences with a host of "strong" female characters who were more than capable of kicking ass. However, in an effort to move away from the "damsel in distress" stereotype, most of these movies just turned the women in men with boobs. There was nothing about them that was identifiably female. Rather than being strong women, they were characters who simply made gender interchangeable. And in the end, they were still fetishized -- who doesn't love a gal with nice gams, a white tank top, and a big gun? You can read that whole thing as a subtle wink at the oft-inherent homoeroticism in many action films, but that's a philosophical debate I'm not prepared to dig into right now, fun though it might be. What Chu Yuan did, and what Moto Haigo does with They Were 11 is eschew the testosterone-packed "action chick" fetish in vaor of portraying women who are more identifiably female -- which is ironic since Frol really isn't a woman. They are different from men, react to things differently, and this is seen as a difference rather than a weakness. If action chicks are often little more than men with boobs, then Frol is literally a man with boobs. And she thinks that to lead any sort of an exciting life, she must, again quite literally, become a man. However, Haigo explores the unspoken third option for the character than no one ever thinks of: that she could lead an exciting life as a woman, and that she could oppose the submissive role of women in hr society. If you don't see reflections of contemporary (for the time the story was written, though it's plenty relevant today as well) Japanese (in particular, though it's certainly not relegated to Japan) society and gender roles, then you aren't watching very closely. Haigo's story is an affirmation of the fact that you shouldn't have to be a man to have fun, that women should have the same rights and access to adventure and beer as their male counterparts. I don't have the inclination in a review of an anime movie to delve too deeply into gender and society in Japan except to mention it and perhaps say that it's fitting, in a way, that so many Japanese women have taken to traveling the world and befriending foreigners while the men continue to chain themselves to their desks and define "adventure" as having a few too many Heinekens at the office karaoke party (and yes, this is a gross over generalization, but I'm trying half-heartedly to make a positive point, so forgive my lack of coherence). These women aren't butch pseudo-men. They're women. Like Frol, they've realized that they shouldn't be forced into deciding between "being a woman" and staying at home to mother a lame salaryman husband or "becoming a man" and eschewing everything feminine in favor of becoming "the office butch." They can, instead, live a woman's life of fun and action.
I don't know if a male writer would have come up with the same solution, or even posed the problem in the same way, but it's quite a complex issue that is tacked well by They Were 11 without ever becoming ham-fisted or stealing the focus away from the central mystery of who is the fake crew member and how do we prevent ourselves from all dying horrible deaths at the hands of fever-inducing space spores as our derelict spaceship plunges toward the atmosphere. The script for the movie was written by Toshiaki Imaizumi and Katsumi Koide. Neither had any real experience at the time of this production, and neither had much of a career after this movie (though they did collaborate again on Urusei Yatsura: Inaba the Dreammaker, the only other high profile credit for either screenwriter). They handle Moto Haigo's source material perfectly though, and they should be commended for managing to take so many stylistic elements (space opera, mystery, action, shojo romance, a dash of yaoi) and strike the perfect balance between them. This is by and large a sci-fi mystery film, but the shojo tendencies of the original author are allowed to underpin the action and give it an emotional depth absent from many other sci-fi films. At the same time, those tendencies toward romance and melodrama are kept securely in check and doled out only in tiny increments at just the right moment, allowing them to augment the central sci-fi style without overwhelming it. Their script is also expertly paced. It never hits a slow spot, but neither does it rush through details haphazardly. They know they have a delicious set-up, and they relish exploiting it without ever sinking to "monster lurking in the shadows" silliness or lapsing into drawn-out tedium. Everything is infused with a sense of unease and tension that propels the story along at exactly the right pace. To redeem myself somewhat, the art director for They Were 11 is a guy named Junichi Azuma, who went on in the same year to work as art director on Gall Force. Yeah -- now that must be where my initial mistaken impression came from. Certainly. Can you prove otherwise? They Were 11 is a surprisingly tight science fiction thriller that can be enjoyed without problem on a purely superficial level. If you are looking to dig deeper, then the movie gives you plenty to think about, including the aforementioned gender issues as well as the topics of xenophobia and international (or interplanetary, as the case may be) cooperation. Though it stops short of being profound, They Were 11 is a complex and thoughtful story wrapped up inside a smashing good sci-fi yarn. My only disappointment was that I thought it was "like Gall Force" for all those years and rented The Guyver instead. But then, as I said in my review of Crusher Joe, at least that afforded me the recent delight of discovering this oft-ignored and nigh forgotten anime gem. Labels: Anime and Animation, Anime: 80s, Science Fiction, Year: 1986 posted by Keith at 4:10 PM | 0 Comments Monday, May 01, 2006Crusher Joe
1983, Japan. Starring Hiraku Takemura, Run Sasaki, Noriko Ohara, Kiyoshi Kobayashi, Issei Futamata, Goro Naya, Osamu Kobayashi, Akira Kume, Reiko Muto, Kazuyuki Sogabe, Takeshi Watabe, Daisuke Gori, Kazuko Yanaga, Nobuo Tanaka, Hidekatsu Shibata. Directed by Yoshikazu Yasuhiko. Written by Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, Haruka Takachiho. Purchase from Amazon.com.
A thrilling part of Animeighties Month! Here's a good example of why you need to take care in how you make snap judgments about things (as in, judgments made quickly and potentially without all the facts, not judgments where it's judged to be appropriate to wag your head and yell, "Oh snap"). Before sitting down to watch it for this review, I'd never seen Crusher Joe. Not only had I never seen it, it never even occured to me that I might want to see it. I'd heard of it, seen it around, but I never bothered with it. And I handled it in this matter for one reason and one reason only: the title sounded kind of lame. I mean, Crusher Joe? Wasn't he in Mike Tyson's Punch Out? Wasn't he one of the ham 'n' eggers the old WWF would trot out for their Saturday Night Main Event when they wanted someone for a superstar to beat? I think Crusher Joe used to tag team with Leapin' Lanny Poffo. It just wasn't a title that caught my attention, and so I just let it fall through the cracks without so much as a look. Looking back, I can either lament that I possessed such a cavalier and uninformed attitude and thus missed Crusher Joe for so many years, or I can celebrate the fact that though I may have missed it back in the day, all that really means is I get to experience the thrill of discovery now. And it is a thrilling discovery, because despite the name deemed by me to be lackluster, if you want sprawling space action in the classic sci-fi anime mode and you're not willing to happily subject yourself to Odin, Crusher Joe is probably what you are looking for, mainly because it is really goddamn good. What's emerged as sort of the over-arching theme of this whole Animeighties month seems to be the relationship between anime in the 1980s (and thus the manga which often served as the original source material) and the pulp and potboiler fiction of the United States. Odin reflects the ponderous and often nonsensical sci-fi pulp of A.E. van Vogt. Golgo 13 traces its roots to the post-Fleming, post-Bond deluge of espionage fiction that came out during the 60s and 70s. Wicked City grows like a slimy, toothy tentacle from the horror pulp of H.P. Lovecraft. So to stick with the theme, where does Crusher Joe fall into the grand scheme of things? Maybe it's somewhere along the lines of Edgar Rice Burroughs science fiction pulp stories, in which a strapping earthman would find himself on Mars, cold-cocking a lot of uppity Martian warlords and romancing sexy Martian princesses (man, have I been there a time or two). More obviously, though, Crusher Joe is the sort of sprawling space epic that would be right at home in the early days of the comics. There's a gung-ho, anything goes bravado like you'd find in early Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers. Stripped of heavy speculation and halfwit philosophizing, Crusher Joe is science fiction that simply wants to be a rollicking good time, full of thrills and dazzle and wit. Luckily for us, it succeeds on all accounts.
Coming out in 1983, it is similar to Golgo 13 in that it exists with one foot in the style of the 70s and the other firmly planted in the glamour of the 80s. And like most features from the 80s, I find the artwork and animation absolutely beautiful. One frequently reads comments to the effect of, "Since it's older, the artwork hasn't held up well," and I've never understood or agreed with that assessment. Yes, it lacks the exactness of modern animation, but it also lacks the sterility. You can actually see the artists at work, sense their presence in the rougher lines and shading, as opposed to the more polished but less affectionate artwork that comes with computer assistance. Maybe that's just nostalgia talking, and I certainly don't mean to disparage modern artists and animators, who still do a bang-up job. I just really like the look of old, hand-drawn cel animation, and I don't get why people see its appearance as a short-coming rather than an asset. I'm also constantly impressed by the sheer amount of action that gets drawn. Modern anime may have more expert, thinner lines and coloring, but it's often complex art shot static and without motion. Crusher Joe, like most anime features from the era, positively bursts with action. There is always something moving, something going on. The static frames are few and far between, and that makes the fat that everything was accomplished without the aid of computers even more impressive. To be fair, of course, this is a feature film, not an OVA or TV series, so there was more money and presumably more time to devote to making the animation both fluid and complex. Still, feature film or whatever, it's always fun to watch art that has this much happening in each scene. The plot of Crusher Joe revolves around a team of Crushers led by a guy named Joe (Hiraku Takemura, who has this as his only listed credit despite being quite good). This may go some distance in explaining the title. The Crushers of this future (one in which, obviously, mankind has colonized distant planets and taken to spacefarin') are jack-of-all-trade types, specializing in hauling cargo. Anyone who watched Firefly should recognize a little Crusher Joe in the show, though I've always thought of Firefly as being more inspired by Cowboy Bebop -- though I'd also have to guess that Cowboy Bebop must draw at least some inspiration from Crusher Joe. Joe's crew consists of the beautiful princess Alfin (Run Sasaki, who worked on Super Dimension Fortress Macross aka Robotech before and after this, as well as Violence Jack and City Hunter), the beefy cyborg Talos (Kiyoshi Kobayashi, easily the most experienced of the main cast, with credits including Lupin III, Science Ninja Team Gatchaman aka Battle of the Planets or G-Force, a bunch of Mazinger stuff, Space Adventure Cobra, Golgo 13, Violence Jack, Gundam, and plenty more -- including some work on the live-action shows Zone Fighter and Spectreman, which happen to be two of my favorites), and weird kid Ricky (Noriko Ohara, who acted in Captain Harlock, Galaxy Express 999, Yamato, Macross, Urusei Yatsura, and some Doraemon stuff). It's fitting that Kiyoshi Kobayashi acted in Gatchaman, since the crew of that show sounds similar to the crew of Crusher Joe. The big difference is that the Crushers are a lot less serious and not really prone to lengthy bouts of melancholy introspection while staring at their hands. Plus, the Crusher's princess is more likely to get drunk and take her clothes off. It was the decadent eighties, after all.
Joe's crew is employed to haul a young woman in suspended animation to a planet where doctors can bring her out of her coma and fix what ails her. Complicating the matter -- for what would such matters be without complications -- is the fact that she is the heiress of one of the most powerful interstellar industrialist families. They don't want news of her illness leaked to the public, and their opponents would be keen on getting their hands on her, by any means necessary. Things immediately go to hell when their ship runs into a warp anomaly that facilitates someone stealing the cargo, as well as the corporate stooges who were guarding it. What's more, after showing up way off course with no cargo to speak of and no record of the job, the Crushers are apprehended by an overzealous naval captain convinced they are pirates. The charges are eventually dropped thanks to the intervention of a member of military intelligence, but not before the head of the Crushers Union -- who also happens to be Joe's father -- suspends their license to operate. This culminates in Joe and Alfin getting drunk and horny, then drunk and violent at a local disco, eventually literally bringing the whole place down. The agent from military intelligence seems to have his own nefarious schemes for which he wants to employ Joe and the crew, despite the fact that they're suspended. The mission will not only help them clear their names and recover the missing girl; it will also involve them directly in combating an out-of-control den of pirates that have taken refuge on a newly terraformed and still unstable planet. Even with this plot revealed, the true nature of what the Crushers are up against isn't revealed until the final third of the film. Crusher Joe is packed with great action and snappy writing. Not quite Lupin witty, but close. There are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments sprinkled throughout the fist fights and laser battles, creating an atmosphere not unlike some of the sillier episodes of Cowboy Bebop or Patlabor. Everything is simply nothing more or less than a two-fisted good time. Joe is dashing and tough. His crew is loyal. They tackle one dangerous situation after another. Like most pulp -- in this case, sci-fi comic books -- Crusher Joe relies on stock character types that viewers will immediately understand without much back story or development. Once again, the movie is based on previously existing material, but if like me you've never read a single word of the Crusher Joe novels, you'll still be able to understand everything about the characters, because they are the stock players in any good science fiction story. But you still get emotionally engaged by them, because what the movie does with stock characters and recognizable situations is excellent. There are no new stories, after all. The trick is in the execution, and Crusher Joe is razor-sharp and well-honed in it's handing of sci-fi pulp chestnuts. And speaking of stories -- it's worth mentioning that Crusher Joe has one of the most comprehensible, straight-forward, and non-convoluted plots I've seen from any anime feature. There are twists and turns indeed, and the writing is never dumb, but it is easy to follow and crisply paced. It strikes a perfect balance between action and comedy, with a tiny dose of pathos thrown in here and there to give the film added depth. Crusher Joe has been lumped into the "space opera" subgenre, a categorization I don't particularly agree with, mainly because to me, space opera has to deal pretty heavy-handedly with melodrama. There's lots of haunted pasts and soul searching and tragedy. Yamato or Harlock, or Gundam -- now those are space operas; romances played out across a sweeping epic spacescape. Well, Harlock and Yamato have haunting tragedy and soul searching. Gundam seems to be less soul searching, more whining from the characters. Crusher Joe is less operatic and more Saturday matinee serial. It figures, why stare at your hand and read poetry to the cosmos when you get drunk and punch someone in the face? I have great affection for both types of storytelling, and just because a movie doesn't indulge in half-baked soul searching and waxing of poetics doesn't mean it's shallow or ill-conceived. Crusher Joe manages to pull off the stunt of being complex rather than convoluted. It's a different type of film from more morose and gloomy space opera, albeit one that is played out against a similarly epic background. The script for the movie was written by director Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, but he was working from original source material by Haruka Takachiho, most famous for creating the original Dirty Pair (Kei and Yuri -- who also make a cameo appearance in Crusher Joe when Joe goes to meet the president of a planet at a drive-in movie theater that happens to be showing a movie starring characters who look remarkably similar to the Dirty Pair). He would later go on to found Studio Nue, the creators of the long-running Macross series.
I've said that Crusher Joe feels like an old 1940s sci-fi comic book, or maybe a Flash Gordon serial, and that's true, but if you really want to peg down the likeliest source of influence, you need look no further than the publication date of Yoshikazu's first Crusher Joe novel, Crisis on the Planet Pizan. It came out in 1977, hot on the heels of a movie that defined "space opera" for a generation or two -- Star Wars. I'm loathe to say anything was inspired by Star Wars, not so much because I hate Star Wars (I quite like the first two movies, and by first two, I mean the actual first two, not the ones George Lucas made a couple years ago then called the first ones) as because that makes people instantly assume that it's just like Star Wars, or that Star Wars itself wasn't anything but a solid example of classic pulp sci-fi storytelling. Obviously, the dates mean that Star Wars was an influence on Crusher Joe, but equally obvious should be the fact that Star Wars wasn't so much an original work as it was a reminder of past pulp glories. Director Yoshikazu Yasuhiko worked as a director on Gundam before Crusher Joe, and did storyboards for shows like Yamato and Raideen ("Fade in!"). You can see a dash of Go Nagai's influence in some of the character designs Yoshikazu did for Crusher Joe. In 1989, he wrote and directed Venus Wars, another solid sci-fi action-adventure (though not nearly as good as Crusher Joe) that I'd hope to get to for Animeighties month. Oh well, next time. So yeah, shame on me for skipping Crusher Joe for all those years simply because I thought the title sounded lame. Well, I'm here now to sing its glorious up unto the angels in heaven. The current boom in anime popularity -- this being the boom that has really pushed it from the ranks of a small, dedicated fandom and into the mainstream of American culture like never before -- has concentrated heavily on new material. It's not surprising, since we've already covered the average anime fan's disdain for anything more than a few years old, though it also has something to do with the fact that, although there are plenty of bad, popular anime titles, there are also a ton of really good shows and feature films coming out. However, some companies are starting to balance the cost of licensing new anime with the benefits of dumping their back catalog of properties onto DVD. Thus, Animeigo gives us Crusher Joe, a film (there are also two OVAs, also included on the two-disc DVD) that has largely fallen through the cracks or got missed entirely as it flew into the States pretty much under the radar of most people. Now is the perfect time to acquaint yourself with this forgotten gem. Crusher Joe is absolutely top-notch action-adventure storytelling, boasting smart writing, great artwork, a tiny dash of gratuitous nudity, lots of space battles, jungle battles, and a pirate named Big Murphy. When held up against the more ambitious efforts of the decade (i.e., Akira), it's obvious that the scope of its intentions is far more modest, but that doesn't translate into it being any less impressive. Crusher Joe sets out to be an action-packed piece of vintage comic book action, full of bold colors and swaggering adventure, and in that sense, it is a completely enjoyable and thoroughly resounding success. Labels: Anime and Animation, Anime: 80s, Science Fiction, Year: 1983 posted by Keith at 4:52 PM | 1 Comments Saturday, April 22, 2006Wicked City
1987, Japan. Drected by Yoshiaki Kawajiri. Written by Kisei Choo, Hideyuki Kikuchi. Purchase from Amazon.com.
A thrilling part of Animeighties Month! I keep sitting down to write my review of Wicked City, and I keep petering out after a page of rambling incoherence, as opposed to what I normally do, which is peter out after about six pages of random incoherence then post it and call it an update. I don't know why I'm so stymied on this review. Perhaps I've just not been in the proper mindset for writing a review of anything (my book reviews of The Intelligencer, Count Zero, and Doctor No are similarly derailed), what with the sun being out, an adventure trip to Dominica booked, and my kayaking hand itching to get a start on developing the season's calluses. My thoughts are definitely going north and south, which is why I couldn't cut the bottle in half. Although that last oblique reference has given me an idea for a new movie: Jack Knifed: The Adventures of Jack Bauer and Jack Burton. Well, I think I've managed to marshal my thoughts into a loose confederation of like-minded individuals assembled in a disjointed but somewhat recognizable formation, so I thought I'd give it another go, especially since April is winding down and I've only posted two reviews for Animeighties Month -- you should have seen the overly ambitious list I originally made. But let me offer a word of warning as relates to the coming review, as a courtesy to the number of new readers who have been ensnared by Teleport city's jungle booby trap of placing some old anime titles in the usual fray. For the past several months, the reviews here have been relatively focused -- and I say relative in terms of how they relate to some of our previous reviews. You may think to yourself, "You call that Golgo 13 review focused?" And my reply would be, first, "I know what you are thinking, for I have the power to peer into the minds of men." Having thusly chilled you with powers I acquired in 1984 as a direct result of lying about my Dungeons & Dragons character's sudden blossoming of psyonics, I would then explain to you, either vocally or through the sheer force of mental will at my disposal, that yes, all things considered, the Golgo 13 review was indeed focused, for although it covered a large swath of ground with it's billowing parachute of truth, the vast majority of it was related, in some surprisingly direct way, to the background information needed for a proper and deep understanding of a movie where the hero is implored by a woman to pull her trigger, lovingly and softly.
I say this now as a warning that the past several months of reviews that busy themselves primarily with reviewing a movie may have lulled you into a false sense of security. Many of you may not have been around for the halcyon days of having to read five pages of my biography before getting to the first comment regarding the actual subject of the review. If you were looking for lean, mean, informative film writing, Teleport City really wasn't the place to be. My philosophy when I started this site, and yea even long before the Web, was to write about film in a way that related the watching of such movies to a life in general, to place them in the context of daily existence, rather than treat them as external components to be commented upon without any reflection as to the role they have played in my life. I thought this for two reasons: first, because fans of bad films are often met with a chorus of predictable, "Get a life!" taunting, and I wanted to show off the fact that not only do I have a life, and not only does being a fan of these films, not preclude you from a life, but the life I have lead may actually be a hell of a lot more fun and interesting than that of the person trotting out that hoary old cliche of an insult. And most of the b-movie fans I've met over the years have boasted similarly satisfying lives. Adventures have been mounted, relationships have been built, sweeping romance and epic action all manage to coexist with watching and writing about goofy films no one else would devote a paragraph to. Secondly, and more importantly, a lot of the films I write positive reviews of are positive solely because of the circumstances that led up to seeing them, or under which I saw them. Understanding why I would write a glowing review of something like Treasure of the Four Crowns or Sword and the Sorcerer requires understanding how I saw those movies, what it was like at the time, what experiences became intertwined and associated with the movie. My approach has never been to review films as a science, with a clinical approach. My approach has always been to put them in their proper personal and social context, to explain how the movie might have become a part of my life, and how everything else that was happening to me at the time may have influenced my opinion of a particular film. The resulting reviews may seem wildly unfocused. They may seem to wander off on tangents, lose their way as they meander through the muck of my memory and nostalgia, but I've never felt that the information, the silly asides and biographies and recollections, were at all throw-away diversions. They were, within the confines of my potentially crackpot way of writing about movies, vital threads of a greater tapestry in which the film itself is only one of the images formed. Having thusly warned new readers and old ones who may have forgotten, let me further explain that I issue this warning because my review of Wicked City is going to be prefaced by a story that has very little to do with actually assessing the artistic or entertainment merit of the film itself, but nevertheless reflects something that plays an important role in influencing my overall reaction to the movie. Like all my stories, it involves adventure and romance. If you just want to skip ahead to a history of tentacle porn and a review of the movie, use this handy link to fast forward through time and space. And with that... My chest was heaving, and I was doing the best I could to suck in as much of the balmy, flower-scented spring air as I could. Blades of grass probed lightly at my back, and I felt the soft warmth of a hand on my stomach, which at the time had not yet embarked on the long and shockingly successful quest to bulge and hang down over the top of my pants that it enjoys these days. It was 1993, her name was Elisa, and we'd just finished whiling away a perfect north Florida spring day by shooting basketball. She was a hell of a gal, too beautiful to associate with the weak-chinned likes of me. Dark, curly hair; healthy, tan skin; fun, easy-going, athletic, with the slightest vestigial traces of a Puerto Rican accent. She lived in an apartment that shared a parking lot with the duplex I lived in with my friend Rob, and after a couple months of seeing each other from time to time, we graduated from friendly nods of acknowledgement to an actual exchange of words and a few drinks here and there. I was just at the early stages of toying with the idea of emerging from a straight edge punk rock cocoon, so I was a bit on the timid side when it came to imbibing (I would learn some years later, when I decided to embrace the culture of wine and spirits wholeheartedly, that Scotch-Irish blood apparently bestows upon you near godlike powers of tolerance and recuperation, regardless of how little you'd been drinking the past decade). Dating in Gainesville is tricky, because there were (and still are, from what I could tell during my last visit) so very few places you can take a girl that rank very far above Denny's or El Toro. Lisa was the first non-punk girlfriend I'd had in a long time, and I was going to have to come up with a different game plan if I wanted the relationship to continue. Punk rockers often suffer from an unhealthy, "I shall show her my world!" mentality, as if we inhabit a vast underworld full of mystical danger and darkness when, in fact, the average punk rocker's world consists of sitting on the couch, hanging out in a parking lot, or going to see really horrible bands that you pretend to like so you can make proclamations about "supporting the scene," because you're not old enough or wise enough (and some never are) to realize that some scenes and artistic endeavors really blow and aren't worth supporting. This is especially true of any scene that is comprised of four or five guys with beards, Dickies jackets, and fake trucker hats playing loud amelodic indie rock. Lucky for me that Elisa was some crazy kind of dream girl and was incredibly easy-going when it came to going along with idiotic schemes, and when it comes to idiotic schemes, I'm a Viking. So despite the lack of world-class places to which a sophisticated young gentleman could take a beautiful young lady for an evening of cocktails and witty conversation, there were still plenty of places a slobbish, lazy punk rocker still clinging to the "I ain't gonna wear no suit and dance for The Man" that people should outgrow a couple months after leaving high school could take a charming young lady who, for reasons one can't possibly comprehend, had decided to take a shine to the aforementioned asshole. So we'd go out for Coronas and all you can eat crawdads by the bucket, or we'd stay in with a bottle of wine and a movie. Or we'd go shoot hoops or kick the soccer ball around, take walks through nearby nature preserves, or we'd just sit in the floor at my place and listen to records, because punk rock guys always seem to have this sick need to make girls listen to godawful pieces of crap that the guy thinks is utter genius. "Yes, you are a smart and cultured woman possessed of a striking beauty that leaves a man breathless. Come! Come sit on my ratty bedroom carpet while I play Boredoms records for you."
Actually, in this regard, I took the sage advice of my friend Jon, and rather than trotting out Zeni Geva and Sun Ra, stuck primarily to The Cocteau Twins. I was, at the time, also a member of the University of Florida Film Council, and we were in the midst of the first annual (of two, I believe) Asian Film Festival, a program I'd put together primarily because I wanted to see Once Upon a Time in China, Chinese Ghost Story, and Bullet in the Head on the big screen, and this was the only way it was ever going to happen. We also peppered it with a smattering of Japanese cartoons and a few respectable films like Black Rain and Tokyo Story so people who wanted to sit and feel smart about themselves four a couple hours could do that. That day spent shooting hoops happen to fall on the final day of the event. I'd skipped out on Ozu in favor of sunshine and a sparkling smile, but the day was growing short and we were at a loss for what to do with the evening. "Well," I said as we lay there together on the grass, staring up at the tops of palm trees and listening to the slow rumble of traffic along 13th Street, "It's the last night of film festival. It'd be nice to end it on a better note than last night." "Last night" would have been our big showing of John Woo's Hong Kong swansong, Hardboiled. We were among the very first theaters in America to screen the film, though you wouldn't know it based on the amount of stars and prestige it brought our way (none). But people drove from as far away as Miami and Atlanta when they heard we were showing the movie, uncut and subtitled. All of the Hong Kong films played to packed houses, but none possessed the buzz that surrounded Hardboiled. This was right in the middle of people started to go batty for Hong Kong action films thanks to things like The Killer showing up on Cinemax. And the screening was a massive success, with a packed house howling and cheering right up until the projector went to switch to the final reel of the film -- the sprawling hospital shoot-out -- and we were suddenly watching the first reel of Aliens. Someone had screwed up big time before they sent us the film, but what could we do? We had a theater of angry patrons, and because UF runs their box office separate from the theater itself, the box office people had already packed up and went home, so there could be no cash refunds. All we could offer were vouchers for free screenings, which didn't do much to placate the people who drove six hours. Elisa stretched languorously next to me. "That sounds good," she said. "What's playing tonight?" I went over the schedule in my head. Immediately I regretted making the suggestion. We should have just gone for burritos at El Toro. "Umm," I hesitated, "A Japanese anime film." Her eye slit up slightly. She was a real sport at watching bad movies -- we'd even gone to see one of those screenings of Mystery Science Theater together at her suggestion (I'd never even seen the show up until that point, as Cox Cable did not offer Comedy Central) -- and it wasn't that long ago that we'd watched Akira, which had delighted her to no end. "Which one?" she asked enthusiastically. "Umm, it's called Wicked City. It's uh..." Honestly, I hadn't seen Wicked City at that point, which was the main reason I'd even booked it. It was originally meant to fill an 8 PM timeslot, with the midnight movie finale being another showing of Hardboiled, but with Hardboiled on the ropes, we replayed Zu Warriors and then slid Wicked City into the midnight movie slot, where it would be right at home. About all I knew of the film was what I'd seen in the previews. "Well, I know there's some monsters, some guys in tuxedos fly, and, well, a woman turns into a spider." I also knew that her vagina became a giant slobbering toothy maw, but I didn't know if it would be worse to bring that up now or wait until it actually showed up on screen. Thing is, I was really looking forward to all that madness, because I'd heard nothing but good things about the movie. Sure, it was a tad perverse, but beautifully animated and incredibly well-written. OK, I figured, maybe it'd be a decent movie for the two of us. I mean, it wasn't going to be Overfiend, which I'd seen unsubtitled a couple years earlier when the tape started making the rounds among cult film traders.
I don't have the world's most sterling track record when it comes to date movies. It's not that I don't know how to pick a decent date movie, one that both I and my prospective lady companion can enjoy. It's just that I tend to stumble by accident into remarkably bad choices knowing full well how bad they are. Midway through trying to impress a dame a mere couple months before, I'd invited her over for a romantic evening of dinner and a movie, only to have an assembly of friends show up demanding they be allowed to watch Black Devil Doll from Hell. As I had the town's only copy and the only working VCR (I'd bought it the day before at Wal-Mart, with the intention of using it for my romantic movie night, then packing it back up and returning it a day later -- such is college life) among my friends, my romantic evening became an enthusiastic and drunken screening of Black Devil Doll from Hell. Other date movies have included Alien 4, Cliffhanger (only because it was 50 cent Tuesday, meaning that you paid 50 cents, not that 50 Cent was in attendance, at the second run theater and my power had been shut off), and I Like to Hurt People. So it was that I took a girl out on a date to see Wicked City. She showed up in a jaw-droppingly nice dress and those embroidered cloth Chinese slippers. I was a fucking moron punk rocker, so I think I wore olive drab cargo pants cut off at the knees and an XL-sized Ramones shirt -- XL even though I was 5'7" and weighed 110 pounds. What the hell was this girl thinking? She took the film pretty well. Laughed at the spider-vagina, winced a bit when the demon tentacles started slithering into the chick character's mouth, but all in all, she seemed to enjoy the movie, though she freely admitted it wasn't something she was likely to rush out to see again. Wicked City wasn't what caused our relationship to peter out. It was me, as is often the case. I was still addicted to pretending like being punk rock was some kind of insane revolutionary lifestyle that she would never understand, and I was better off dating some gaunt, lazy chick in a Black Flag t-shirt and possessed of no real interest in anything other than studded leather bracelets and sitting on the couch. Needless to say given that lengthy intro I wrote, the circumstances under which I saw Wicked City go a long way to shaping my opinion about the film. Although the night we saw it was wonderful, and we were in at the apex of our youthful romance, Wicked City still represents badly blown opportunities, missed chances, and a commitment to awful decision making. My God, that gal was something. And I was an ass who started blowing her off basically because she wouldn't listen to Minor Threat. Wicked City is a painful reminder of how big an idiot I can be. When I watch it, I get a little misty-eyed and start thinking about the past. I raise my gin and tonic to the stars and say, well, I don't say anything. Granted, it's a funny movie to turn one toward bittersweet reflection, because it's full of bad-ass dudes with guns blowing the crap out of demons that are prone to probing the nethers of a woman with their slime-dripping tentacles, usually against said woman's will. But then, I took a date to see it, so what the hell (if you used the link above to skip to this point and are wondering what I'm talking about, don't you wish you'd read the whole thing now)? Given the sheer number of absurdly pointless and idiotic things people are allowed to study for their doctoral thesis, I'm sure someone somewhere has sold some desperate-to-be-hep professor in a tweed jacket and bow tie on the notion that it is academically valuable to become a doctor in the history of Japanese tentacle porn. I did not have the foresight to try and pass this off as a thesis, since like all punk rockers I was trying to pass off writing about punk rock as a thesis-worthy topic. So I am not the world's foremost authority on the social and artistic history of tentacle porn. I shall endeavor to do my best to cover the basics. WWII: America drops two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Bunta Sugawara survives and begins his long journey through the criminal underworld in post-war Hiroshima. A slew of restrictions are put on Japanese cinema to make sure nothing come sup that'll get the Japanese all riled up and becoming a handful for MacArthur. Korean War: we figure at this point that the Japanese are basically pretty cool. But many of the restrictions put in place remain. Most famous among them: a ban on showing, in film or still photo or illustration, human genitalia, sexual penetration, or pubic hair. During the seventies, Japanese filmmakers are forced to become increasingly clever in the way they go about depicting erotic acts of wanton carnality, giving rise to a country with more strategically placed candles and potted plants than anywhere else in the world. Porno films are still made, but the pubic region is blurred by unsightly optical mosaics or fogging. This ban on pubic hair remains intact clear through the nineties. But enterprising smut makers and a population generally sick of strategically placed candles and intrusive mosaics succeed in punching through reform that allows for on-camera pubic hair, though the actual penis and vagina are still illegal. This ban seems increasingly pointless and more about stubbornness with the advent of the "thin mosaic" technique, but we're straying off topic here. Looking for a way they could legally depict the dirty, disgusting act of sex and the vile, evil, naughty portions of the human anatomy, Japanese manga and anime artists came up with a brilliant idea. Exactly who first thought it up I don't know, but the thought was that these guys could freely draw penis-shaped tentacles attached to a variety of horrific creatures and get away with it since, technically, they weren't drawing a penis. It was just a penis-shaped tentacle. Plus, this way, you could violate a woman in multiple orifices, providing fun for the whole family. My assumption was that this first showed up in manga somewhere, but as I'm lacking my Doctorate in Tentacle Porn, I don't know. I'm sure someone does though. The most famous appearance of tentacle porn in anime was in the infamous Urotsuki Doji or Legend of the Overfiend, but Wicked City might very well have been the first tentacle film out of the gate -- though you can't really call it porn, and you certainly can't put it in the same class as slimy, hilarious filth like Overfiend.
In fact, like many "firsts," Wicked City is really only tangentially related, at best, to the world of tentacle porn that exploded in a luminescent white glob after the release of Urotsuki Doji. There is a tentacle rape in Wicked City, but it's not presented hardcore. There is additional nudity and sexuality in the movie as well, but once again nothing on the level of porn, and really no different from what was in Golgo 13, except that it involves demons and thus lends itself to a more twisted and surreal artistic sensibility. Considering what gets produced these days, Wicked City is relatively tame -- relative, remember, to films in which multi-tentacled demons slather naked women with otherworldly goo. These days, of course, artists get away pretty frequently with drawing full-on penetration and genitalia. Even Overfiend got away with it in 1989, and since then plenty of other anime titles have skirted the No-Dingalings Law, as it was officially known in the Japanese parliament. Yet there are still tons of cheap, crude tentacle porn releases every year. This would be primarily because it turns out some people prefer watching slimy demon tentacles rather than human parts poking around in bodily openings. I'm really not in the game of making moral calls on stuff like this, so we'll just leave it at, "some people preferred the penis stand-in over the actual penis." You could really understand Wicked City pretty well without understanding this roughly sketched history of tentacle porn (I didn't even get into animism and the role of the octopus in ancient Japanese art, because that's for whoever is writing their thesis about this crap), but I thought I'd throw it out there anyway because it would be good for a larf. So now, when you are trying to impress the doe-eyed Gothic Lolitas hanging out at Otakon, you can do it by saying, "Actually, tentacle rape can trace its roots back to the early days of Shintoism and the belief that certain animals were types of gods. Plus, the octopus, you know. Have you ever looked at one of those things?" If they ask you where you got all your sick information (they will ask you this as a delaying tactic so they can get to their mace, and rightfully so), you can puff up your chest like a rutting pigeon and proudly proclaim that it was "from the same guy who told to watch a Filipino midget spy film, then ditched a beautiful and charming woman because she didn't want to listen to Youth of Today." I compared the horrible, perverting, youth-corrupting filth present in Wicked City with the filth in Golgo 13, and if you're going to compare this movie to anything, it compares well to Golgo 13 even though on the surface the two seem pretty dissimilar. Both look to a combination of 40s film noir, 70s grindhouse sleaze, and 80s Miami Vice color schemes to achieve a look that is unique and new yet instantly familiar. Wicked City doesn't look exactly like Golgo 13, but one can definitely see parallels in their approach to artwork -- basically, they develop a different style from the same source material. Likewise, Wicked City continues the tendency of 80s anime to look to past American pulp writing as another source of inspiration. If Odin is a throwback to the writing of AE van Vogt, and Golgo 13 is a throwback to the gritty crime writing of Chandler, Hammet, and the 60s espionage potboilers that followed Ian Fleming's James Bond template, Wicked City can trace its roots back to the pulp writing of H.P. Lovecraft (yes, he wrote serial pulps) and the Lovecraft-inspired horror-pulp of R.E. Howard (best known for creating the character Conan the Barbarian). Howard and Lovecraft were regular correspondents with one another -- friends as much as two insane pulp writers can be friends with each other. Lovecraft's ever-expanding Cthulu mythos was a major influence on Howard, who wrote stories that dabbled in Lovecraft's universe, but with more of the gung-ho brawn that identifies Howard's writing. Howard's own endearing contribution to the world of horror pulp is the grim wandering Puritan Solomon Kane, who walks the earth forever in combat with ghosts, pirates, cannibals, ancient civilizations, living corpses, and other ghoulish delights. However, while Howard's sensibilities may have informed some of the more macho elements present in Wicked City (as well as his cruder but more enthusiastic style of writing), it's obvious that this and most of the subsequent demon-oriented anime titles (both hentai and not) are heavily influenced by a combination of Japanese folklore and grotesque H.P. Lovecraft imagery. The plot of the film is, like most anime plots, pretty simple once you strip away the orbiting insanity, much like the plot to any fantastical pulp story: there exist two worlds, our own and a shadowy world of demons. While all humans look basically the same, however, the demons get to have a billion different appearances, which doesn't seem fair. Anyway, for centuries or so, the two worlds have managed to coexist, but lately, a passel of rabble rousers from the demon world have decided to start wreaking havoc in our world. It's up to the mysterious Black Guard -- a security force comprised of members from both worlds, but mostly, it seems, ours -- to keep a lid on the situation until a horny old negotiator from the demon realm can broker a ceasefire. Assigned to protect negotiator Giuseppe Maiyart (irritatingly enough, I can't find any accurate listings for the Japanese voice acting cast) are Black Guard members Taki, from the human world, and Makie, from the demon world. Taki is a grim-faced young man with a no-nonsense approach to his supernatural job (not unlike the sort of blue collar, daily grind" approach to fantastic events that you find in Hellboy). Makie is the beautiful (as always) otherworldly woman with razor-sharp retractable fingernails (shades of William Gibson's Neuromancer perhaps?). They wrok well together, but trouble arises when Guiseppe's impish nature combines with Taki falling in love with Makie, affording the rogue demons a chance to take her hostage in exchange for getting Taki to abandon his post guarding the diminutive negotiator (who is sort of like Yoda, but if Yoda wore track suits and jacked off a lot -- which maybe he does. Unfortunately, the Star Wars movies never explore that). Wicked City was famous for a clever script, engaging artwork, and some truly phantasmagorical and imaginative set pieces. It was infamous for some of these same set pieces. As mentioned, for instance, this is the first instance of which I know of the now ubiquitous tentacle rape, though again, it's not a hardcore scene and is pretty mild (as mild as demon rape can be, I suppose) on the grand scale of the perversions anime offers the daring and/or sadly horny viewer. The film opens with it's most famous/infamous scene: Taki meeting a hot broad in a bar, then taking her home for a little lovin', then having her turn into a giant spider beast thing with the head and torso of a woman, but with long stocking-clad spider legs and a roaring, drooling fanged mouth where the vagina usually goes. Far from being sexually explicit, this scene is more grotesquely imaginative and crazy than it is offensive. It certainly sets the mood for what's to come and serves as an easy warning beacon. If you get freaked out by this, it ain't getting any more kid-friendly later in the movie. The body horror sequence is lightened somewhat when, shortly thereafter, Taki's superior says that maybe this experience will teach him to be "a littlre sexually cautious next time." Other notorious sequences involve Giuseppe running off to get a little action from a hooker, only to fall prey to a demon woman whose whole body becomes a malleable putty and Taki being swallowed whole by a cooing demon woman's fanged vagina while trying to rescue Makie. So yeah, it's all pretty twisted, and if you want a fine example of the gory excesses Japanese anime was willing to explore during the 1980s, you need look no further than Wicked City. It's full of ghoulish beasts, dripping tentacles, spraying blood, and spilling guts. But like much of the best anime to come from that decade of gleeful abandon, what sets Wicked City above the seething sea of horror anime is the fact that, coexisting with the repulsive Lovecraftian nightmares and grindhouse exploitation is a movie that is thoughtfully crafted and beautifully animated. Wicked City plays out as a parable of Japanese society in the 1980s. Recovery from the war was complete. Rather than being a limping wounded man, Japan suddenly found itself a world power once again, but this time without the need of a imperialist military. But with such rapid success comes confusion. Japan's image of itself as a well-ordered and well-behaved society was challenged at every turn by the simple realities of life. Some humans can act as cogs in a well-oiled, polite, bowing machine. But in a society like Japan, for every cog there is going to be a square peg that throws a kink into the works. The more repressive your culture, in other words, the more outrageous and extreme the counter-culture. Which is why Japan gave birth to loony youth fashion cultures, noise music, and Kinji Fukasaku yakuza films. Beneath that well-ordered veneer, Japan was as much a boiling cauldron of lust and perversion as any other country, with the possible exception of Germany. Wicked City is rife with images of archetypal Japanese salarymen -- Taki and the rest of the Guard where the requisite black suit, black tie ensemble of the salaryman, despite their incredible mission -- and women being ripped asunder by animal desires and passions they've sought endlessly to master and suppress. The demons are the wretched excess that so many Japanese (and other nationalities, for that matter) citizens are torn between denying and embracing. Giving oneself over entirely to them results in, you know, being devoured by toothy vaginas. Denying them entirely results in a similarly nasty fate. Survival, it would seem, involves a merging of these two polar opposite tendencies -- which we see in the relationship that emerges between Taki and Makie. This sort of intellectual underpinning of the often horrific action on screen is what keeps Wicked City a source of constant debate among people who still remember anime from the 80s. When we screened it as part of the Asian Film Festival, it was both lauded and condemned. It certainly created a host of varied and often conflicting opinions, even among types of people usually united by a common goal. Had the movie been simple smut of the caliber seen in most tentacle porn since then, it wouldn't spark this sort of debate. Well, given the fact that people will debate pretty much anything, I guess it might have. Point is, Wicked City has a lot more going for it than just the grisly imagery. The Tokyo of Wicked City is realized in a way that augments the thematic currents of the story. It's a fairly recognizable world, and it just so happens that incredibly bizarre things happen. Once again, as I've mentioned in plenty of other reviews (if only I could remember which ones), Wicked City succeeds in being creepy by taking the mundane and familiar and tweaking it in a way that keeps it comforting and familiar but also unsettling alien and inexplicable. It's hardboiled detective noir filtered through the askew vision of a director like David Cronenberg. You know something just ain't quite right, even before spider-women start scurrying down the facades of otherwise dull and unimpressive high rise apartment complexes. Like many films, animated and otherwise, it seems to use Blade Runner as its art design starting point, but rather than aping Blade Runner, it takes the foundation concept -- a future that is equal parts gee whiz sci-fi and nourish antiquity -- and puts its own spin on it. There's never any real doubt that Wicked City is set in the near future, but there's not much on display to actually say it's the future. It's simply the way the film is colored and the tone it sets that places it in the world of scifi-noir.
The artwork is gritty and expertly executed, boasting the warmth and intricacy of hand-drawn art rather than the polish and perfection of more modern computer-assisted drawing. It relies heavily on the blue and red palette, a nod perhaps to the playful yet sinister way in which Italian directors like Mario Bava and Dario Argento played with lighting and used it not to reflect reality, but rather to convey a certain mood. Similarly, many of the shots in Wicked City seem to be nods to the old EC Comics horror anthologies, which were probably as much an influence on the tone and style of the film as the old pulp stories of H.P. Lovecraft. The red and blue shaded "shocking scene of unspeakable terror" was a trademark of the EC titles, and Wicked City knows when to pull out homages to those equally pulpy old comic books. If the plot of Wicked City is nothing overly impressive -- cops guard the witness under siege, basically -- the way in which the film executes the typical set-up is nothing short of staggering in its creativity. The pace is languid without being slow, and the many plot twists stem organically and logically from the story rather than being disjointed zingers thrown in with no reason other than to shock and titilate. Even the film's notorious sexual content is at home and justified by the storytelling. Wicked City is awash with set pieces that manage to be repulsive, beautiful, shocking, and melancholy -- often all at the same time. Often, you can't believe the crazy stuff that's going on, but it totally sucks you in, and it's pulled off so spectacularly in the artwork that you find yourself emotionally involved even when the characters are thinly sketched. It's an atrocity show from which you can't extract yourself. It's also action-packed and rarely lets up long enough to become dull. There's scarcely a pause as the film skips from one eye-popping set-up to the next. The end result is more a series of individual action pieces than it is a full film, but the narrative is just enough to pull the whole thing together into a cohesive and comprehensible feature film that continues to be interesting almost two decades after its initial release. Add to that the fact that the story takes itself completely seriously -- even with the addition of a horny lump-handed old dude in a Sopranos track suit. As with all the best pulp, Wicked City creates a completely outrageous situation and then handles it with such earnest, solemn-faced seriousness that you are willing to buy into the illutsion no matter how crazy it becomes. Of course, it's hard to sit through a film like Wicked City and not think about the attitude it expresses toward women. OK, maybe it's not that hard, but as a reviewer, I try to do my best to cover as many elements of a story as I can, even if I don't find them especially compelling. It's not debatable that many people see the film as rather strongly anti-female. After all, their sexual organs are often seen as slobbering beasts that can swallow a man whole and destroy him. People often make the mistake of thinking that what a film depicts is an accurate reflection of the attitudes of the film maker, which fails to take into account the fact that someone may be making a statement in reaction to something rather then in opposition of it (not to mention that maybe they were just using their imaginations). Whether director Yoshiaki Kawajiri and writers Kisei Choo and Hideyuki Kikuchi have deep-rooted issues to work out with women I can't say. The way I've always read Wicked City isn't that it's an expression of the creator's fears and hang-ups, but rather an indictment of a society (not just Japanese) that both outlaws and fetishizes female sexuality. Society is endless teasing people when it comes to sexuality, hinting at it, selling it, then telling you you're dirty or evil for wanting it. Look at the porn movie industry -- the world's biggest multi-billion dollar industry that no one has ever seen anything from, or so each individual would have you believe. That sort of twisted entice-and-deny mentality is common everywhere, and ultimately, it creates a destructive mindset that reconciles the fear of the unknown with the desire for that same unknown through acts of violence. In the case of Wicked City, Taki and the other Black Guard are typical men raise din a repressive society. It's no wonder that female genitalia so often manifest themselves as menacing and otherworldly. But I'll be honest. Although I took plenty of film studies classes that dwell on sexuality and sexual politics in films, it really doesn't interest me. So I'll mention what I think, but it’s not the reason I go to the movies, and it's not the over-arching issue that defines my opinion of Wicked City. I like Wicked City because it's an action-packed pulp horror comic come to life, infused with acid trip imagery that rattles the brain. It's sick, daring, and in my opinion, brilliantly written. The artwork is gorgeous even when it's horrific. It certainly doesn't ever deserve to be thrown onto the hentai rubbish heap, or even blamed for the proliferation of cheaper, sleazier versions of itself that came from knock-off artists who were probably more inspired by Overfiend than by Wicked City anyway. Yoshiaki Kawajiri began his directing career in 1984 with the feature film Lensman, which was one of the very first anime titles to incorporate CGI into the preceding without it being as noticeably and hilariously pathetic as the CGI helicopters from Golgo 13. Wicked City was his second feature, and he would go on to direct another demon invasion themed movie, Demon City Shinjiku, which is similar to Wicked City in some ways, but very different in others. It lacks the sex and extreme gore, but also lacks the expert creation of dark mood and atmosphere, playing out more like a straight action film than piece of horror pulp. Wicked City made huge waves in America, at least amongst cult film and anime fans, when it made the rounds in the usual format (ie, a dubbed version from Streamline, using the usual Streamline crew of English language voice actors and being of about the same quality as their dub of Golgo 13). Demon City less so, but Kawajiri scored another huge cult fave in 1993 with Ninja Scroll, which retains some of Wicked City's affection for grotesqueries and a Grand Guignol style of film making. Similar, but with more Gothic lace and such, is his recent resurrection of another icon of 80s anime, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust. Kawajiri had nothing to do with the original Vampire Hunter D, but it obviously shares a lot of common ground with Wicked City as it indulges in a mind-blowing parade of freakish monsters, so it's not all that odd that Kawajiri would find himself directing a follow-up. Additional success with X and with pieces of The Animatrix insure that Kawajiri continues to be an important and vital contributor to the ever-expanding world of animated filmmaking. Wow, that last sentence sounds like it came from his resume cover letter. Let me rewrite it: Kawajiri continues to be an important and vital contributor to the ever-expanding world of people being ripped in half by demons and having their guts spill out all over the ground. Writer Kisei Choo had considerably less of a career, as Wicked City is the only credit I could turn up for him. It wouldn't surprise me to one day learn that Kisei Choo is just a pseudonym for some other, more established writer who was afraid of what being involved with a project like Wicked City might do to his career -- as if such things ever seem to have that detrimental an impact. You can write the goriest, nastiest piece of perverted crap Japan has ever seen (and that's saying something), then turn around and write for Hamtaro if you want. That's just the way things seem to happen. Story developer Hideyuki Kikiuchi had better luck. Aside from being a writer for the original Vampire Hunter D as well as Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, Demon City Shinjiku, and A Wind Named Amnesia. But he's not a screenwriter. Most of his work is in story outlines or novel writing.
There was a live-action adaption produced in 1992 by Tsui Hark, who likely did more of the directing than credited director Tai Kit Mak. I haven't seen the film since 1995 or so, so I'm not going to pretend like I'm in a position to write a proper review comparing it to the animated source material. It was less saucy, with only a hint of nudity, and focused on the relationship between two male members of the Black Guard: Taki (the always somnabulistic Leon Lai) and his half-demon partner Ken (Jacky Cheung, who gets to turn into a fanged demn and chew scenery the way he so loves to do). Joey Wong Tsu-hsien (Chinese Ghost Story, and that City Hunter movie starring Jackie Chan) was in the mix as well. About all I remember was the film employed a pastel blue and pink color palette similar but softer to the anime's red and blue, the Black Guard combatted demons using psychic powers that can only be invoked by pointing at your own forehead, and the finale was Taki and Ken riding around atop 747 commercial airliners and giving speeches as they tried to destroy and/or save one another. Or maybe it was Roy Cheung who was riding around on top of a 747. Look, at least two guys were riding around atop 747, and that was pretty cool. The movie itself was, as best as I can remember, pleasing to me without being really blow-away impressive. Now I feel like watching it again. Producer/stealth director Tsui Hark, aside from being the father of modern Hong Kong special effects, was also the man behind hooking up with a Japanese production and art crew to make the first really big budget Chinese animated feature, A Chinese Ghost Story: The Animation, which I highly recommend. Before that, Chinese animation was all Bruce Lee and Chinese Gods, which I also highly recommend. All in all, I really like Wicked City, and feel that it's not all that shameful to admit such a thing. It's a screwed up movie, but not nearly so much as the hype might lead you believe, and certainly nowhere near the sort of trash Overfiend is. Yes, Overfiend looms like a many-tentacled penis demon over all the 80s. That's why it keeps coming up. Plus, it's pretty funny to keep bringing it up, at least to me. I don't really recommend you do what I did and bring a date to see Wicked City, but I still think it's a high water mark (but not the highest) of the seamy 80s anime that invaded America, and well worth checking out once you've steeled yourself against the more tasteless images the film is going to throw at you. Wicked City is really adult-oriented anime done right. Heck, it's not even as gratuitous as Golgo 13. And anyway, like I always say: don't you have something better to do than be offended by twenty-year-old Japanese cartoons? That's like still being offended by The Canterbury Tales. Labels: Anime and Animation, Anime: 80s, Horror: Just Plain Weird, Year: 1987 posted by Keith at 6:11 PM | 2 Comments Friday, April 14, 2006Golgo 13
Golgo 13: Kowloon Assignment: 1977, Japan. Starring Sonny Chiba, Callan Leung, Etsuko Shihomi, Emi Shindo, Elaine Sung, Nick Lam Wai Kei, Jerry Ito, Chi-Chung Lee, Yiu Lam Chan, Shu Tong Wong. Directed by Yukio Noda. Written by Takeshi Matsumoto, Nobuaki Nakajima.
Golgo 13: The Professional: 1983, Japan. Starring Kiyoshi Kobayashi, Tetsuro Sagawa, Goro Naya, Kumiko Takizawa. Directed by Osamu Dezaki, Shichiro Kobayashi, Hirokata Takahashi. Written by Takao Saito. Purchase from Amazon.com. A thrilling part of Animeighties Month! I don't know if this is the longest, most unfocused, and rambling review of Golgo 13 ever written, but man, it's gotta be close. They say that it's important to always understand that what you see in the movies does not reflect reality (especially true in documentary filmmaking). In other words, you may believe a man can fly, but you probably shouldn't try it...or should you? Maybe the people who have tried to fly under their own power and plummeted to their death are just the few freaks in the world who can't fly, and the rest of us can...if only we'd try! Point is, although what you see in the movies doesn't always correspond to real life, sometimes you come across a movie that does, in fact, reflect if not the whole of real life, then at least your life. Sitting down to watch Golgo 13: The Professional for the first time in years, I was shocked by how closely the life of the titular globe-trotting assassin reflects my own. Landing in Malta or some other exotic location, shooting some scumbag, collecting my fat wad of cash for a job well done, then heading to my loft in an undisclosed location to make sweet love to whatever woman caught my eye when I was busy pounding down scotch at some seedy strip club bar where I was telling the other broads trying to grab my attention to, "Hit the bricks, baby" -- man, I've been there. Since I've not written all that much about anime in the past, I do tend in these reviews to throw out a considerable amount of back story and trivia which I'd previously stated I didn't have at my disposal. Apparently, I was wrong about not having it, and I've collected more useless facts than I realized about certain titles over the years. But only certain titles. I have my tastes, and I've always watched anime based on whether or not the title falls within that range of interest, as opposed to watching something simply because it was anime even though it falls outside of my highbrow taste range. Thus, the vast and popular world of things like romantic comedy anime, sports anime, maid/servant anime -- these things are wastelands into which I never wander. I know nothing about them and, frankly, I don't really want to, no matter how many people tell me I should watch Love Hina. Ain't gonna do it. Does it have bad-ass globe-trotting assassins splattering brains all over a high rise building's penthouse window before wandering off the bed some moaning chick who implores him to "pull her trigger, lovingly and softly?" If not, then I ain't interested. I don't want to watch a bunch of doe-eyed little girls in maid costumes serve tea. I'm a hard fighting, hard drinking, hard loving man, like Golgo 13, and I don't have time to waste on weepy "doily anime."
So while I don't know much about a lot of the anime that gets the kids all fired up, I do apparently know more than I realized about anime that does fall within the scope of my interests, and a lot of it is going to come out in big floods during these reviews, because I have a lot of catching up to do. Plus, I'm sort of taking on the double task of reviewing a movie and also trying to summarize the entire trend of anime business and fandom in the 80s and 90s, so things may dovetail into points that seem to have very little to do with the actual movie title at the top of the page. Think of it all as one big long article, though, as properly understanding these films and my reaction to them requires the stage being set properly. This review, for example, will wander through the murky swamp of marketing 80s anime, the history of Golgo 13, Sonny Chiba, and comments about James Bond before finally getting around to saying that the sleazy Golgo 13 movie is pretty much one of the most bad-ass movies ever made, only I will make this point in much more florid and eloquent fashion than saying "this movie is bad-ass." Although, really, Golgo 13: The Professional is bad-ass. Plus, you know, it's fun to learn these things so you can use your knowledge of violent 80s anime to impress the gothic Lolitas at the next convention you attend, at least up until the point where they say, "What's Roujin Z?" I've always handled anime titles less as anime and more just as another example of a certain type of genre of film, mostly because anime is so vast and varied that classifying something as anime and leaving it at that really doesn't give you any idea what to expect -- other than it will probably be animated. During the 1980s, however, and especially in the early 90s, there was a huge push by marketers to sell their newly discovered anime titles as defining the whole of the Japanese animation world. A stock parade of titles were always trotted out as being emblematic of the art form as a whole. Thus an endless procession of "These aren't your father's cartoons!" type of marketing campaigns. It was all wildly misleading of course, nudging one toward presuming that Japanese cartoons were all studies in brain splattering violence and violent tentacle rape (as epitomized by movies like Legend of the Overfiend, Golgo 13, and My Neighbor Totoro). Even a timid foray into anime waters quickly reveals this not to be the case, but you wouldn't know it based on the advertisement. Still, it happened that all the sleazy, gory, disgusting pulp trash was what I loved in both film and literature, so even if I knew there was much more in the world than the evil anime, I was more than happy to reel about in the filth of exploding heads and stony assassins. This wave of anime was geared largely toward attracting the money of college students, which is an interesting demographic to target considering how much money the average college student has to spend. The hook was, of course, that these were taboo cartoons, crazy shit you wouldn't believe. And frankly, we were happy to buy into it, because a lot of it was crazy shit we couldn't believe. As someone coming from a cult film background peppered with action, horror, and martial arts flicks, much of the zanier anime that was being pushed at the time appealed to me, but it was also obvious that it was by no means a fair sample of the entire anime world. Still, that initial advertising campaign was phenomenally successful in establishing the average American's opinion of what anime (and manga) was: tentacle rape movies. Watching anime made you a pervert. It was dangerous, like listening to Judas Priest records backward.
This was also the first time anime was marketing to U.S. audiences as something distinctly Japanese. Like many my age, I grew up watching Battle of the Planets and Speed Racer, among other shows, as well as live action programs like Ultraman and Space Giants. As a youth, it never once occurred to me that these shows were Japanese. It never even occurred to me for the national origin of entertainment to matter one lick. As far as I knew, all shows and movies fluttered down from a wonderful magical realm built inside the gaseous clouds that enshrouded Venus. All that concerned me was whether or not the shows were fun. I didn't know that they were "different" from other cartoons because I didn't even realize they were "other" from other cartoons, except that they were about cooler things, like spaceships and monsters and karate, and not about lame things, like chubby bears who care about each other and little blue people who never catch on to the fact that Joeky Smurf's presents always explode, but never in a way that causes teeth and eyeballs to fly out in slow motion. And the people who released those shows here went to great lengths to cover up their Japanese origins (as if kids gave a damn -- this persistent idea that kids won't relate to something foreign still baffles me). I don't mean just the dubbing-- one expects that from shows aimed at kids -- but also changing all the names in the credits (because kids are such avid readers of the closing credits for cartoons). When the big VHS wave hit in the early 90s, there was more of an effort to sell the titles as something strange and exotic and foreign; rather than covering it up, their Japanese origin was exploited and used as something that signified they were different, better, than their American counterparts. The films were often still dubbed, and the original names were often still replaced by American re-dubbers and producers names, but there was no doubt that the fact that these were Japanese cartoons (Japanimation, as they called it) was the big hook. In these early days, one of the pioneers in dumping poorly dubbed "not your father's" cartoons onto the American market was a company called Streamline Pictures. Streamline, through a deal they arranged with Satan himself, managed to snag most of the high-profile anime titles that came out during the 80s and 90s -- or if they got something low profile, the marketing machine kicked in gear and made it high profile. Streamline was famous for making anime available in the United States, and infamous for providing some of the worst dubbing jobs this side of the Vietamese dub of A Chinese Ghost Story II I once watched, where you could hear conversations in the background, people eating lunch, sneezing, and at one point one of the dubbers yawning when no one was yawning on screen. Streamline's dubs were always technically proficient and artistically dubious, even at their best. For one, they had a tendency to make wholesale changes to the scripts if the mood suited them. For another thing, they tended to make awful acting decisions. Witness, for example, probably their most reviled dub: that of the original American release of Akira, which made some major changes to the story that made it even more convoluted than it already was, and also assumed that all Japanese biker punks would speak with thick Brooklyn accents. Streamline was truly a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they got a hold of many of the best titles and made them widely available in the United States. On the other hand -- man, Brooklyn accents? And they seemed committed to never releasing anything subtitled, where as other fledgling companies like U.S. Manga, AnimEgo, and Viz would often release a dubbed and a subtitled version. So for many of us, the first time we ever experienced films like Akira and Golgo 13 was via the laughably bad dubbed Streamline editions. Such was the case for me when I first watched Golgo 13, a feature film adaptation of a long-running Japanese comic book that was aimed primarily at bitter guys in dead-end salaryman jobs who harbored daydreams of being tough-as-nails murderous sex machines but, in reality, were just nerdy guys reading a comic book on the train before they started a day full of kissing their boss's ass and shouting out the company cheer (much like me, except we don't have a company cheer, and I'm reading 60s spy novels). The Golgo 13 comics were created by an enterprising writer named Takao Saito, who got his big break in the business doing manga adaptations of the James Bond stories. Saito's Bond comics were fully licensed components of the James Bond world, but they played fast and loose with the original books, often having very little to do with them other than the title and some character names (basically the same as what would happen to the movies). Under Saito, James Bond became a radically different character in some respects, including being a master of disguise when the Ian Fleming books go to great lengths to point out that Bond absolutely refuses to use disguises. Regardless of the lack of faithfulness to the Fleming novels, the comics were wildly popular and generally well-received by the average fan. However, the series eventually got canned in 1967 after covering Thunderball, Man with the Golden Gun, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and Live and Let Die. It has been postulated that the fact that the comics were so radically different from the original stories from which they took their name was one of the main reasons for the cancellation -- this would have been shortly before or right around the same time as You Only Live Twice was released as a movie, which was the first Bond film to really differ dramatically from the original novel (Casino Royale doesn't count). More than likely, however, the comics were considered to be original James Bond stories, and after the death of Ian Fleming, his widow was keen to see that no one else continued writing new, original James Bond adventures (we see how well that worked out for her). Saito's reaction to the cancellation of his Bond series was to keep on writing it anyway, but change the character's name to Duke Togo, aka Golgo 13, a stone cold killer who will off anyone for the right price. Guilty or innocent, male or female, young or old, it didn't matter at all to Golgo 13. Saito's James Bond was drawn to look like Sean Connery (more or less), and anyone who has seen Saito's James Bond will instantly recognize it as being pretty much the same as his design for the mysterious assassin Golgo 13. Over the years, the Golgo 13 stories would get much more explicit than they ever could have under the banner of James Bond, but it's obvious that Golgo 13 is a direct outgrowth of the James Bond stories (with a dash of LUpin III thrown in from time to time), albeit one that's filtered through a gleeful willingness to embrace the increasingly permissive environment of the 1970s.
Free of the shackles of conforming to the Bond character, Saito was able to indulge his every whim and extreme and finally show the people that he, as a writer, was completely insane. Not quite as insane as Kazuo Koike (creator of Crying Freeman and Lone Wolf and Cub, among others), but still plenty nuts. The world of Golgo 13 quickly plumbed the twisted depths of pulp storytelling, serving up a steady stream of wildly popular action stories dripping with gratuitous sex and violence, which as I've said before and will no doubt say again, are the best types of sex and violence. Golgo 13 worked as a throwback to the hardboiled detective fiction of writers like Hammett and Chandler (who often wrote stories that are still surprisingly surreal and twisted) married with the gritty sex and violence of 1970s pop culture. It was pulp trash, through and through, but deliriously cracked in the head and unique in its approach, as opposed to being a simple regurgitation of pulp tropes. It was obvious that Saito had become some sort of sick, mad genius, the comic book creating equivalent of one of his James Bond villains. The first movie adaptation of Golgo 13 came to us courtesy of a 1977 live action film starring a perfectly cast (in my opinion, anyway) Sonny Chiba and directed by Yukio Noda, who brought the world the 1974 pinky violence exploitation "classic" Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs (which later begat that horribly boring series of DTV Zero Woman movies in the 1990s). I shouldn't have to summarize who Sonny Chiba is. If you don't know, that's because you're a new jack chump with no action movie street cred. Get out and watch yourself those Street Fighter films, some Battles Without Honor and Humanity, and maybe some of his samurai movies. Less important is rushing out and grabbing Golgo 13: The Kowloon Assignment, which is pretty much the opposite of the action-packed, gore-crazed sexfest that was the animated Golgo 13 that came out a few years later. Kowloon Assignment is the movie to watch if you want to see what it's like when Golgo 13 just sort of sits around. The story is pretty basic, as all good Golgo 13 stories should be: Golgo 13 is hired to kill someone, and the Hong Kong police department tries to stop him even though the guy he's killing is sort of a dick. Sonny Chiba does look a lot like Golgo 13 in many shots, though sometimes it looks like the humidity is turning his coif into a frizzy fro. The film was shot on location in Japan and Hong Kong, and one would hope that means a lot of primo Hong Kong kungfu talent would be showing up. Unfortunately, it looks like the production skimped on hiring locals for the Hong Kong sequences, so instead of potentially cool team-ups like Sonny Chiba versus Ti Lung, we get Sonny Chiba casually evading a string of ham 'n' eggers like Callan Leung. Who the hell is Callan Leung? Surely Sonny Chiba had David Chiang or Lo Lieh's telephone number and could ring them up for a cameo. He does bring Chiba movie staple Etsuko Shiomi with him, and she always looks fabulous in action, even if she's only in the movie long enough for one fight scene before she gets offed. Still, one Sue Shiomi fight scene and a lot of Sonny Chiba walking down the street don't make for edge-of-your-seat cinema. I guess there wouldn't have been much point to hiring top notch Hong Kong talent for the action scenes since there are hardly any action scenes anyway. Japanese live action cinema was pretty zany in 1977. Lots of weirdness all over the place, and yet somehow Kowloon Assignment, based on such crazed material, is incredibly tame and dull. The bloodshed is minimal, there's a naked boob ortwo, the fights are few and far between, and Golgo 13 isn't nearly as cool as he should be, possibly because that sort of stone-faced killer is more dynamic as a drawn piece of art than as an actual guy. All in all, a major disappointment on all fronts. However, it'd seem unlikely that the Golgo 13 comic wasn't an influence on better, more successful Sonny Chiba films, and that more successful Chiba films would likewise prove to be influences on Saito's writing (or his stable of writers, as he was one of the few popular manga writers who doled responsibilities out to a team rather than doing all the work himself). In particular, there are some pretty significant parallels to be drawn between Golgo 13 and Sonny Chiba's Street Fighter anti-hero, Terry Tsuruga, a merciless killing machine who will take anyone out if the price is right, and kidnap your sister and sell her into prostitution if you can't pay. In fact, the original Street Fighter was the first to use a little gimmick where someone gets punched and the movie cuts to an X-Ray showing crushing bones and whatnot -- a technique that is repeated during the finale of the Golgo 13 animated film. It's too bad that the venomous mean spirit, nasty violence, and all-around sickness of The Street Fighter isn't evident in Kowloon Asignment. It would have been a much better movie if that had been the case. In 1983, it was high time someone brought the Golgo 13 stories to life as an animated feature and, hopefully, did them right. This task fell upon the shoulders of directors Osamu Dezaki, Shichiro Kobayashi, and Hirokata Takahashi. It was a really bizarre trio of men to direct a movie packed to the gills with blood, gore, and sex. Shichiro and Hirokata both worked on Miyazaki's Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro film. Shichiro is best known for his work on the Urusei Yatsura series, while Hirokata dabbled in Rainbow Brite. Osamu Dezaki was, at the time, best known for The Rose of Versailles, a flowery shojo (girly) anime that is every bit as emotional and melodramatic as Golgo 13 is mean and violent. Dezaki's trademark is a unique style of playing with the artwork, using split screens and freeze frames (all fairly common nowadays) that would become richly detailed still drawings that helped tie anime to its manga roots. All three men worked on Space Adventure Cobra in 1982, which must have prepped them for their work on the over-the-top macho Golgo 13 a year later.
Needless to say, anyone following Dezaki into Golgo 13 thinking the babe-bangin' assassin was suddenly going to have big girly eyelashes and find himself walking through spontaneous clouds of flowers while writing poetry and weeping gently as Vivaldi played in the background was going to find themselves somewhat out of their element. Working on original stories from Saito, Golgo 13 the movie is a shamelessly over-the-top work of grindhouse theater exploitation; an endless and welcome parade of cold-blooded murder, grim-faced psychopaths, statuesque naked women, and wanton acts of depravity, all of which revolve tornado-style around the central character, Golgo 13, who even after 40 years of comic book stories, has never revealed anything about his past. He is eternally thirty-something, with no home, no family, and no name. "Duke Togo" is just another pseudonym, since you can't sign into hotels under the name Golgo 13 -- don't think I haven't tried. Anyway, you should never confuse Duke Togo for Dick Togo, though they'd make a decent team if they ever decided to pair up. What we do know about Golgo 13 (whose name is derived from the hill upon which Christ was crucified, as the Japanese love Biblical reference non-sequiters) is that his life consists of killing and sex. He is an expert marksman who prefers a modified M-16 but is at home with just about any weapon. He's an expert at karate, speaks just about every language known to man (even the clicking language of the Kalahari bushmen, I bet), a trained medic, and can instantly become a master of any other discipline if the plot requires it of him. And frankly, that's all you need to know about him. Golgo 13 operates within the arena of pulp fiction, which means it relies on audiences recognizing a series of archetypal stock characters who are what they are because that's what the story says they are. Golgo 13 is a master assassin, and that's all we need to know about him. Whatever expectations that character type has associated with it are expected to already be known by the reader or viewer. There is no call for complicated back story, or any back story at all, because pulp fiction doesn't dwell on such things. Whatever history you think of when you hear a brief description of Golgo 13 is probably right. The movie wastes no time jumping immediately into the action. We meet Golgo 13 (voiced by relative newcomer Tetsuro Sagawa in the original Japanese, Greg Snegoff in the dub, who has a couple noteworthy Eurocult movie appearances to his name) as he is wrapping up one assignment and taking on another -- the assassination of a billionaire industrialist's only son, who is being primed to take over his father's empire. Enraged by the murder, industrialist Leonard Dawson (Goro Naya -- who has a lengthy list of voice acting and regular acting credits to his name, including Lupin, Peacock King, Vampire Princess Miyu, various incarnations of Kamen Rider, and both the live action and anime versions of Casshern) swears bloody revenge upon the wily assassin, even if it destroys everything he's built, and even if it means sacrificing his daughter-in-law to the perverse whims of disgusting hitmen. And that's the plot. From there on out, Golgo 13 kills people, and people try to kill him. When he's not killing people, it's because he's having sex. Golgo 13 is a heady showcase of all the excesses that made the 1980s one of Japan's most infamously decadent decades. There's a lot of nudity and a lot of blood. People die in slow motion, with blood spurting brightly from gory knife and bullet wounds as their faces contort into that bug-eyed, twisted-jaw mask of death that is familiar to so many fans of 80s anime. No one gets shot once when they can get shot a dozen times, and no woman goes very long before coming out of her clothes, either by choice or by force. Golgo 13 even shoves a grenade in a guy's mouth and we get to watch the flaming body run around directionless while the surprised, fire-engulfed head tumbles to the ground in slow motion -- never mind that that's not how grenades work). Everyone, Golgo 13 included, is present merely to be abused in the most merciless fashion imaginable. So it should be fairly obvious that I embrace the seedy excesses of Golgo 13 with unabashed enthusiasm. It plays the source material perfectly in that it never once goes for the ironic wink, nudge, or comedic interlude. Everyone is completely dead serious about even the most outlandish scenarios (like Golgo 13 killing a Nazi war criminal in the middle of an orgy by climbing a building and shooting all the way through another building to hit the Nazi in the third building right in the middle of the head), which really puts Golgo 13 among the ranks of the poliziotteschi from the 1970s, like Violent Rome and Violent Naples, which handled similarly outrageous sequences with the same sense of gravity (and also indulged in gratuitous perversity that would have been totally at home in Golgo 13). In fact, Golgo 13 the movie is equal parts poliziotteschi and Eurospy film, drawing on the aesthetic and amoral thematic climate of both genres (right down to Golgo's wardrobe, which wavers between the turtle neck and slim suit look of sixties spies and the safari jacket and ascot look of the 70s). Although released in 1983 and rightly considered "80s anime," Golgo 13 definitely maintains a blend of that and the previous decade. Dezaki's approach to the artwork in the film is incredible. He makes wonderful use of his trademark split screens and other bizarre framing devices. The quality of the art is superb, achieving a raw and heavy gritty feeling that succeeds remarkably well at mimicking the shadowy noir look of old films, grafted onto the glam and neon of the 1980s -- sort of like an animated Michael Mann film, in a way. Golgo 13 isn't nearly as sleek looking as something like Odin (it's also not as boring), relying less on intricate backdrops and more on shading and mood, but the rougher approach suits the material perfectly. You'll find a similar though slightly more polished approach in Wicked City, albeit with the added bonus of a woman whose vagina is a giant, drooling, fanged spider mouth.
So that's the traditional cel artwork. Unfortunately, you can't really talk about the artwork in Golgo 13 without mentioning the ill-conceived and thoroughly abysmal CGI helicopter sequence. Dezaki and Shichiro worked together on something called 3-D Animated Homeless Child Remi, which sounds like something you really want to rush out and look for. I'm guessing this 1977 collaboration sparked their interest in the early days of CGI animation, and against all better judgment, they were hell-bent on cramming some into Golgo 13 at some point. And so we get the infamous helicopter attack sequence, in which the movie abruptly shifts from the richly realized cel animation to crudely rendered, jerky CGI completely devoid of detail. It looks like something you'd see in a real estate company demo at a county fair's expo hall. It's just so insanely bad that I can't even express how truly bad it is. The entire sequence only lasts a minute or so, but it seems like an eternity, because everything that has been so good up to this point grinds to a whiplash stop so Dezaki and Shichiro can fart around with their Amiga or whatever they used to cough up this sequence. OK, you can't fault them for trying, but surely someone somewhere looked at it and said, "Fellas, this looks pathetic. I mean, this looks astoundingly awful. I'm not putting this in the movie." But somehow, the CGI animation made it into the finished project, along with some crude CGI during the opening credits, which is a lot less offensive because it's just during the credits and not integrated into the rest of the animation. Plus, that animation is of a skeleton with a Smith & Wesson, so that's all right. The acting in the Japanese version of the movie is pretty much as good as you expect it to be. Watching it for this review was the firts time I'd heard the original actors. Normally, I just ignore English language dubs since I prefer the original language, however reviewing the English dub of Golgo 13 is worthwhile for a number of reasons. First, because it's a Streamline dub, and this is how people saw the film for years. Second, Golgo 13 is only in Japanese because the people who made it speak Japanese. Most of the characters are American, with a couple Italians thrown in. So it's legitimate to say that while Japanese is the language by which you should judge the film since that's what the original actors speak, it could just as easily be in English. Third, the Streamline English dub is just flat out hilarious even though it plays the material completely straight and resists the urge to "funny it up," the way other dubs often did with material this absurd. Simply put, the Streamline dub is uneven. Most of the male actors are all right, but that's because they're either icy cold assassins or blustering psychos, and both of those are pretty easy to communicate. The women are less successful, speaking mostly in monotone run-on sentences. The script sticks relatively close to the original dialogue, but then why not? When the original gives you lines like, "Pull my trigger, softly and lovingly," why not stick with it? Playing it straight-faced only makes it sound that much funnier. The dub also peppers the conversations with a bit more profanity, but that seems suitable. After all, if it had originally been written in English, these characters would have cursed up a storm.
Streamline honcho Carl Macek wasn't hiring brand name actors, but his usual stock players weren't entirely inexperienced. Greg Snegoff, for instance, voices Golgo 13 and previously appeared in a few of our favorite bad Italian action films -- Last Hunter, Lucio Fulci's Contraband, and the post-apocalyptic She. Michael McConnohie is pretty good as the voice of Leonard Dawson, and he has more credits as a voice actor than a sane person would count. All in all, it’s not the best dub, but it's adequate for the style of storytelling. Certainly it's less scandalous than the old Akira dub with all its, "Dat peabwain?" nonsense. Like many people, I refer to Golgo 13 as being pulp entertainment, but I should explain a little something about rampant abuse of the term "pulp," especially since it's going to come up a lot here seeing as how so much anime in the 1980s was inspired by old pulp style storytelling. Technically, when I say, "pulp," I should be referring to a very specific set of stories -- in other words, serialized fiction that appeared in pulp magazines covering a wide range of "lowbrow" genres like science fiction, crime, espionage, romance, and Westerns. Odin is a perfect example of the sort of pulp storytelling you get from a 40s or 50s sci-fi magazine. Of course, pulp isn't so narrowly defined a word these days, thanks in no small part to Quentin Tarantino adopting it to describe the grindhouse cinema of the 60s and 70s, which definitely boasted some pulp story sensibilities. But it also includes the deluge of cheap spy novels that came out in the wake of Ian Fleming's James Bond. I've called these books pulp fiction, simply because it's something that conjures up a specific feel for most people that accurately reflects the books, but any true pulp fan would write (and they have) to correct me. Those books aren't technically pulp. Potboilers, maybe. But not pulp. Golgo 13 adheres more to post-Bond definition of pulp. It has roots firmly planted in the sensationalist action-adventure fiction of the sixties and seventies, as well as in the gritty sleaze of 1970s grindhouse cinema which now falls under the banner of pulp fiction to many people. Anyway, I just wanted to say that so more people don't write me to explain what pulp fiction actually is versus what it's known as today. I get it -- but I still think it's valid for the term to have evolved from its original meaning. And that said, Golgo 13 is hardcore grindhouse insanity. It's brash, offensive, mean, and so completely absurd that there's no real way for a rational being to find it truly offensive. It's cheerfully perverse and delightfully violent. It didn't make all that big an impact upon it's release in America, and despite the enduring popularity of the comics, Golgo 13 only found his way to the screen once more, in the lackluster Golgo 13: Queen Bee released some years later. Since then, the Golgo 13 anime has sort of fallen through the cracks, which is a shame because it's a spectacular and totally irredeemable piece of movie making, packed end to end with action and insanity. Without a doubt, it's one of my favorite titles from the 1980s. Labels: Action: Yakuza, Anime and Animation, Anime: 80s, Espionage, Stars: Sonny Chiba, Year: 1983 posted by Keith at 12:41 AM | 9 Comments Tuesday, April 11, 2006Odin: Photon Space Sailer Starlight
1986, Japan. Directed by Toshio Masuda, Takeshi Shirado, Eiichi Yamamoto. Written by Kazuo Kasahara, Toshio Masuda, Yoshinobu Nishizaki, Eiichi Yamamoto. Purchase from Amazon.com.
A thrilling part of Animeighties Month! Let me start off by saying that I love Odin. Absolutely love it. All those people in the world who call it one of the worst animated films of all time? Liars. Every one of them. Dirty, rotten, filthy liars. Then let me further preface that admission by freely admitting that I have no illusions as to the quality of Odin. It's awful. It's a shining example of everything that can go wrong with anime feature filmmaking. It's bloated, needlessly long, often tedious, thinly characterized, nigh incomprehensible, and since the creators dreamed that it would be a Yamato-style series, it doesn't even have an ending. Even if, like me, you are a fan of so-called "old anime," there's a 99% chance that if you rent Odin, you will never make it to the end (much like the filmmakers themselves). And there's a pretty high probability that it will make you angry at me, and possibly mildly violent over the fact that I somehow swayed you into thinking it might be a good thing to add to your Netflix queue. So let me get this out of the way right now: Odin is a completely pointless 140-minute disaster that you should avoid at all costs. Unless, that is, you happen to think like me. Let me start this review by describing the opening minutes of Odin, which pretty much set the tone for everything that is about to follow. If you don't get the opening, then the rest of the movie isn't going to be for you either. First, we get a brief recap of mankind's various brave forays into exploring the oceans. OK, so far, so good. We see we're going to get some pretty good artwork. Odin was, after all, a big budget affair. The action then shifts to the future (2099 -- at least they had the good sense to set it more than twenty years in the future), when mankind has taken to exploring the solar system in giant spaceships adorned with schooner-style sails that harness the power of a network of directional lasers that propel the ships back and forth across space. The idea of spaceships that look like old sailing ships is a tad silly, but it's got a nice old-school pulp sci-fi feel to it, and anyway, one of my all-time favorite series is about a steam engine locomotive that flies through space -- and you can even put the windows down -- so who am I to complain? So far, nothing too odious (or Odinous -- that's right, I'm here all week, folks) up to this point. We get a brief look at the various space sailers, which is a better montage than the never-ending Enterprise fly-bys we got in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (which, as far as I can tell, have been playing since 1979 and still haven't finished up). It's all set to snappy Peter Thomas Soundorchestra style music like you got in his score for Chariots of the Gods, which I pretty fitting (this movie had as many composers as it had writers and directors). Then a transport shuttle lands on one of the giant sailers, the ramp opens, and one of the characters steps out, points toward...the future, perhaps...and yells, "GO!!!" And that's when Odin begins to earn its reputation.
A song from the 80s Japanese glam metal band Loudness begins to soar majestically across the soundtrack, like a great eagle of pure metal majesty unfurling wings formed from the power chords of one of those pointy, angular guitars. The crew of the space sailer, obviously invigorated by the fist-pumping anthemic rock music, stream out of the transport shuttle, running energetically and giving each other high-fives. They are just that happy and gung-ho to be aboard the Space Photon Sailer Starlight. And I don't mean they're walking at a crisp clip or jogging. They're hauling ass Jesse Owens style, full-speed sprinting enthusiastically up and down ramps, joyously climbing access ladders, and triumphantly situating themselves at control consoles. Then there is more running, more high fiving, and lots of sweeping, panning shots of the exterior of the ship. Then, it all keeps on going. And going. For the entire length of the song. Amid the ecstasy and unbridled "Yeah, A-Number One Aces!" excitement of the boarding process, a solitary figure rides a glass elevator to the tip of one of the sails and places his hand contemplatively against the glass window, staring off into the distance as if to say, "Yes, this ship is my heart, and it soars upward, ever upward, like the music of Loudness!" How you are going to feel about the rest of Odin depends largely on how you react to five minutes of guys running merrily through spaceship corridors, giving each other high fives and basically handling the whole thing like they're the champion team running out onto the field for "the big game" while Loudness plays. If this is the sort of thing that has you rolling your eyes and checking your watch, or eyeing the fast forward button, then let me give you a word of advice: just fast forward to the end credits, because this sequence is pretty much as good as it gets. There's nothing more exciting or logical beyond this point. This whole boarding sequence operates as sort the Dante-esque warning sign posted at the gates of Hell. Abandon all hope, ye who watch any more of Odin. Actually, you may even want to skip the end credits, during which a very special treat rolls that will delight some and exasperate many. If, however, you react to this sequence in much the same way as the characters on screen, then it's safe to continue. Frankly, this entire ludicrous intro does indeed make me want to run at full speed down the hall, high fiving my fellow space sailer sailors and shouting, "Yeah!" The entire sequence always makes me laugh in a hearty, manly fashion. That was true when I first saw Odin back in the Dark Ages, and it proved to still be true when I rewatched it for this review. It's such a goofy idea, from beginning to end. The running and cheering sequence, I mean, not the movie Odin itself. Actually, I guess the whole movie is a pretty goofy idea, beginning to end, as well, or it would be if it had an end. But it's just so deliriously nutty and enthusiastic that I love it. If you are tired of brooding space pirates or dystopic futures, then all you need to do is watch these goofballs sprint up and down space ramps while listening to Loudness. From this moment on, I'm going to assume that all space vessel boarding is conducted in this fashion. This is how they boarded the Apollo capsules, and the only reason Japan has never sent a man to the moon is because their astronauts are too tired after a hard day of cheering and running. If we could get a glimpse at the International Space Station right now, you know what we'd see? That's right. They'd be running up and down the cramped corridors, high fiving each other, shouting, "Da, comrade!" and pressing their palms against the portholes. And listening to Loudness. Now that my description of the sequence has gone on nearly as long as the sequence itself, we can continue. Oh wait, no we can't because all that running and jumping for joy is followed immediately by a lengthy launch sequence in which we get to see the characters fiddle dials and press blinking lights while the movie indulges in another long parade of "fly-by" footage in and around the spaceship. Suddenly, that fly-by sequence from Star Trek: The Motion Picture isn't looking so bad, is it folks? This goes on for quite a spell, until we finally get the photon laser thing fired up and the Starlight sails gloriously forth toward...the moon? Seriously? All this, and they're only going to the moon? In an age in which giant clipper ships ply the spaceways, does taking a shake-down cruise to the moon really justify all the high-fives and endless sweeping shots of the spaceship? Oh well, at least the journey is underway and we can now relax and get down to some serious action. Except that we can't, because en route to the moon, the Starlight picks up a mayday call from a ship in the asteroid belt near Jupiter. Now why the hell would any ship fly through an asteroid belt in the first place? Didn't they watch Empire Strikes Back? Well, the Starlight captain decides to respond to the SOS, even though they're only five minutes out of space dock and there must be closer ships if the laser highways are as crowded as the movie claims. But then one of the characters -- some of them have names, but they're token nods toward organization more than they are significant elements of the story, since there are really only two characters in the whole movie ("young gun" and "old salt") -- announces they can use the gravity isolator engine (or some such device -- the made-up pulp sci-fi jargon flies with gleeful abandon in this film) and be there lickety split. If you're guessing this results in another overly lengthy "preppin' the engines" sequence, you'd be on target. When they announced that the time until the engine could be used was seventy minutes, I was afraid they were going to really show us seventy minutes of guys fiddling with knobs and blinking lights and yelling out things like, "Phase induction coupling coil MX37 GO!!!"
While all this is happening, space cadet fighter pilot Akira (he embodies the "young gun" characters) decides that it wasn't fair of the International Space Agency to flunk him out of Starlight service school just because he punched a superior officer in the nose. So he steals a long-distance space fighter (we know it is such because this movie labels pretty much every action and piece of technology with handy captions, so you can learn to recognize Gravity Isolation Sailing when it happens), buzzes the Starlight, and demands to be let on board. This act would be, I presume, punishable by death in many militaries, but in the Odin universe, all it does is make everyone smile and proclaim that having Akira on board "might be good for a laugh." Not only do they let him on board, but they pretty much turn over control of the ship to him within minutes of his arrival. Eventually, the ship gets to the asteroid belt and searches the wreckage of a passenger cruiser that was obliterated by a mysterious destroyer, which appears soon enough and is assessed to be of a mysterious alien origin. As mankind has yet to discover evidence of any extra-terrestrial life in the Odinverse, this would seem to be a pretty big deal, even if it is a heavily-armed battle cruiser with a tendency to blow the crap out of anything it comes across. The Starlight discovers a single survivor from the slaughter -- a beautiful young girl, luckily enough, because what fun would it have been to discover a fat old crone smoking a corncob pipe and prone to uncontrollable bouts of mixed cackling and phlegmy coughing? Actually, yeah, that would have been pretty funny. While investigating the mysterious cruiser, the Starlight crew accidentally triggers its self-destruct mechanism, apparently by lightly touching the surface of the ship. So it is a vast, heavily armored battle cruiser boasting advanced alien technology, seemingly impervious to all weapons of human design, but you can destroy it by touching it. The short-comings of this battle cruiser don't matter much though, because once they pick up the girl, the cruiser is forgotten. No inquiry is ever made as to its origins or what it was doing hanging out in the asteroid belt blowing things up. If there was ever any explanation at all of what this ship was supposed to be, I must have blinked while they were making it. Was this supposed to be a ship from the soon-to-be-introduced Odin? We never see anything like it again, and no one sees fit to ever go, "Oh yeah, we should warn people about deadly alien destroyers that explode when you touch them." The exploding battleship sends the Starlight's seamen shooting toward Uranus, where the girl they picked up guides them to a UFO crash sight. Yes, if nothing else, Odin gives you ample opportunity for childish Uranus and seamen jokes. Make them, otherwise you're not going to have much else to do. Some special computer crystals (luckily, all computer systems in the entire universe, regardless of whether they are terrestrial or alien in nature, run on the same type of storage medium -- an advanced form of Zip Disk, I believe) and the fractured memories of the girl (named Sarah Cyanbaker, "Cyanbaker" being an ancient Norse name meaning, "Maker of neon blue breads") point the Starlight in the direction of Odin, a mythical planet from which, the movie postulates, ancient astronauts departed en route to becoming the first humans, or Norse gods. Something like that. The subsequent discovery of a space warp point makes traveling to Odin a possibility, but the old salt Captain and his old salt cronies receive orders to return to space dock, assess the situation, and prepare for a proper expedition to unexplored and potentially hostile distant space. And they might possibly also mention all this newfound evidence of life on other planets to the International Space Agency. Upset by this brief flirtation with some sort of logic and responsibility, the cheering young crew takes Akira's advice and stages a mutiny, taking the ship in search of Odin and locking the senior officers in the mess hall where, predictably enough, the old farts all smile to themselves and are pleased that their crew has mutinied and taken an untested ship on its maiden voyage through a warp point toward a portion of the universe thousands of light years from the edge of explored space, without proper provisions, armaments, or training. Once again, behavior punishable by death is greeted with sly smiles, back slapping, and "Oh, to be young again!" nonchalance. When the Starlight is set upon by vicious robot defenders almost immediately after exiting the warp, you can't help but think they got what they deserved. It turns out that the robots are the last vestiges of life on Odin, an automatic defense system commanded by an acid trip hallucination of a guy named Asgard that has gone insane over the eons and decided to wage war on all organic life (ironically, in this movie, Odin is a place and Asgard, where Odin lived in Norse myths, is a person). Now that the Starlight has popped through the warp point, the machines decide to backtrack and destroy life on earth as well. For his act of mutiny and potentially destroying all life on earth, Akira is congratulated and put in charge of figuring out how to best their mechanized enemies, leading to a laser-studded orgy of animated violence as the crew of the Starlight zap this and that, fly around, and when they need that extra push toward victory, insert their Loudness 8-track into the Starlight's hi-fi system. And yes, I hope that one day, "A laser-studded orgy of animated violence" appears as a blurb on Odin DVD packaging. Really, where to begin with this movie? How about the ending, which doesn't exist? Apparently thinking that this was going to be a hugely successful movie that would immediately spawn sequels, the film concludes with a dying captain (oh come on -- that's no spoiler) telling his mutinous young crew to venture forth and continue the quest for Odin, for surely the machines are not all that is left of that ancient civilization that may or may not have given birth to mankind (despite all evidence to the contrary and the fact that a dying Odinite even says, "this is all that remains of our culture"), or at least to the mythology of one small section of mankind. We then get a few more shots of the Starlight, then fade to...a Loudness music video??? Oh, come on! A two hours and twenty minute running time, and we don't even get an ending? And what's more, the Loudness video, for the song "Searching for Odin" (the main lyrics of which seem to be a soaring power ballad chorus repeating "Searching for Odin, my love!"), is cheaply shot on video and is just of the band standing in some fog machine mist. At their liveliest, I think the guitarist does that power ballad thing where he lightly taps one foot and sort of sways back and forth as he stares off into the distance. You know the stance. Every metal dude does it. But I demand more from Loudness. They're not even rockin' out or running around and giving high-fives to each other.
So basically, the entire 140 minutes you just spent watching Odin was for nothing. I would have even been satisfied if they just popped up a screen that said, "And then they found Odin and it was awesome...but that is another tale!" But we don't even get that, because this movie was a thunderous flop for which no sequel was ever made. It's the Megaforce of anime ("The Megaforce of anime!" -- why is no one quoting Teleport City on their box covers???) -- a huge undertaking, using a wealth of talent and money, meant to become an endearing blockbuster that defines a generation, but instead gets relegated to the ranks of bad movie punchline. It seems like an hour of this movie is padded out by gratuitous fly-bys or pointless action. Everything in Odin takes twice as long to explain as it should, and there's never any real pay-off for any of this time. One sequence finds the Starlight stranded in a negative energy nebula, or something like that, from which escape is impossible. After lots of talking and repairing (don't worry -- the Repair Boats are labeled when they appear on screen, so you will know when repairs are taking place -- I sure wish they'd labeled things like "Energetic Corridor Running" and "Space Photon Mutiny"), they just use a special engine and fly out, no harm done and no point to it except to increase the running time. And after leading a lengthy and involved assault on a computer brain, Akira and his team return and announce, "that was just a communication conduit; now we have to destroy the actual computer brain," and we have to watch the whole thing all over again. That said, though, the final assault on the computer brain fortress is pretty good stuff, with slick looking robots, giant tanks, and bazooka lasers. There are, as mentioned earlier, no real characters to speak of other than Akira and the salty old captain. And Sarah, I guess, but her only character trait is to wander onto the bridge from time to time and announce that they should find Odin. That, or she simply falls to her knees and screams, "Odeeeeeen!!!" They pay lip service to differentiating the crew but really, everyone is on board to cheer and die heroically, and you won't remember the name of a single one of them, except maybe "Boatswain." And none of the deaths mean much of anything, not just because the characters are so poorly fleshed out, but because there's practically no point to anything that happens in this movie, especially when you consider the ending. To the film's credit, the artwork is beautiful. It's a great example of eighties tech design at its best. The Starlight looks cool (and believe me, they give you plenty of chances to look at it), and the art is rich and detailed and interesting. It's obvious that they spent all their money on art and design, and then realized after the fact that they better drum up some kind of script. Said script comes to us courtesy of Yoshinobu Nishizaki (also the producer), Kazuo Kasahara, and Toshio Masuda. Three people? It took three people to come up with this mess? Actually, I guess that makes sense. I bet all three wrote entirely different movies, then they crammed them all into one film and called it a feature. At least that would explain the dazzling lack of coherence and the even more dazzling abundance of idiocy. None of these jokers were novices. Kazuo had been screenwriting since the late 1950s, including penning some of Japan's best-known features, such as Kinji Fukasaku's Battles Without Honor and Humanity films -- not that those qualify you for a coherency award. He was director Fukasaku's go-to writer, though, having penned not only the Battles movies, but also Cops vs Thugs, Yakuza Graveyard, and Renegade Ninjas. They're all very good, very fun films, but once again, the cord that binds them together is that half the time you have no idea what the hell is going on. You can definitely see the influence of his shotgun approach to characters and audience comprehension in the script for Odin. Similarly, Toshio Masuda was an experienced director and writer by the time Odin blemished his resume. He wrote and directed the superb Seijun Suzuki-esque Velvet Hustler in 1967, the totally crackpot Last Days of Planet Earth, then became a writer and director for the Space Battleship Yamato series (aka Star Blazers).
If anyone is to be blamed for the glorious awfulness of Odin, though, it's writer/producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki, whose brain child this abomination was. It's his fault that the movie has no less than three (possibly four) writers and three directors (including Takeshi Shirado and Eiichi Yamamoto, both veterans of Yamato), which is always a recipe for disaster. That's just too many conflicting visions and egos. You may also notice that there's a lot of people from Space Battleship Yamato popping up in the credits of Odin. You may further notice that the plot, what of it there is, of Odin doesn't sound too far from the plot of Yamato -- a spaceship that looks like an old ship plying the stars in search of a legendary planet. In fact, Nishizaki's first job as writer, director, and producer was with the Yamato series, a concept he dreamed up then turned to Leiji Masumoto to bring to life. When Yamato's guiding light left the series to pursue other ideas (specifically, Captain Harlock), Nishizaki did his best to keep the franchise limping along, but it was obvious from the precipitous plunge in quality that he was no Leiji Masumoto and that the series was sinking faster than the actual battlehsip Yamato (an endearing symbol of Japan's bravery and might, even though it was an idiotically gigantic battleship ushered triumphantly into service just as the Americans were discovering how easy it was for groups of small airplanes to sink idiotically large battleships -- I can think of better symbols of national pride). Having sullied the name of Yamato, Nishizaki decided to strike out in a bold new direction with Blue Noah, a show about a spaceship created out of an old submarine, which must journey to a mysterious destination. You may detect a pattern here. When Blue Noah crashed and burned, Nishizaki dreamed up Odin. Or rather, he retooled his original Yamato idea for the third time, assuming that he was going to have a movie so cool that people wouldn't even remember Yamato. It didn't really work out that way, and Odin sank at the box office and only resurfaced in the guise of a "so bad you won't believe it" fascination among twisted individuals like myself, who basically say of Odin, "It's absolutely horrible. You really should see it." Weep not for Nishizaki, however. Never one to stay down for long, he rebounded from the failure of Odin by developing another new idea, one that actually wasn't about spaceships shaped like old seagoing vessels. That creation -- lovingly known in the United States as Legend of the Overfiend -- did have the elements present that it needed to become, you know, somewhat memorable. All that said, man do I love Odin. And not ironically, and not just because it's bad. I really enjoy the hell out of it. I mean, make no mistake -- this is everything that can go wrong with a movie, all going wrong in one gloriously preposterous embarrassment. Odin is a wreck. It's also, for a guy like me, an endearing throwback to the heady days of anything-goes pulp science fiction and broadly-painted space opera. Make-believe future technology appears and disappears at the drop of the hat; characters are crudely drawn in the most obvious strokes, relying on you simply accepting them for what they are (laser fodder, mostly) without ever learning anything but completely generic things about them (they enjoy heavy metal music and like to high five each other); entire situations are built up in fine detail only to be completely abandoned; hair-brained attempts at philosophy and theology fly fast and furious and never come together to form an even remotely cohesive thematic tapestry. Odin plays out like a long-running, crudely written episodic serial, one that the author dashes off in a couple hours and then promptly forgets until he has to write the next installment, which may or may not connect very well to what little he remembers of what he wrote for the last installment. And then, the whole thing gets cancelled before he ever writes the ending. I've read slapdash AE Van Vogt novels from the 1940s that feel very similar in nonsensical tone to Odin. And I love them for the same largely inexplicable reasons I love Odin. It's pure pulp, and pure pulp always delights me, even when it's as bad as this and feels like its being made up on the fly. Yes, there are good pulp stories, and great pulp stories, and it's a shame that so much of what's bad about pulp writing has become what's most strongly identified with pulp writing. It's a real artistic tragedy, blah blah, and I don't care. I'd still rather read van Vogt or "Solomon Kane" than Arthur C. Clarke (not that I mind Clarke at all), and I'd still rather watch Odin than many other movies which are obviously much better (and much worse -- MD Geist, I'm looking in your direction). I can't in good faith say you should check Odin out unless you are likely to garner entertainment from such an ambitious piece of junk. I'd say that shearing it of thirty minutes would make it a leaner, better movie, but the American release (both the full length and edited versions are on the DVD release) does just that and emerges as even more incoherent and boring than the lengthier original -- plus, I think they cut out the Loudness video that substitutes in place of an ending, so you don't even have that to look forward to. So make of that what you will. The vast majority of people will find Odin to be tedious at best, and likely very nearly intolerable. Me? Odin is so good that it makes me want to run down the hallway, high five Nishizaki, and watch the whole thing over again. Like the crew of the Photon Space Sailer Starlight, I'm always going to be "searching for Odin, my love!" Labels: Anime and Animation, Anime: 80s, Science Fiction, Year: 1986 posted by Keith at 1:22 PM | 10 Comments Monday, April 10, 2006Animeighties
Lately, thanks in no small part to the Anime World Order podcast, I've been seized by the desire to feature a little more anime on Teleport City and, at the same time, revisit a lot of the movies I watched from the 1980s, which I caught, for the most part, in the early 90s when there was the first big wave of pretty much any and every anime title distributors could get on the cheap being dumped onto VHS for quickie releases in the United States. Back in those heady days, there was no Web to steer you in the right direction, and only a couple English-language publications dedicated to covering the strange world of Japanese cartoons. There were a lot of fanzines, mind you, but even with the assistance of Factsheet Five, you were lucky to ever stumble across any in your daily life (and this from someone whose daily life included writing, editing, and publishing a zine). So you pretty much went to the video store (Specs had the best selection in Gainesville) blind and grabbed whatever looked halfways interesting. Sometimes you lucked out. A lot of times, you came home with MD Geist or Crystal Triangle (people still harbor a grudge against me for bringing that one over to watch) or Dog Soldier. But good or bad, plowing through the emerging world of anime in America always came with a tinge of discovery and excitement -- which is more than I can say for watching Crystal Triangle.
If you wanted to see something you'd read about but hadn't received a domestic release, then you had to enter the great dance that was tape trading. If you were lucky enough to live in a town with an anime fan club, you could conduct business through their front. Otherwise, you were on your own in the wilderness, searching down people based on classified ads or word of mouth so that you could swap fifth generation fan-subbed bootlegs from Arctic Animation. As anyone who was involved in the tape trade culture knows, you eventually run into some pretty peculiar characters (or are a peculiar character yourself). Because I was already trading tapes to get uncut horror films and Hong Kong action flicks, I was pretty well prepared for what tape trading involved. But anime tape traders could be even more insane than any others. No, not more insane. Horror and kungfu film traders usually either came across as nerdy but normal, or they kept bugging you for "that video where the chick sticks live eels up her vagina." But it was a pretty free and easy trading lifestyle, especially if you happen to have the aforementioned "eel pussy" video. That thing, or a copy of Sex and Zen, was like gold. You could demand four or five Jackie Chan movies for it. But anime tape traders were often a lot more anal. Or maybe it was just that they were more organized than the whiskey-swilling scumbags who were doling out the Lucio Fulci tapes back in the day. I didn't really start exploring anime beyond Akira and the notorious Overfiend (which pretty much everyone saw at some point during the 1980s) until I was in college, and Gainesville happened to have a decently stocked anime club comprised mostly of people I really didn't like all that much, including the guy with a gay cop moustache and disturbing bean-shaped head who used to say things like, "I had tuh drive tuh niggah town the othuh day," and used to spell furniture, "frencher." He was a dick and a racist, but he was also fanatical about scoring fansubbed anime tapes, which was a big improvement over what I'd been watching, which was mostly unsubtitled copies of Golgo 13 and Gei Gei Gei No Kitaro. I managed to tolerate him long enough to get copies of the Patlabor TV series, subbed by Arctic Animation -- who used to constantly hold what seemed to be entire conversations amongst themselves via the subtitles during the credits, which I guess was occasionally more interesting than reading the lyrics to "Midnight Blue" yet again. I think they also liked to spice up the cursing in the shows a bit. And if you think enduring a North Florida racist for the sake of Patlabor is tasteless, remind me to tell you about the time I was fooling around with some chick only to discover that she had a giant swastika tattooed on her back. In 1994 or so, having written everything I needed to write about punk rock, I switched the fanzine I'd started in 1987 (then called And When There's Darkness, taken from a line in a Token Entry song for you decrepit old skate rock fans) to an all-movie review and discussion format (retitled Kungfu Girl). It was mostly Hong Kong films, which were just starting to enjoy a higher profile among cult film fans in the United States thanks to copies of The Killer and a few choice other titles circulating about. But amid my reviews for scratchy bootleg copies of Once Upon a Time in China and Chinese Ghost Story, I'd slip in the occasional anime and Godzilla review (well, the more than occasional Godzilla review, I reckon). It was enough to eventually get the zine mentioned in Film Threat and Sentai magazine, which was a comic book-size zine published by Antarctic Press (no relation to Arctic Animation -- what's with the Polar ice caps, people?), which opened a whole new slew of tape trading avenues for me (and also got the zine noticed enough for me to get my first professional writing job, as a contributor to Sex and Zen and a Bullet in the Head by Stefan Hammond -- savor those Shaw Bros. reviews, baby). Funny that being into what was, at the time, considered new school anime now makes you an old school fan (growing up watching Speed Racer, Star Blazers, Battle of the Planets, and Lupin apparently makes you "Incan ice mummy school"), but I guess that's the way it works, like how pulling an acid drop on your Bill Danforth Alva skateboard in the 1980s is now qualified as "old school skateboarding." But that's nothing more complex than the ebb and flow of time. As the years marched on and we all grew up and became well-adjusted, responsible members of a functioning modern society, we stopped watching cartoons, usually because a dust-choked old VCR shredded our precious VHS tapes and rendered them unwatchable (as if MD Geist needed help being unwatchable) while not offering up an alternative other than going to eBay and buying someone else's equally chewed up tape for $75. But then along came DVD and the second great wave of interest in anime. And although us aging old veterans of the glitz and sparkle of the eighties had to flip through an endless number of Pokemon and "magical transforming girl" shows, the search would, from time to time, reveal one of our beloved old titles lying cobweb-covered and ignored in a dark corner behind a janitor's pail and some moldering old rags. We would then experience a feeling of elation at having recovered this small portion of our recent past, a euphoric state that would last right up until you saw that the price of the disc was $35. Hey, it may be fun to take a nostalgic stroll down Dominion: Tank Police Boulevard, but I'm not paying $35 for the experience. And neither were a lot of fans like me who, being of a more advanced age at this point in our lives, refused to shell out big bucks for a forty-five minute DVD when we could be putting our cash toward dialysis machines. Of course, companies put out a forty-five minute OVA (OAV if you're nasty) on DVD, charge thirty-something bucks for it, then use the fact that no one bought it as an example of how no one is interested in purchasing old anime titles. Hey folks, guess what? Old cult movies sell for under ten dollars, and we buy a ton of those, even crappy ones we don't like. Take a hint. At the same time, the companies do have a point, even if the way they go about supporting it is sleazy. Most anime fans are younger, and most of them have no interest in titles that are even ten years old, let alone twenty or more. This is nothing unique to anime fandom, of course, but what is odd is how many hardcore anime fans, not just casual viewers, have no interest in older titles. I expect it from hoi polloi, but you'd think when someone crosses that line into becoming, if not an otaku, then at least a student of the game, that they'd be open to titles from across the span of the art form's history. After all, even young fans of cult films quickly become steeped in the films of the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Many are more resistant to black and white films, but still, they're up for exploring. In fact, cult film fandom consists primarily of rabid fans who explore the past and disdain more recent films. Anime, however, seems to work the opposite. In younger fans -- and I mean, when I say younger, people who range in age from roughly middle school age to college age -- it seems the more they are into anime, the snobbier they are about watching anything with a few years under its belt. And those that do generally seem dismissive of it, as if they're only half-watching it at best, and certainly making no effort to understand it or put it into any sort of context. Coming from a cult film background, where the past is always considered to be superior to the present, I always had a hard time understanding this about anime fans. Why the devotion to anything new solely because it's new? And why the commitment to scoffing at anything ten years or more old? There are exceptions, of course, as there are to any generalization, but I'm frequently staggered by the sheer number of fans who devour anime incessantly yet absolutely refuse to even watch anything more than a few years old. One could, perhaps, draw some sort of parallel to Japanese society's love of the new, but Japan is no stranger to getting misty-eyed and nostalgic about its past. Plus, many of you aren't Japanese anyway. I've always tried to devote at least a tiny portion of Teleport City to salvaging certain movies from the rubbish bin of memory, even when I think of those movies as something everyone has seen. It often turns out that just because I come from a school of thought that considers certain titles common knowledge and the basic foundation of a proper cinematic education doesn't mean that attitude is reflected in the greater population of fandom. Thus, it's worth it, for me, on a site like Teleport City to remind people they ought to see films like Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, because so few younger fans think of watching those movies. It's not that they don't want to; it simply doesn't occur to them. Similarly, there are plenty of anime titles that I think of obvious must-sees that younger anime fans have never even heard of, let alone seen. So it's worth it to me to spend some time picking through the old days and reliving some memories -- most of them good, some of them...not so much. Not everything that gets written about in the next couple of weeks is something I'd call must-see anime, though I do feel that any fan worth his salt should devote himself to seeing at least a smattering of truly awful titles, just so they can be better rounded and more aware of how bad something can be. And it is by no means anything approaching an attempt at a comprehensive survey of anime titles released in the United States during the 1980s and early 1990s. It's not even an attempt to cover all the biggest titles (i.e., no Ranma, no Urusei Yatsura, because I never was able to sustain any interest in those, be it in show or movie format, and no Project A-Ko, because I don't want to watch it again, seeing as how I'm the one person in the world who doesn't really like it all that much). Some respectable titles will slip in despite my effort to always scrape the bottom of the barrel, and at least a couple will show up that are best described as "notorious." A few of the titles will be truly horrible films which, for reasons I don't even want to ponder, I think are absolutely fantastic fun, even as I am fully aware of how mind-bendingly awful they are. Which is a nice way to kick off our discussion Odin: Space Photon Sailer Starlight... Labels: Anime and Animation, Anime: 80s posted by Keith at 3:50 PM | 12 Comments Wednesday, March 29, 2006Ghost in the Shell II/Patlabor III
Ghost in the Shell: Innocence -- 2004, Japan. Starring Akio Otsuka, Atsuko Tanaka, Koichi Yamadera, Tamio Oki, Yutaka Nakano, Naoto Takenaka. Directed by Mamoru Oshii. Written by Masamune Shirow, Mamoru Oshii. Purchase from Amazon.com
Patlabor: WXIII -- 2002, Japan. Starring Katsuhiko Watabiki, Hiroaki Hirata, Atsuko Tanaka, Ryunosuke Obayashi, Mina Tominaga, Toshio Furukawa. Directed by Takuji Endo, Fumihiko Takayama. Written by Tori Miki. Purchase from Amazon.com Sorry if this review is a little dense on technical info, as opposed to being dense int he way my reviews usually are. There isn't a lot of anime reviewed at Teleport City, and I'm not entirely certain why. The dearth of anime reviews is certainly not an accurate reflection of my viewing habits. I'm not hardcore student of the game, but it's not as if there's never been an anime title flitting across my television screen. I guess I just always figured that so many more knowledgeable people were already writing about the stuff that there was no real point to adding my voice to the chorus. There was, for the most part, very little of significance I would have to add to the discourse. But then, it's rare that I have anything significant to add to any sort of discourse, and since I tend to watch a lot of titles that have fallen out of favor or been all but forgotten as the eternal sands of time shift ever forward and bury everything under the advancing mountain of Naruto episodes, I figured there was no real point to avoiding such reviews. It's important, after all, that crusty old dudes like me dedicate ourselves to reminding the younger generations about Golgo 13, Wicked City, and of course, Odin (you will bow to Odin). There have been a couple anime reviews on Teleport City in the past -- both of Leiji Masumoto creations -- but those reviews were written a long time ago, when the world was young and the site was still in its infancy, and both are of particularly poor quality and thus not entirely worth the time it would take you to find them in the archives. So just as 2006 is the year for increasing the amount of Bollywood representation on Teleport City, so too shall it be the glorious year that I review a couple more anime titles.
Having prefaced this entire piece with the proclamation that I watch mostly old stuff that the bulk of anime fandom has no interest in exploring, thus leaving it relegated to the ranks of a few aging bums who can't figure out what the hell thing it is people at conventions have with cat ears, I now intend to undercut that entirely by reviewing one of the higher profile anime feature films to make the rounds in the United States. Trust me, though, in the next week or so I'll review both Golgo 13 and Odin, and the elation you will feel shall cause you to run triumphantly up and down boarding ramps, high-fiving your fellow travelers as soaring glam metal plays in the background. It just so happens, however, that the wheel of fate that controls my Netflix queue served up two of the more well-known titles before the onslaught of nostalgic classics lined up behind them. Normally, I would hesitate to link two reviews together so closely, as it short-circuits their stand-alone long-term lifespan once they're filed away in the archives. But Ghost in the Shell II: Innocence and Patlabor: WXIII not only showed up at the same time, but also share a number of traits that makes combining the two titles into a single review logical, at least from the viewpoint looking out from the twisted sinews of my brain, soaked as it is in rum and whatever addictive pixie dust they sprinkle on Girl Scout Cookie Thin Mints. Ghost in the Shell II: Innocence and Patlabor: WXIII made the arthouse circuits around the United States at more or less the same time, give or take a year. Close enough for atom bombs, anyway. Both were received well by critics. Innocence was received well by fans. Patlabor somewhat less so, for a number of reasons. Chief among those reasons would be that Ghost in the Shell enjoys a much higher profile in the United States, either because the darker cyberpunk edge is more appealing to American fans, or because it features a hot, nearly-naked cyborg chick with a huge rack (of guns, I mean), while Patlabor has the merely cute, fully-clothed Noa Izumi. Both films took the bold step of eschewing the characters with which the series is most strongly identified in favor of focusing on previously supporting or entirely new characters. And both films are essentially detective stories that apply an old-fashioned approach to science fiction in which the technology and gee-whiz futurism is scaled back in favor of a plot centered primarily on characters -- which is nt entirely unexpected given the tendencies displayed in the overall body of work associated with both franchises. We'll delve into the thematic similarities in greater detail shortly, but I also want to mention, for those who don't know (and even for those who do, since you've already read this far into the sentence, and there's no point in turning back now), that Ghost in the Shell and Patlabor share several common links behind the camera as well. To bring up to speed anyone who may not follow the ins and outs of the Japanese animation and comic book world, here's the gist of things. Ghost in the Shell, like pretty much most Japanese cartoons, started life as manga (Japanese comic book) written by a cat named Masamune Shirow. Shirow wrote all sorts of stuff that got plenty popular during the eighties and nineties, including Black Magic M-66, Appleseed, and Dominion: Tank Police. When it came time to turn Shirow's Ghost in the Shell comic into a feature film, director Mamoru Oshii was tapped to sit in the seat. Oshii was best known at the time as the director of the Patlabor series, based on comics written by Yuki Masami. Oshii also directed the first two Patlabor feature films, as well as a host of other projects with substantial followings, including Jin Roh, some of the Urusei Yatsura (Lum) movies, and the live action/computer animation hybrid Avalon. If you ask the average casual fan of anime to name a few directors, there's pretty much a 95% chance that if they can name anyone, they're going to say Mamoru Oshii and Haiyao Miyazaki. If you are lucky, they may be able to trot out Katsuhiro Otomo, but more likely they'll just say, "Oh, and that guy who made Akira."
Because, presumably, Oshii was occupied with Innocence, he was unable to serve as director for the third Patlabor film, which was instead directed by the team of Takayama Fumihiko (who has previously directed Gundam: War in a Pocket and the original Bubblegum Crisis OAV) and Takuji Endo (a first-time director whose only previous experience was as a second unit director for the TV series X -- it never even occurred to me that an animated film would have a second unit, but I guess it makes sense, even if you're just sending them across the room to shoot the animated establishing shots and landscapes). Not being able to rely on Oshii to direct the third film might have seemed a hindrance to carrying over the tone of the first two films, which were fairly dark and serious, in contrast to the series which had relied as much on comedy as it did action and tension to create and hold onto the huge fanbase that followed Patlabor throughout its entire television and OAV run. But Fumihiko seemed a decent fit even if he wasn't the superstar Oshii was, and he did come from an eighties background that suits the feel and fans of Patlabor. Of the two titles, Patlabor definitely came with more baggage than Ghost in the Shell. Besides the manga, there was the much-beloved television run and two OAV series, not to mention the two previous films. Patlabor has never enjoyed the soaring popularity in the United States that I thought it deserved, but even so, there were more than enough fans to put the pressure on the third film, especially since the original two had been so good. Ghost in the Shell, conversely, had the manga and only one other movie. Since the average -- and I'm referring to this proverbial person a lot -- anime fan doesn't read very much manga, we can almost discount its influence in both instances. Ghost in the Shell also had a television run in the form of Stand Alone Complex, but at the time of Innocence's release in the United States, very few people had seen the television series, and even so it was only in its first season. You could argue, of course, that Patlabor never aired on American television, nor did it get a VHS release. Therefore, that body of material is as viably dismissed as the manga. On the one hand, I'd say you have a point. On the other, I'd say that it's because none of it aired that it becomes that much more valuable. The only people who had seen Patlabor, for the most part, were hardcore fans, people who had taken the time to seek out fansubs when no other alternative existed. Their affection for the show was pretty intense. So the people who would be seeing a Patlabor movie would be, presumably, well versed in and dedicated to the series history, where as Ghost in the Shell, with its higher profile name and less back material, would tend to attract a more casual viewer. Thus, parting ways with the main character from the first Ghost in the Shell film was less of a gamble than parting ways with the entire core of characters established in the Patlabor titles, at least as I see it. But both films are notable for their willingness to shift attention to other characters. In the case of Ghost in the Shell, Innocence concentrates on cyborg cops Batou (voiced by Akio Otsuka) and Togusa (Koichi Yamedera, who has a tendency to show up in bit parts in Godzilla movies but is probably best known as the voice of Spike Spiegel on Cowboy Bebop or as Captain Harlock on all the more recent Matsumoto titles).
Batou is pretty familiar as he plays a pretty big role in the first film as Major Kusanagi's partner. Togusa gets a fair amount of attention in the Stand Alone Complex series, but fans who saw Innocence before Stand Alone Complex will be fairly unfamiliar with him, though because of the TV show he became my favorite character and emerges as an obvious counterweight to Kusanagi, who shows up in Innocence only at the very end, and then only as a disembodied consciousness downloaded temporarily into a body. Incidentally, Kusanagi is voiced by actress Atsuko Tanaka, who among other credits, appears as Saeko Misaki, one of the main characters in Patlabor: WXIII. Where Kusanagi is so dedicated to technical modification of the human that, by this film, she has ceased having a body at all and exists only as a "ghost" in cyberspace, Togusa is the least cybernetically enhanced member of Section 9, the special police force to which he, Batou, and formerly Kusanagi belong. Togusa has cybernetic implants in his brain, as all police do, but that's it, and even that he seems to have solely because it's a requirement of the job. Somewhere between the two extremes stand Batou, heavily modified but also perfectly happy maintaining his existence as a physical human being. Similarly, Patlabor: WXIII does not focus on the ensemble cast that makes up Special Vehicles Unit 2, the focus of all the previous entries in the series (though the second movie focuses less on the unit as a whole and more on a single character, their captain Goto), and instead concentrates on two police officers, the aging Detective Kusumi (who I assumed was the same character as aging Detective Matsui from the first Patlabor film, but I'm pretty sure I was wrong about that, though they might as well be the same) and the younger Detective Hata. Kusumi is voiced by Katsuhiko Watabiki, who has surprisingly few credits to his name but did appear in Junya Sato's 1988 historical epic The Silk Road, which I haven't seen in a good dozen years or so. Hata is voiced by Hiroaki Hirata, who has done some work in the new Galaxy Express but seems to spend most his time doing work on Digimon. He also did the voice of Koga in Innocence. See, these two ventures really ought to just do a cross-over at some point. You wouldn't even have to hire much additional cast. The plots of the two movies are neither entirely similar or dissimilar, and what they do share is as much a product of ongoing thematic links between the two titles as it is the simple result of there being a few pervading themes that run through the greater bulk of Japanese science fiction anime. Let's begin with Innocence, which kicks the action off by informing us that Major Kusanagi has more or less disappeared entirely into the net, leaving her former partner, Batou, to team up with Togusa on a case involving the tendency of a particular model of "doll" -- basically a life-size, computerized humanoid robot that can be employed for a variety of purposes (you can guess some of them) -- to go on the fritz and murder their owners before self-destructing. As with the first film, and as with much of Shirow's writing, the film dwells heavily on popular anime themes such as the merging of man and machine and the difference in human versus machine intelligence, and when does the latter start to become the former -- or in the case of increasingly cybernetically enhanced humans, vice versa. Batou and Togusa follow the trail of clues through the yakuza underworld and finally to the doll manufacturing plant itself for the final revelation as to why these robots are killing their masters. Innocence is served well by a thoughtful, expertly paced story that relies heavily on identification with the two main characters, which it pulls off remarkably well. Sad, in a way, that animated cartoon characters are often more fleshed out and better written these days than their live-action film counterparts, who rely increasingly on flashy visuals and computer animation to carry flat scripts and thin characterization. There's a Masamune Shirow penned story in there somewhere. Although Innocence isn't exactly lacking for action (anyone who has seen the previous film or episodes of Stand Alone Complex knows that it's rarely an action-oriented show anyway), the sublime moments come in the down time between shoot-outs. Batou's interaction with his dog is particularly strong, albeit it simple, at making you warm to his character. I think it was a wise decision to place the weight of the story on his solid shoulders. As a man who is equal parts futuristic cyborg and old fashioned flesh and bone lug, he proves to be the most compelling of the Ghost in the Shell characters. Even though Togusa may be my favorite, he's too far to one end of the spectrum to effectively embody the push-pull between technology and biology that sits at the core of Shirow's entire Ghost in the Shell universe. Batou, on the other hand, is perfect for this. When the film does shift to action, it's executed remarkably well. A mix-up in a yakuza bar and a hallucinogenic freak out in a supermarket are warm-ups for the finale though, which is both exciting, sad, and hypnotic as Batou and Kusanagi (or at least, her consciousness downloaded into one of the doll bodies) fight their way through a labyrinthine factory en route to uncovering the truth at the core of the case. The interaction of image and music is, as with the first film, dramatic, and Kenji Kawaii provides another stellar score for this film, same as the first and with obvious common elements to tie them closely together. Even though it isn't an action scene per se, there's one scene in particular that is almost overwhelming in how well it's pulled off, and although the rich texture and detail of the animation (which is, as is often the case these days, a mix of perfectly realized cel animation and so-so computer animation) can't be denied, it's really the use of Kawaii's music that makes it so effective. This would be the surreal parade sequence that occurs as Togusa and Batou hunt down a potential informant. Absolutely stunning sequence, though I don't know if I could really explain why. It's one of those scenes that just really sticks with me because it works so hard at creating a completely unreal world that is also completely real and recognizable as something not all that far off base. I've always thought, though it wasn't my original thought, that both horror and science fiction are at their most effective when they take realty and tweak it just enough to make it feel at once comfortably familiar and unnervingly alien. Blade Runner excelled in this capacity, and its no surprise that a film like Blade Runner became the inspiration for so much Japanese animation -- especially Ghost in the Shell, which seems to understand how to be influenced by Blade Runner more than most movies do. Meaning, that is, that Ghost in the Shell takes pointers from Blade Runner's art design, which many movies do, but also knows how to tie it in with similar but not identical questions about the future. Anyway, it's a great scene. The first tour we get of Neo Tokyo in Akira is another such scene that sticks with me even though it's almost a throwaway establishing shot. But it's another hyper colorful blend of intensely detailed art and expertly conducted music that lets you glimpse a world both completely outrageous yet imminently believable. The finale of Innocence is similarly haunting, both in the action sequences involving the battle with wave after wave of unblinking, flailing dolls and in the final revelation, which unlike many revelations, makes perfect sense placed within the overall theme of Ghost in the Shell. The movie at this point is transfixing through and through, but it obtains an even higher level here, one that is really flat-out mind-blowing. Suddenly, the horror and beauty of everything you've seen -- from garish Chinatown parades to twisted laboratories, twitching half-dead gynoids, Batou's apartment -- comes crashing you’re your head, and you, or rather I, realized just how gorgeous and powerful Innocence was. It's almost a Stendahl Syndrome sort of experience -- there is so much to absorb, everything is so detailed, so rife with meaning and theology and philosophy, that at some point you simply can't take it all in. I watched Innocence spread out over two nights, then watched it again in its entirety a night later. Still, even as I'm writing this epically long-winded review, the main thought in my mind is, "I want to watch it again right now." It's like heroin, or maybe Girl Scout cookies, which are even more addictive (and delicious) than heroin. Its central questions remain vital as we advance toward a future that may not be exactly like Ghost in the Shell in the details, but certainly bears some considerable likenesses. We may not be downloading our consciousness William Gibson style into the internet, but we're certainly uploading more and more of our personal lives and social interactions. Our party invitations, friend networks, personal diaries -- these things have all become part of a colossally confused and often nigh unintelligible jumble, but this is really only a decade or so into this new medium we call the Web. The potential for it to play an ever-increasing role in our lives exists, even if it still seems like the stuff of Ghost in the Shell and Neuromancer at this point. If we've proven anything as a race it's that we're absolutely wretched at accurately predicting the way technological advancement will shape our future. There are simply too many variables and unexpecteds that come form left field. I mean, who, when Henry Ford hopped atop his first automobile, could see that the invention of the car would not only change the face of transportation, but would be a direct cause of the rise in the importance of Middle Eastern nations, which in turn means we take an active interest in places that were previously nothing but backwaters visited by religious pilgrims and pipe-smoking British archaeologists who needed some more mummies. Look at how network technology has transformed society in just a few short years, and then try to imagine what it could do with another fifty. This isn't to imply that the change is either good or bad, simply that it has happened and will continue to happen, and that impossibly far-fetched things have a nasty habit of becoming run-of-the-mill realities if you give them a few years.
Likewise, Ghost in the Shell pokes at the question of what becomes of us, morally and spiritually, as the convergence of technology and biology advances. The Gynoid (all female in form, obviously fromt he name) dolls that are going berserk are regarded as malfunctioning machines, but at what point do increasingly human machines become the moral equivalent of increasingly mechanized humans? Where is the line that divides a gynoid from Batou, or from Kusanagi, who is still considered human even though she has forsaken her body and become a completely digital lifeform. Is it the heritage of having once been human? In that case, then what of machines that are infused in some way with human consciousness? Or human babies that are given cybernetic modifications shortly after birth? This may seem like waxing philosophic on hypothetical questions invented purely so we could wax philosophic about them, but science fiction usually adds a layer of the fantastic on top of something otherwise real. Think of online crime, something with which we're still attempting to learn how to grapple. Not credit card fraud, mind you, but something like online stalking. At what point does an act committed in a virtual, digital environment deserve to carry the same weight as a similar crime in the real world? And the more time we spend online, doesn't that legitimize it as an equally real world as the physical world? Can you cheat on a spouse online, and how is it the same and different from doing it in person? We may not have implants and cybernetic eyes and arms, but we're an increasingly mech/tech oriented society. As machines continue to become increasingly commonplace as the conduit for our communication and interaction, at what point does our online presence become as liable for our deeds as our physical body? Exploring these questions in general, and in particular the ever-evolving relationship between humans and the machines we build, is certainly nothing unique to Ghost in the Shell. It is, I would say, the prevailing theme in most science fiction anime from the 1980s on. Masamune Shirow's stories just happen to be the most literate in ruminating on these topics, though he stops short of ever really making a definite proclamation about the future, which is wise. Speculative fiction's job is to pose questions, not provide answers. This isn't just an excuse for vagueness, however. The world is stuffed with sci-fi that tries to pass its ill-conceived and half-baked plots off as speculative or "open ended" when in fact they're just bad. Innocence asks the questions, but it remembers to ask the questions in a way that makes you actually want to ruminate on them a spell after the film is finished. Patlabor: WXIII does the same thing differently, or maybe it's something different the same way. I'm not sure. Patlabor has always been somewhat less fanciful in its vision of the future (which was, at the time, 1999). The basic science fiction premise is that a variety of large robots are commonly employed in a variety of heavy lifting tasks such as construction. But these aren't Gundam type super robots. For the most part, they're ugly, functionally designed, pieces of construction equipment. Only within the realm of police and military work to these robots -- labors -- take on a more anthropomorphic appearance. With the rise of labors, there was also a rise in labor-related crimes, most of which consists of crackpots in bulky construction labors smashing things up. Sort of like joyriding through Manhattan on a backhoe. To combat this new type of crime, the police began using the patrol labor - patlabor, for short. But other than that, the future of Patlabor looks pretty much like the present, even more so than Ghost in the Shell, which also stays close to reality, or at least presents its fancier elements in such a way as to make them seem perfectly integrated in a world that is still full of convenience stores, apartments, and droopy faced dogs. But Patlabor really is just the present, but with fancier construction equipment. So now you have the basics, and you can pretty much forget them because labors, patrol or otherwise, play an exceptionally tiny role in the plot of WXIII, which seems to ask many of the same questions as Innocence, but as relates to the continuing evolution of artificial biological life forms rather than electronic ones. Strange things are afoot in Tokyo Bay. Fish populations have plummeted, and construction labors working around the bay keep turning up smashed, with the drivers either missing or gorily splashed across the scene of the crime. Detectives Kusumi and Hata are called in to investigate the murders and presumable acts of sabotage, which may or may not be related to a controversial artificial land mass being developed in Tokyo Bay, which has been the source of much protest and trouble for much of the Patlabor series, film and television. The two cops quickly discover that all the labors were manufactured by Schaft Enterprises, or at the very least were running on Schaft motors. Eventually, however, they discover that the crimes have nothing to do with the labors, and that there is, in fact, a monster in the Bay. It may seem a bit weird if all you've seen is the Patlabor movies, but the television series never shied away from paying homage to old giant monster movies. Kusumi and Hata then begin to trace the origin of the monster in hopes that discovering where it came from will help them figure out how the heck to deal with it, especially since it seems to boast incredibly regenerative powers.
The story that serves as the basis for WXIII was, some have said, not written to be a Patlabor story. However, it's not hard to retrofit it for the Patlabor universe, even if it isn't about the familiar Patlabor characters. Series regulars Noa and Shinohara make a brief cameo, and SV2 captain Goto has a couple brief scenes, but for the most part, no one from the previous Patlabor titles shows up until the very end, when the nature of the monster has been revealed and SV2 is called out to deal with subduing the thing. Fans were pretty evenly split on this approach to the movie, but it seems to me to be a natural progression based on the previous two films. The first one deals pretty normally with the SV2 crew. The second film, however, relegates every character but Goto to cameos and centers almost entirely on the enigmatic captain who seems to be a lazy bum but has far more going on in his head and his past than anyone would guess. In the third film, then, it doesn't seem that far-fetched that Goto himself becomes a cameo appearance and the story focuses on characters even further removed from SV2. As with Patlabor II, the story itself is very compelling, so that once you get over the absence of your favorite characters, you are quickly drawn in. Then, when the familiar faces of SV2 do show up at the end, it's like a reunion with old friends you're much more excited to see because of their absence up to that point. I don't think WXIII realizes Kusumi, Hata, or Professor Saeko Misaki quite as well as Innocence does Batou and Kogusa, but both are still interesting. They just don't come with as much philosophical baggage. Kusumi is old and Hata is young, but that's not really something that plays a large role in their dynamic. It's not as if Kusumi is some old dude who can't deal with all this crazy new stuff. He's pretty competent, though hindered by a bum leg. And Hata isn't some hothead who chafes the old man. He just a good understudy. Where the philosophy of WXIII comes into play is with Professor Misaki and the creature lurking in Tokyo Bay. It's asks the same questions, in many ways, as Innocence. At what point do our biological experiments become living creatures entitled to the rights of other animals? When does something stop becoming an experiment? It never really meanders into the "tampering in God's domain" admonishment, and seems to basically say that, one way or the other, biological advances are coming. They may hit stumbling blocks, like moral opposition to stem cell research, but that doesn't mean they aren't coming. And when they do, when we start making breakthroughs, are we going to be ready to deal with the results? The safe answer, based on our track record, would be, "probably not." And while these things may not manifest as a giant creature grown from cancer cells, their impact on society could be no less dramatic. WXIII is a slow film. There is very little action, and most of what we get is a police procedural. Fans of the Patlabor series probably won't be surprised by this though. The series was already well-known for being a giant robot anime that often had nothing to do with giant robots. The labors could disappear for several episodes as the series explored characters or simply took time out for a ghost story. In fact, some of the best episodes of both the television series and OAVs were the ones that didn't feature the labors (I'm thinking, Goto and SV1's Captain Nagumo have to spend the night in a love motel, or the Kanuka vs. Kumagami drinking contest episode), so the absence of labors until the very end is no big surprise. In pacing and tone, WXIII plays out much less like sci-fi action anime and compares more favorably to features like Tokyo Godfathers or Millennium Actress, only with a giant monster lurking in the bay. Slow doesn't mean boring though, at least not to me, and while some fans thought the double whammy of no SV2 characters and so little action was enough to sink the film, I still found it entirely compelling and quite thoughtful, not to mention tense and exciting when the action does make an appearance (as with the wonderfully done first meeting between Hata, Kusumi, and the monster). Artistically, WXIII represents a perfect example of the quantum leap in quality that Japanese animation is capable of. As with Ghost in the Shell and some of the other mentioned titles, this is a realist approach to animation. There are no wacky faces or other familiar tropes of popular anime (although some of those did appear frequently in the Patlabor television series, but not in the Stand Alone Complex series). As with Innocence, backgrounds are richly detailed and character designs are true to real life. It may not be Oshii directing the action, but his protoges certainly don't let the master down. And once again, Kenji Kawaii supplies an evocative and effective score to accompany the stunning art and thoughtful script. I don't think, in the end, that WXIII is quite as good a movie as Innocence, but it's still a damn fine example of just how good Japanese animated films can be. If it had spent a little more time in getting us to warm up to Hata and Kusumi the way we warm to Batou, it would have been flawless. The two films work very well together, and though viewing them side by side certainly isn't a requirement, it was a fulfilling experience for me. I don't think you need to be overly familiar with the mythology of either franchise, though it wouldn't hurt to bone up on the basics, especially since the Patlabor and Ghost in the Shell material represents, for me anyway, some the absolute best material film and television has to offer (and possibly comics, but I've never really read any of them), regardless of country or whether or not it happens to be live action or animated. Along with a few other choice selections, Ghost in the Shell: Innocence and Patlabor: WXIII stand up as sublime triumphs of anime features. And then there's Odin... Labels: Anime and Animation, Country: Japan, Netflix Diary, Science Fiction, Year: 2002, Year: 2004 posted by Keith at 6:33 PM | 0 Comments Monday, March 20, 2006Fire and Ice
1983, United States. Starring Randy Norton, Cynthia Leake, Steve Sandor, Sean Hannon, Leo Gordon, William Ostrander, Eileen O'Reill, Elizabeth Lloyd Shaw, Micky Morton, Tamarah Park. Directed by Ralph Bakshi. Written by Gerry Thomas and Roy Conway. Purchase from Amazon.com
 .OK, let's talk some Dungeons & Dragons before we dig into the film review proper. It'll help you understand the background which makes it possible for me to so love a film like Fire and Ice as much as I do. It's also one of those inevitable subjects, and it's best we get it out of the way now. Geeks and nerds will always bring it up. For us, D&D is sort of like heroin is to skinny rock stars. You go through a period of brief flirtation, end up heavily addicted to the point where it destroys your social life, and you sit around, all high on your drug, saying things that seem deep and philosophical to you but are really just idiotic, like, "Man, what if you put a Portable Hole inside a Bag of Holding?" or, "Man, wouldn't it be cool if Gary Gygax was here right now?" Then you go through a period of recovery, followed by a relapse, then finally get clean and spend the next thirty years talking about how you "used to do heroin" or "used to play D&D" to whoever has the misfortune of being in a position to have to listen to you. Possibly the only thing worse than people telling you stories about when they were stoned and stared at a wall for seven hours, or people reading you their erotic vampire fanfic, is crusty old farts telling you about how they used to roll the twenty-sided die -- and yeah, try sidling up to someone in a bar one night and asking them if they'd "like to roll the twenty-sided die." You'll be lucky if your potential mate-date doesn't yell, "Blee yark!" in your face and take you back to their keep on the borderlands to show you their collection of smoky crystalline dice that they store in a leather pouch they bought at last year's medieval festival. Speaking of which, when did it become acceptable to show up to medieval fairs dressed as an elf? Since when did that become an acceptable historic recreation of the times? I mean, a sprite or a kobold I could understand, but an elf? For that matter, when did camouflage pants and combat boots become acceptable attire? For God's sake, man, where're your jerkins??? I think if you're going to dress up for a medieval fair, you should have to meet some minimum standard of historical accuracy. At the very least, you shouldn't be able to wear a long Fruit of the Loom t-shirt with a belt cinched around it. It should be like dining at a fancy restaurant. You don't have proper attire? Well, sir, please don this complimentary King Henry VIII robe. OK, hoi polloi I can excuse, but the people who actively take part in the festival events? It just doesn't seem fair to me that some guy went out and forged his own full suit of plate mail armor, and then the guy next to him bought two rolls of Reynolds Wrap and a sheet of poster board.
But this is just one of those things, like how Paganism makes me mad because it's all fruity sweetness and light hippies flitting about and saying "Blessed be!" and "Goddess bless you," instead of doing what it was Pagans were busy doing before the sixties ruined it all, which was hitting people in the chest with giant battle axes then drinking blood from the cleaved skulls of their enemies. We didn't "drum circle" the Romans out of Scotland, people. I'm just saying that if you are dressing up for the Renaissance Festival, at the very least you should have to invest in a pair of those tan rawhide Robin Hood boots that were popular with the pickup-driving guys when I was a kid. Still, I suppose it could be worse. Anime fandom seems to have been overrun by fat guys dressed as cats, where all they do is draw whiskers on their face and throw on some cardboard ears and a pipe cleaner tail. You know what that outfit is, buddy? That's what the loser kid throws together for Halloween. Some people spend hours and hours crafted outrageously complex and detailed costumes to showcase their nerdiness. I think those people should be allowed to kick the ass of anyone who shows up dressed as a cat person, wearing normal clothes but with a cheap tail and ears taped to themselves. Likewise, the guy who makes his own authentic armor should be able to use his Morning Star of Clobberin' +3 on anyone who show sup to a medieval fair wearing their normal clothes, but with a cape thrown on. I mean, this is why Civil War reinacters don't give you guys no respect, man. So where was I? Sorry, I can get pretty worked up when a topic is this important. So yeah, like many other nerds, I dabbled in the black art of D&D. Funny, in retrospect, how hysterical people were over the evil of the game. If you remember, D&D was going to either turn us all into devil worshippers (also fond of just throwing cheap cloaks over their street clothes instead of going all the way and putting on red Danksin unitards) or it was going to cause the youth of America to become so lost in this amazing world of make-believe and fantasy that all concept of the real world would disintegrate, leaving us with a society full of people wearing fake elf ears and cheap cloaks. Hmm. I guess they were right, after all. My flirtation with this world full of dungeons and dragons began at an early age thanks to the fact that an old boyfriend of my mother's happened to be one of the early employees at TSR, so he funneled me a steady stream of the old basic and advanced box sets that came in the red and aquamarine boxes respectively. I guess I was in fourth grade when we put together our geeky little campaign, though back then D&D was considered less dorky and more dangerous, sort of like how video games were dangerous, then became dorky, and now are back to the point where thug kids host video-game related public access cable shows about them. For the most part, we'd gather at a friend's house, cheat on our character sheets for a while, consult various charts, then play the game for half an hour (usually Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, because we liked to equip our characters with lasers and such) or so before retiring to play outside or watch a movie. Four times out of five, the movie would be a barbarian movie not entirely dissimilar to the game of D&D we'd just abandoned in mid-campaign. Actually, there was a 97% chance that the movie would be Beastmaster. But we've covered that territory before, so if you need to hear jokes about Beastmaster and watching barbarian movies, go back and read one of our previous sword and sorcery movie reviews. Somehow, the animated Ralph Bakshi feature Fire and Ice managed to slip through the cracks, though I can't imagine it didn't make the early 1980s cable TV rounds. It's perfect late-night HBO fare. If I'd seen it back then, I would have embraced it whole-heartedly and probably proclaimed it the best thing I'd ever seen. Or something to that effect. Alas, it was never to be, and although Heavy Metal was inescapable at the time, Fire and Ice remained unseen by me until the recent DVD release allowed me to go back and see how Bakshi's sword and sorcery cartoon had aged over the years. In brief, Fire and Ice is the animated feature film equivalent of trying to buy saucy fantasy comic magazine Heavy Metal at age thirteen, praying that the B. Dalton check-out clerk doesn't realize that the magazine is a veritable horn o' plenty of naked chicks riding dragons around acid-trip landscapes that look like something the guy down the street would have airbrushed onto the side of his custom van. And then, if you do manage to score, you have to forever hide the torrid tome amongst your copies of Dragon magazine for fear that the big-breasted zebra-striped woman on the cover might otherwise arouse parental suspicion, resulting in them just happening to randomly open the magazine to one of the naughtier Guido Crepax stories. Ralph Bakshi is a director and artist who was at the forefront of a lot of innovative new ideas, but he was always at the forefront in a way that would only facilitate his ambitions crashing and burning, only to have someone else basically hatch the same idea a few years later with great success. Bakshi first made headlines by directing a raunchy cartoon for adults named Fritz the Cat, forever destined to be picked up by accident by aging vaudeville fans who mistake it for Felix the Cat. At the time of the film's release, the concept of cartoon movies for adults, packed full of cursing, drug use, and sex, was pretty alien, and it's likely that more than a few ill-informed parents took their screaming, crying broods out for a fun day at the cartoon movie only to discover after the lights went down that they were in a grindhouse theater full of guys in raincoats jerking off to anthropomorphic cat women (if you've been to an anime convention lately, you've seen that some things never change). Soon thereafter, Bakshi decided that what he wanted to do with his time was make an animated adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's epic Lord of the Rings trilogy. To realize his vision, Bakshi would rely on a technique called rotoscoping -- that is, filming live actors, then tracing the artwork over them. Bakshi's ambition was admirable, but it was a fair leap across the chasm from ambition to realization, and The Lord of the Rings failed to make the jump. The film is an uncomfortable mish-mash of questionable character design (ugly gap-toothed hobbits, Boromir the Viking, Aragorn the Navajo), impressive animation, and shocking lapses in the quality of rotoscoping that results in frequent shifts from animation to live-action actors who look nothing like their animated counterparts horsing around against heavily tinted backgrounds. It also didn't help that funding was a major stumbling block, and Bakshi ran out of time and money two books into the three-book adventure. Undeterred, Bakshi forged boldly forward, sticking to the fantasy formula for Fire and Ice, which was released in the immediate wake of Conan the Barbarian's success and the launching of the sword and sorcery trend that delighted us for so many hours when we'd grown tired of using our imaginations to slay trolls and other beasts lurking in the pages of the Monster Manual and beloved Fiend Folio. Where Lord of the Rings held the promise of Bakshi merging his adult-oriented artwork with the world of Tolkien, the hook for Fire and Ice was that it was an artistic collaboration between Bakshi and one of the most famous pulp artists of all time, Frank Frazetta. Frazetta rose to prominence as one of the most in-demand artists of the heyday of pulp fiction, gaining particular notoriety for his illustration of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, and while you can't exactly claim that he invented fantasy artwork, he certainly defined it for quite some time, up until the point when Haji Sorayama started drawing hot, naked robot chicks and Boris Vallejo picked up the fantasy art gauntlet. But Frazetta was The Man for decades, creating a style that showcased beefy, axe-wielding barbarians in furry loincloths and big-breasted, big-booty women in tiny, tiny magical bikinis. It would seem, at least in the early 1980s, that his artwork would be a good match for Ralph Bakshi's animation style. Something more adult-oriented, full of gibbering goblins, bare-chested barbarians, and buxom babes. Working from Frazetta character designs and the basic template of a fantasy tale as defined by decades of pulp fiction, and plagued as always by budget short-comings and a general lack of interest from audiences, Bakshi gave us Fire and Ice. Fire and Ice involves a clash of two cultures. First, there is the evil, skinny blue guy Nekron, who would be played by David Bowie if this was a big-budget, live-action film. Nekron lives in a land of ice and glaciers and dreams of making the rest of the world as dismal and bleak as his North Dakota-esque ice kingdom. Standing in his way is the king of Fire Keep, who has harnessed the power of the volcanoes that surround his kingdom. Nekron's scheming mother devises a plan to kidnap Teegra, the hot big-booty daughter of the king of Fire Keep, and thus force him to negotiate a surrender. But being evil, Nekron's minions are mostly sub-human goblins who don't seem to be very good at much of anything other than riding atop advancing glaciers while hooting and waving clubs. Teegra escapes (using the ever-effective "look at my nipples while I writhe about in the water" method of escape), gets captured, escapes, get captured, so on and so forth. Meanwhile, a hunky barbarian named Larn survives Nekron's attack on his village and takes to wandering the land, killing goblins whenever he happens to come across them. He and Teegra eventually hook up, and then a dude named Darkwolf, in a big wolfhead hood, shows up to do some damage as well. The whole thing ends with a wild assault-by-dragon on Nekron's icy fortress. It is by no accounts a perfect film. Bakshi relies once again on the technique of rotoscoping, realized here in infinitely better fashion than in the awkward Lord of the Rings. Although this is once again a film made by first filming live-action actors on a soundstage, then animating over the top of them, there are no points at which we just get tinted footage of the live-action actors. The actual animated look is consistent, and the rotoscoping provides for very fluid and realistic movement of the characters. Unfortunately, Frazetta relies heavily on moody shading and lighting, and in that sense, Bakshi's animation falls flat -- literally. There's no real attempt, save for one or two scenes, at creating a sense of depth or lighting. Bakshi just doesn't have the time and resources to achieve such detail, and thus Frazetta's characters look less like Frazetta creations and more like Bakshi's character designs from Lord of the Rings, but better looking. There's also a funny part in one of the DVD extras where Frazetta explains that he always assumed that somewhere out there were women who looked like the women he drew, at least up until the process of rotoscoping, and thus needing to find a real woman to serve as the actress base of his design for Teegra, the booty-shaking daughter of the good king of Fire Keep. Although it fails to capture the nuance of Frazetta's original artwork, Fire and Ice still boasts pretty good if standard artwork. It reminds me of how much I miss the look of hand-drawn animation. Computer-assisted artwork results in really smooth, really slick lines and shading. By comparison, something like Fire and Ice -- which was really a stylistic throwback even upon its initial release -- looks likes a series of animated sketches, with bolder outlines, rougher around the edges. But I really like that raw look, though I have nothing against the more refined lines of modern animation. The backgrounds are also highly stylized, almost impressionist, which means they look cool and were easier to draw. With more time and better technology, Bakshi might have been able to realize a more fully developed style of animation for this film, with more inventive lighting and shading, resulting in something that looks less like a bigger budget version of The Herculoids. But he didn't have those things, and the end results are still enough fun for me to forgive him. In fact, the entire film was completed by just a tiny handful of artists working from Frazetta's character designs and Bakshi's live-action stars, which makes the TV cartoon quality moments excusable and the more richly realized moments truly impressive. One of the artists was none other than Peter Chung, who animated the dragonhawk finale and would go on to create his own scantily-clad, impossibly-proportioned heroine some years later when he wrote and animated a little show called Aeon Flux.
The acting is, at best, workmanlike, but it suits the style of the film. None of the live-action actors were anyone especially accomplished, unless you count an appearance on Glen Larson's Buck Rogers to be an accomplishment. Steve Sandor, who provides the voice of Darkwolf, is probably the most experienced actor of the bunch, having logged countless hours working on pretty much every television show that was made from Star Trek on. Luckily, the dialogue doesn't demand much of anyone, so they all glide by pretty easily and without anything really sticking as a particularly bad acting job, though a few huffs and puffs during running scenes are looped in a little too loudly. The script by Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas (the duo also worked on the script for Conan the Destroyer, and both together and separately, worked on a number of famous cartoon TV shows, including The Transformers and GI Joe) is pretty paint by numbers pulp fantasy. It doesn't do anything you don't expect it to do, and each of the characters depends on you recognizing a familiar pulp archetype. There is no back story for anyone. We have no idea who any of these people really are, or why they're doing what they do. We don't know who Nekron really is. We have no idea why Darkwolf shows up and joins forces with Larn. The extras tell us that an original draft of the movie explained that he was Nekron's father, but that never shows up -- nor is it even hinted at -- in the finished product. The thing is, none of the characters really need a complicated (or even simple) back story, because the dependence on the target audience's familiarity with stock pulp characters gets the job done. Nekron does the things he does because he's bad. Larn is good. Darkwolf is cool and mysterious. Teegra is scantily clad (even for a fantasy film princess) in a thong and flimsy bikini top and has jiggling boobs and booty cheeks. If you need any more information than that, then you've missed the point of this type of throwback story, which is to show guys in loincloths beating up goblins, intercut with leering shots of Teegra's ass as she crawls through the swamp. I would imagine a movie like Fire and Ice appeals to a very select population of people. It was a failure upon its initial release, though like most Bakshi films it built up a cult following after the fact. Measured against modern fantasy films that take advantage of cutting edge computer animation (Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy being the benchmark), something as modest as Fire and Ice can't really measure up, but you're sort of making a mistake if you pit a small-budget pulp fantasy movie from 1983 against something of that stature. Older fantasy fans, however, will probably find a lot in Fire and Ice that appeals to them, especially if they favor old-style pulp storytelling and artwork. I thoroughly enjoy Fire and Ice, beginning to end, and find it consistently entertaining and fascinating, not to mention beautifully realized despite the typical Bakshi-project budget constraints. It's a lot more enjoyable and successful as a piece of animated filmmaking than Bakshi's Lord of the Rings, and the influence of Frazetta, while not completely realized, adds even further to the old-fashioned pulp novel feel of the movie. Labels: Anime and Animation, Fantasy: Sword and Sorcery, Netflix Diary, Year: 1983 posted by Keith at 4:37 PM | 4 Comments Wednesday, September 18, 2002Chinese Gods
1980, Hong Kong. Directed by Chik Hoi Chang.
You don't see very much animation coming out of Hong Kong, and I've never really understood why. You know, when you think about it, Hong Kong seems like a pretty boring place. Where are the cartoons? Where are the punk bands? The pro wrestling? The cool toys? It's like Japan hogged the entire cool allotment for the continent of Asia, and although Hong Kong got kungfu and gangster movies, that's about it. And as far as I know, Mexican food has practically no presence in any of the Asian countries, which is a crime. Maybe someday I will move to Osaka and open a taco stand. Anyway, we're not here to talk about tacos. We were talking about how you can count the number of Hong Kong cartoons on one hand, even if that hand was mauled in an industrial accident. In fact, I've only found two cartoon movies from Hong Kong, though I think they have some television series about a flying pig or something. My excuse for Hong Kong having pretty much nothing fun going for it has always been that the island is too small and concentrated. There's really no room for punk clubs and independent films and zines and whatever. So everyone is stuck with nothing but crappy, mass produced pop entertainment. But with animation, I just don't know. Can't they just send it all to Korea like we in the United States do? Chinese Gods was the first Hong Kong cartoon I ever saw, and quite frankly, I've yet to fully recover. Someone took a lot of that brown acid they had at Woodstock, then dove too deep and got a nitrogen high, then sat down and made this utterly dumbfounding, totally amazing gem of a movie. I don't even know where to begin with this one, as the size of this film's weirdness makes it nearly impossible to get a hold of. Should I start with ancient Chinese gods and their motorcycle clouds? Or the frequent dismemberment, charring, and other acts of insane violence? How about the fact that, when all else fails, the ancient gods of China have to call on the ultimate supernatural guardian of China, Bruce Lee (sporting a cool third eye in the center of his forehead)? Well, let's start with the technical aspects of this. The artwork is pretty good, a nice mix of traditional Chinese styles with 1970s style Japanese cartoon aesthetic. The animation, however, looks about on par with what kids doing an animation project in their middle school class would come up with. It's really bad and reminds me of those crappy Christian religious cartoons they sometimes play on cable. If you have ever seen one, you know what I'm talking about. The Lord may have filled his flock with righteous condescension but he left out little things like artistic ability. That includes artistic musical talent. What the hell is the deal with Christian rock? Is there a worse sounding abomination anywhere in the universe? Okay, where were we? Let's move on to the plot of this cartoon. There is an evil warlord who is oppressing the people of his province. His wife is a fox spirit, and although they are sexy, fox spirits are always deceitful and naughty. Disgusted by the ruler's evil deeds, the gods, one of whom can make his eyes extend way far out of his head, send a wise demigod type fellow down to Earth to talk sense to the despot. In accordance with the behavior you would expect from a ruler who murders his most loyal advisors and burns lots of people alive for the hell of it, he doesn't really see the error of his ways. Angered and frustrated, the demigod whips up a tornado that carries many of the peasants to a neighboring province, where the ruler is benevolent and honest. Obviously, this is a fantasy film. The evil ruler decides to declare war on the good leader, but when his assassins fail to carry out their job, the fox spirit suggests that the evil ruler enlist the aid of the dark forces, who are pretty good at such things. In turn, the wise demigod enlists the aid of his pals up in the heavens and all out supernatural war ensues. Evil Taoist priests, monsters and demons of every possible shape and size, and god riding around on clouds that make motorcycle noises are all part of the fun. When the forces of evil send in the Three Kings of Hell as their coup de gras, the good gods summon up Bruce Lee. Yep. When God himself can't solve a problem, he calls on Bruce Lee. Wouldn't you? Bruce Lee, complete with his official silly fighting noises, materializes to kick some King of Hell ass. Bruce can do kungfu and shape shift, among other powers he never used in his other movies but we always suspected he had. I've really only scratched the surface of how insane this cartoon gets. I mean, if you thought The Wall was weird, you ain't seen nothing yet. This movie has more craziness packed into each of it's poorly animated cels than most any other film around. Was this for kids? Surely not. It shows people being chopped in half and burned at the stake, flailing and shrieking as the melt. It has demons ripping people apart and eating their limbs. I mean, sure it's the kind of movie I watched as a kid, but these kids these days are goofier. Oh well, who cares whether or not your kids can watch it, if you have kids. What I'm more interested in is my own personal enjoyment of the film, and I have to say it's really one of the most unbelievably fun and inexplicable things I've ever seen. It makes me feel a bit light-headed. It was another favorite of my stoner friend Ken Volkman, along with Young Taoism Fighter. And hey, if a stoner thinks it's weird, you know you can trust them. The animation is not great, as I said, and a lot of people will snub the film simply on that. But you have to overlook the cheap animation and enjoy the delirium of the story. And you can also admire the artwork, if not the outcome of trying to make it move. It's so cheesy to say that a film looks like someone's bad acid trip, but man alive does that ever fit the bill here. I'm not sure exactly how accurate the mythology on display is. As best I can tell, the reason Bruce Lee is no longer with us is because he had to travel back in time to like the Han Dynasty or something in order to assume his role as the ultimate god of China. He brought with him his knowledge of motorcycles and applied to it some clouds for his buddies. Well, he's a better folk hero than Buffalo Bill, anyway. Chinese Gods got a domestic video release and tends to turn up on video shelves from time to time, so keep your eyes open. When I am rich, which should happen any day now, I plan on re-releasing this film, unleashing unto this Earth some animated madness the likes of which God himself has never before witnessed. You think you know weird, but if you haven't seen this movie, your education is incomplete. Luckily, I'm here to teach you in your times of need. Labels: Anime and Animation, Country: Hong Kong, Fantasy, Martial Arts: Kungfu, Stars: Bruce Lee, Year: 1980 posted by Keith at 4:43 PM | 0 Comments Monday, August 13, 2001Dragon from Russia
1990, Hong Kong. Starring Sam Hui, Maggie Cheung, Nina Li Chih, Carrie Ng, Lee Lai-chun, Pai Ying, Yuen Tak. Directed by Clarence Ford with "input" from Dean Shek and Tsui Hark. Available on DVD (HKFlix).
Ahh, 1990. It was a very good year. I successfully finished my high school career, packed my bags, and headed due south to Florida to seek fame and fortune. Hong Kong was in the throws of what seemed to be an unstoppable Golden Era, the popularity of which was so vast that Hong Kong film makers previously unknown in the west were becoming household names, at least in the households that revolved around cult and obscure films, as mine did. The Hong Kong New Wave sort of kicked itself off in the beginning of the 1980s with two big events. The first was the teaming up of Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, and Yuen Biao in the film Project A, which pretty much forever changed the way martial arts in particular and action in general would be staged. The second event was the release of Tsui Hark's special effects blow-out Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain. Zu was the first film to make use of "Star Wars like" special effects, and with its completion, Tsui Hark had forever changed the fantasy film in the same way Jackie, Sammo, and Biao changed more conventional action films. In 1986, marginal director John Woo, who was best known for a series of rather unfunny comedy films during the 1970s, completed the revolution when he tried his hand at gangster films in the form of A Better Tomorrow. Although Woo's highly stylized, melodramatic gangster epics were the last innovation of the New Wave, the tsunami carried Hong Kong through most of the 1980s and well into the 1990s. It finally sputtered and died around 1996 or so, when with the exception of Wong Kar-wai and Christopher Doyle films, everything seemed to become as awful as they had previously been great. The Golden Era was over, and fans were forced to settle for a nauseating stream of erotic thrillers and copycat "young triad guy" movies. Fans of martial arts films were basically left watching Donnie Yen speed himself up to about 1000 miles an hour in some of the worst films of all time. Things seem to be turning around, albeit very slowly, with the release of entertaining and inventive films like Storm Riders and Chinese Ghost Story: The Animation. But for the most part, fans of Hong Kong cinema who aren't interested in the latest Wong Jing film with a title like Rape Squad or Rapist Union, or Rape Rape Rape Rape Rape and Tits have to look to the past to find quality work. One of the overlooked films of the good ol' days is this live-action adaptation of the violent Japanese comic book, Crying Freeman. Director Clarence Ford opts to remove most, but not all, of the sex and nudity that populated the comic book, and replace it with more action and kungfu. Ford also worked closely with Film Workshop masters Dean Shek and Tsui Hark, and Hark's stylistic touch is all over the film like incriminating fingerprints. But hey, that's okay with me, because I generally like Hark's work. Sam Hui, best known as a member of the successful comedy troupe that included his two brothers, Michael and Ricky, became a big-time film star via the action-packed slapstick spy caper series, Aces Go Places. Hui is a likable guy who some people mistake for Jackie Chan, probably because they have the same nose. Not literally the same nose of course, but similar looking noses. Hui was also popular as a pop star during the 1970s, and from what I've heard of his stuff, he specialized in sappy ballads and acoustic songs. For some reason, his star seemed to falter after this movie, which is too bad because he really shines. Hui plays a man visiting Russia with his girlfriend, former action/comedy star turned respectable arthouse name, Maggie Cheung. Aside from witnessing a brutal fight between two guys in a subway, the trip seems to go quite well until Hui becomes the target of a mysterious man with a fucked-up croaky voice. The man is the trainer for the 800 Dragons, a secret society of assassins. Hmm, I guess all assassin societies have to be secret. You wouldn't get very far in the field if you were a very open and obvious society of assassins. It would be like being a ninja, but wearing a headband that says "Ninja" on it in big red letters. Hui is captured and has his memory erased. During his training, be is befriended by the master's assistant, a cute and wily young woman named Pearl who has the ability to fly, more or less, or at least jump in really cool ways. And she is really good with her feet, to say the least. Hui doesn't really take any of it seriously, opting instead to be the archetypal "naughty kungfu student" despite his obvious potential. It's only when his pal, Pearl, is killed during a fight with rival assassins that Hui starts to take things more seriously. He gets the back tattoo, the mask, and the attitude that makes him the Crying Freeman, so named because he sheds a tear after each assassination. His career as a secret super assassin is filled with cool fight sequences. Purists will be put off by some of the wire work, but it's integrated well and doesn't look goofy, at least not to me. The fights are fast paced, full of acrobatics, and just plain slick. During a mission in Hong Kong, however, his old flame Maggie catches a glimpse of him, and although he is wearing the mask, she thinks she recognizes him. He pays her a visit and recreates one of the most famous scenes from the comic book, in which he assumes the framed pose of a painting his girlfriend was making. The reunion is quickly broken up when vengeful thugs crash in on them. Maggie is shot by Freeman's own assistant, who wants to protect the secret of his identity and eliminate any chance of him regaining his memory. Either that, or he had to sit through Irma Vep. One of the movies best scenes, and it has several, is when Freeman and his associates seek revenge on the renegade assassins who killed Pearl. The fight takes place in a church, and as if the sight of Nina Li Chih, who plays Freeman's partner, dressed as a gun-toting nun isn't enough reason to justify the movie, then I don't know what is. Anyway, you have to see the thing for full effect, but the shots of masked assassins perched atop cathedral steeples and crosses are a fantastic visual. The movie follows it up with another short but cool scene in which Freeman battles Nina Li Chih in a shower. She is not happy with Maggie still being alive and posing a threat to Freeman's identity. Thus, Freeman himself becomes a rogue. For Maggie Cheung, I'm sure any man, and probably most women, would gladly suffer the ire of an ancient secret society of assassins and be happy about it - as long as she promised to never make a movie like Irma Vep again. While Nina and the assistant decide to help Freeman out, the rest of the society, including the old master, are not as forgiving. The finale sees Freeman face off with his teacher in a truly spectacular fight sequence that still wows me nearly nine years after I first saw it. I absolutely love this movie. It has a good story, and perhaps best of all, is jam-packed with creativity and wild action. I know some Crying Freeman fans were put off by the amount of comedy in the film's first half, but I think it helps make everyone more human and believable, even when they are flying over churches and engaging in insane kungfu fights. It also helps the film's finale pack more of an impact. The best thing about this movie is the visual style. The masks and set-pieces are very nice, and the action sequences are stylish and unique. It's too bad they don't make them like this one anymore. But at least they made it once. Labels: Anime and Animation, Country: Hong Kong, Director: Tsui Hark, Espionage, Martial Arts: Kungfu, Year: 1990 posted by Keith at 2:21 AM | 0 Comments Friday, March 30, 2001Arcadia of My Youth
1982, Japan. Starring the voices of Makio Inoue, Kei Tomiyama, Takeshi Aono, Shuichi Ikeda, Taro Ishida, Yujiro Ishihara, Eiji Kanie, Satomi Majima, Eiko Masuyama, Shuichiro Moriyama, Reiko Muto, Seiko Nakano, Rinko Okamoto, Ai Sakuma, Masaharu Sato, Hidekatsu Shibata, Kaneto Shiozawa, Reiko Tajima, Kin Takagi, Hideyuki Tanaka, Makoto Terada, Hiromi Tsuru, Yuriko Yamamoto, Koji Yata, Hiroshi Otake. Directed by Tomoharu Katsumata. Created by Leiji Matsumoto. Buy it from Amazon
 .Legendary Japanese cartoon artist Leiji Masumoto pretty much defined the 1970s style of animation with his monumental creations Space Battle Cruiser Yamato (released in the United States as Star Blazers) and Captain Harlock. I read a lot of anime reviews that can't seem to get over the "retro look" of older animation, meaning the way cartoon art looks when it's actually art instead of computer generated stuff. I just don't relate to their problems. I think the 1970s style of animation is beautiful. Masumoto's character design is unique and easily recognizable, another element that is missing from much modern-day anime, where everyone just seems to look the same and no one is going out of their way to distinguish their artwork from anyone else's. Masumoto's characters are drawn in a somewhat bizarre, elongated style, almost wraithlike. They're quite interesting and were obvious influences on more recent anime films such as Silent Moebius. But what really sets Masumoto's work apart from the pack is his frequent allusion to the past, and in particular, to World War II. The most obvious, of course, is Space Battle Cruiser Yamato, and since we have plans to review that series in the near future, I won't go into a detailed history of the legendary flop of a World War II battleship, the Yamato. Masumoto's a master of transplanting elements from the past into futuristic surroundings, a stylistic element that would later become a mainstay of cyberpunk films thanks to Blade Runner and Brazil, two more films that excel at mixing antiquity with futurism. Most anime fans have at least heard of Captain Harlock, even if their new school mentalities keep them from embracing old cartoons in much the same way that new school Hong Kong kungfu film fans turn their noses up at the wonderful films of the 1960s and 1970s. What can you do with these people, really? Harlock was a mainstay in Japanese television throughout much of the 1970s and more or less became the icon of that generation of animation. He was a space pirate and freedom fighter roaming the universe in his massive starship, Arcadia of My Youth, fighting the forces of oppression. Harlock, along with frequent partner in galactic crime Queen Emereldas, popped up not just in his own series but also in assorted other Masumoto creations, including the Galaxy Express 999 films, and DNA 999, which unites characters from Galaxy Express 999, Captain Harlock, and Space Battle Cruiser Yamato. That's another of the many things I love about Masumoto. Plenty of animators have created a wonderful body of work -- Haiyo Miazaki (Nausicaa, My Neighbor Totoro) and Masimune Shirow (Ghost in the Shell, Appleseed) are two who spring to mind -- but no one has linked all their various creations together into a coherent and massive universe. The characters from one Masumoto creation, however, are often likely to cross paths the creations from another, drawing his entire tapestry together into a truly fleshed-out, believable world. The gestalt makes each of the individual pieces that much more engrossing, and makes Masumoto's grand vision, creation, and master plan that much more impressive. Arcadia of My Youth was the first (and as far as I know, only) feature film dedicated to Harlock. It works basically as a preamble to his adventures, going into detail about his origins as a pilot during Earth's war with a conquering race, his role as a freedom fighter, the acquisition of his star cruiser and crew, and his exile to the blackness of space. Masumoto weaves the entire tale around a core story that reflects the occupation of Japan after World War II. It begins with a sequence about one of Harlock's ancestors -- all of Harlock's ancestors were pilots of one sort of aircraft or another -- facing off in his plane, Arcadia of My Youth, against a seemingly impassable mountain area nicknamed the Stanley Witch. The film switches back and forth frequently between the story of space pirate Harlock and his ancestors, one of whom was a fighter pilot in Europe during World War II (as best I can tell, Harlock is of Swiss descent?), but the bulk of the story takes place on the Earth of the future. The planet has been conquered, and rather than engage in a bloody and prolonged uprising, the leaders of the planet bend over backwards to please their new bosses. Harlock, who we first meet as the pilot of a ship transporting refugees, refuses a post in the new regime, preferring instead to walk away from flight than serve the new masters. He meets another former pilot named Toshiro in a bar, and before you know it, the two are part of a small band of freedom fighters. Much of this happens because of Harlock's relationship with a women named Maya, who runs a pirate radio station broadcasting pro-freedom messages. She is public enemy number one. Harlock and Toshiro meet a sympathetic government soldier who a member of a previously subjugated race on another planet. He uses some sci-fi gizmo stuff to let Toshiro and Harlock remember their past lives and the times their ancestors met in World War II. When the soldier discovers his own planet is scheduled for total obliteration by his new commanders, he decides to help Harlock and his band of rebels. Harlock also encounters the beautiful Queen Emereldas, a free space trader who decides to take her place alongside Harlock rather than maintain her status as a trader. Toshiro reveals the battleship he has been building in secret underground, a massive battle cruiser named Arcadia of My Youth. Harlock, a couple sympathetic government soldiers from the doomed planet, and Toshiro take to the stars to save the planet while Maya and Emereldas are captured back on Earth and scheduled to be executed in an attempt to pressure Harlock into returning. Putting to death the two women strikes a cord with a lot of the previously docile human subjects, and an all out uprising allows Maya and Emereldas to escape as revolution breaks out in the streets. Emereldas, however, is wounded, giving her the familiar scar across her cheek that resembles Harlock's scar and marks her as his female alter ego. Maya herself is exhausted from her prolonged life as a fugitive, and a gunshot wound during the insurrection pushes her that much closer to death. Two things Masumoto has never shied away from are tragedy and melodrama, and he is exquisite at rendering both. In a painful scene, Harlock and his crew arrive at the planet only to find they are too late. It's already been destroyed. Down but not out, Harlock and his crew return to Earth to aid in the rebellion. Harlock is allowed to return to claim the body of the sympathetic soldier who helped him and Toshiro, but he is exiled to space after that. Emereldas decides to accept the same fate with her ship. Harlock spends his final moments on Earth with the dying Maya. Of course, nothing is that simple. One of the commanders of the occupying force is impressed by Harlock's loyalty to his planet and his dedication to freedom. He is determined to meet Harlock in combat, one on one, ship to ship. As with the battles in the Yamato series, the final fight is done in the same style as the great battleship fights of World War I and II. Arcadia of My Youth is a powerful movie that is highlighted by compelling characters, a wonderful story, plenty of emotion, and a shining message about fighting for freedom and sticking to your beliefs even when it would be simpler and easier to conform to the status quo and surrender. Harlock is a champion of free thought, and Masumoto's celebration of the freedom fighters is invigorating. Parallels are, of course, drawn to the occupation of Japan after World War II and the rapid "Westernization," that occurred there as the Japanese people did their best to mimic and appease their new leaders. Masumoto isn't celebrating the Japanese militarism of World War II, of course -- he's far too much a humanist to either close his eyes to or support the cruelty and madness that misd Japan's imperial era. But he does mourn the quickness with which people abandon their traditions and ideals when faced with actually standing up for them. The entire cast of characters is wonderfully fleshed out. Supporting cast members are given as much development as the main cast, making each character a vibrant and convincing entity. I don't think any anime or manga creator is as much a master of characterization as Masumoto. By the time you're done with one of his creations, you genuinely feel like you know these people. Arcadia of My Youth is a sweeping epic, a space opera that continues to add depth to the universe created by Leiji Masumoto. It's a celebration of freedom and selfless sacrifice, an indictment of conformity, and an all-around wonderful film that draws its power from hope, tragedy, and the range of human emotion. It's rare that a film has anything to say to or teach us; it's even more rare that anime is possessed of such depth of story and character. It's a monumental film from a monumental artist. Masumoto's work is often very nearly overwhelming in it's scope yet somehow is minutely involved in the emotions and lives of the individual. It's quite a feat, and one that has been pulled off in grand fashion in this film. Labels: Anime and Animation, Anime: 80s, Country: Japan, Series: Captain Harlock, Series: Leiji Masumoto, Year: 1982 posted by Keith at 11:20 PM | 0 Comments |
