#80: Landlock (1995)

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Director: Yasuhiro Matsumura

Screenplay: ORCA

(Voice) Cast: Ally Coyote as Agahali; Darryl Borden as Luda; Howard Chen as Nosaku; J.F. Searle as Zanark; Mike Pustil as Volk; Sarah LaFleur as Ansa

Viewed in the English Dub

Synopsis: In the world of Zer’lue, a young boy named Luda (Darryl Borden) is assigned the power of the red eye of the Wind God, only for Zanark of the Zul’earth kingdom to invade and kill his father as a plan to have the red and blue eyes of said God for himself.

[Spoilers Throughout]

Landlock? Somehow in watching this generic 90s fantasy anime, part of the Manga Entertainment DVD collection of old licenses, I pine for Violence Jack (1986-1990) again of all things. I cannot even make the comment, admittedly cruel, that I'd never thought Ghost in the Shell author Masamune Shirow could pen a bland sci-fi fantasy anime...only to learn he only contributed to the (admittedly nice) character designs and Landlock has little beyond that in notoriety.

Being able to fish virtues out of any anime, even Landlock has moments of visual vibrancy, originally a two part OVA but put together as a theatrical length one-off by Manga Entertainment, who also (unfortunately) created a terrible English dub, one of the least worthwhile in a while from The Collection series. Visually, the anime at least has a colourful, sci-fi folk world of ancient period dress but with floating sky fortresses, mech robots and the sort of visual styling you would find on a prog rock or power metal album cover, which isn't a bad thing at all. Even the decision, based on providing a contrast between two halves of a godlike power based on red light/eye or blue light/eye, has a nice aesthetic appeal as well as being for an anime (by some unconfirmed and debatable source) that was going to have a Sega Saturn game tie-in that never came to be, thus would've been part of the power up aesthetic if it came to be.

From https://www.onthebox.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Landlock-1.jpg

Unfortunately this in service of the most generic of properties; Shirow merely designing the characters is a shame as, whilst by all accounts as mad as a box of frogs from what he apparently went on to (weird porn and all) in his career afterwards, he would've gone somewhere interesting in ideas even if the results were a car crash. Instead this emphasises the dangers of fantasy as a genre, its reductions of Hero's Journey plotting, and bastardising mythology and religious tales continuing until it's the flavour of cardboard.

Only that sense of visual spectacle occasionally stands out among a really generic cast of characters - standard teenage male hero, quirky anthropologist who is pulled into the tale and does little, the hero's sister and so forth. The only real drama is to be found with the villainess who kill's the hero's father, revealed to be related, thus making her decisions in murder to have a horrible new context, all whilst one of her male squad members working under her is willing to changes sides with her as he is in love with her. It is in itself a fascinating side plot that, in another context, would have been fascinating to see even if there's the absurd notion that she's managing a squad despite being a teenager. That and the fan service nudity, which is creepy when its signposted the main characters are teenagers; it is one of those constantly bizarre decisions in anime found even into the modern day that, even as a fan of anime, has always baffled me when it made far more sense to have characters in their twenties instead of, even without shifting into Hubert Hubert territory, having a tasteless choice and a clear fear of aging.

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After that, it's low in choice to find anything to fill a review up further from. The issues with The Collection, this reoccurring series that only a madman like myself will be obsessed with, is that as with any company Manga Entertainment licensed titles to push out product, and in any era of the anime industry they'll release material that you'd look back on with bafflement if you came across old VHS and DVDs as much as hidden gems, a phenomenon that exists still in the streaming world and probably is worse now. The OVA market, which fed into much of The Collection, is one that for every compelling work (for good or bad) also includes product like Landlock which feels like it squandered artists and ideas.

And Landlock, especially if you can cut a trailer set to Mad Capsule Markets as Manga Entertainment did, would have easily worked as a curious sci-fi tale which yet emphasises a medieval/possible Mesoamerican influenced world, one of a wind god and ritual statues of deities you can use to teleport over vast distances if you have the power, evoking Dune in the blurring the fantastical and the intergalactic. Plus no one would argue with the dynamic meat of a villain, female in this case, who is scarred by what she has been tricked into doing to changing sides for a legitimately profound reason, something more morally superior (and common in anime) than the Western tendency to kill  them of in revenge. Especially more so, as the hero himself is your generic male non-entity, that the female characters have a hell of a lot more cared for it their designs than any of the male characters in their own, another peculiar trait of anime I have less concern of even if there's a fear of a creepy fetishisation in a female character's hair colour.

From https://i.ytimg.com/vi/_Af2YLu2e1k/hqdefault.jpg

Instead, it's bland, that aforementioned dub terrible and also makes me pine for Violence Jack which, for all the horrible content removed from it, at least had a memorable dub. If anything at this stage going through The Collection, the closer to the mid-nineties and onwards the more interesting observations are to be found in the tropes that'd take over, like that weird fan service, and the increasing emphasis on bland male teenage heroes over gruff men. Distinctly, in its sense of colour and style, it's of the nineties only, looking very different from the eighties but different from the modern day after the transition to digital animation techniques.

There's also the sense that, if one is going to appreciate trash or have tropes that I am immediately smitten with, Landlock's too set on telling its generic tale without any sense of surprise or the fun of slightly going insane, a killjoy stubbornly telling an obvious story straight. There's not even a scene of the protagonist ending up in a phantom realm of swirling colours and objects, whilst a supernatural entity providing an exposition dump, that became a personal obsession of mine as a result of viewing The Collection titles, all in spite of the opportunity to in a story which gives you carte blanche for it to happen, and eventually leads to giant hands being summoned that can smash whole miles of forest canopy underneath them....that it wasn't included and could've just makes me feel more disappointed.

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