#272: The Big O (1999–2003)

 

Studio: Sunrise

Director: Kazuyoshi Katayama

Screenplay: Chiaki J. Konaka, Keiichi Hasegawa, Masanao Akahoshi and Shin Yoshida

Voice Cast: Mitsuru Miyamoto as Roger Smith, Akiko Yajima as R. Dorothy Wayneright, Motomu Kiyokawa as Norman Burg, Tesshō Genda as Dan Dastun, Unshō Ishizuka as Alex Rosewater, Emi Shinohara as Angel, Gorō Naya as Gordon Rosewater, Hōchū Ohtsuka as Beck Gold, Katsunosuke Hori as Michael Seebach / Schwarzwald, Issei Futamata as Alan Gabriel (Season Two)

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

The Big O begins with Batman. The animation studio Sunrise was commissioned to help on the legendary Batman: The Animated Series (1992-5), and in the creation of The Big O, you have a work paying tribute to this and Western popular culture like film noir films. They were also clearly inspired by older manga and anime such as Mitsuteru Yokoyama's Giant Robo, which is important as director Kazuyoshi Katayama and others on this series worked on Giant Robo: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1992-8), an straight-to-video production which adapted the source manga but also a tribute to Yokoyama's other manga, including characters from even period tales being placed into this sci-fi narrative. The final show inspired from these two sides of influence in The Big O however could have ended up a different way though. It was also a series which managed the near impossible, of how it was not actually a success in its first season in Japanese broadcast, to the point it was cancelled, but was able to continue and finish the narrative for a second series because of its importation to the West and success on Cartoon Network’s Toonami slot on television, commissioning the second series when it did well and the abrupt end the first season came to be.

The Big O is set in Paradigm City, where forty years earlier a cataclysm left it seemingly the last city, part protected in domes and everyone forgetting memories of the past. Enough survived for a proper urban civilization to still function, and latent memories still allow figures to operate even giant robots. One such figure is the Bruce Wayne of this world, Roger Smith a former member of the military police who is now a “negotiator”, a cross between what you would expect for the title and a detective. Good at his job but with eccentricities, like everyone working for him having to wear black and refusing to use a gun on the job, he also has latent memories that gave him access to the titular O, a member of multiple “megadeus“, a giant robot clearly inspired by the comic character Popeye in the piston arms as much as a tribute to the likes of Giant Robo and Tetsujin 28, especially as like those robots, Smith uses a wristwatch communicator to bring him when needed to his location.

His Alfred the butler is Norman, who is also a cool butler, with a clear military history, and calm enough to be cooking dinner whenever Roger is on the job knowing his boss will return at the right time for a fight to enjoy it. The best side character though has to be Dorothy Wainwright, and that is in mind this is one of the strongest casts in general for an anime series, so that is a high bar. Her full name is R. Dorothy Wainwright, and that is explicitly referencing how Isaac Asimov, the legendary sci-fi author, had androids name themselves, as she is one of the few androids in the cast, though explicitly the one who looks entirely human and seemingly is. The show, among tropes it explores, includes how these figures are so close in seemingly having freewill, such as her deadpan rebuttals of Roger’s moments of heroics, that they bleed the lines of what consciousness. She is also just an awesome female character to have, with the amount of times she is threatened with being hacked or destroyed in the series meaning a lot more because she is a perfect foil to a great lead, introduced over the two part first episodes for the show. The English dub for this series is as well regarded as the Japanese one, but I have to confess as much the virtue for this character is Akiko Yajima's robotic yet almost human sense of bluntness, making the fact her most prolific voice acting role funny in a great way, being Shinnosuke "Shin-chan" Nohara, the lead of the hugely popular Crayon Shin-chan franchise. Whilst bowing out as the lead voice for the character eventually, the fact this is the same actress who played a sarcastic and scatological obsessed five year old boy from the first anime adaptations in 1992 to 2018 is evidence of the talent of a lot of voice actors and actresses in their diverseness.

That cast is one of the best aspects of the show, even when I will admit there are some visible pacing issues in the plot that will be addressed later in this review. Office Dastun, who knew Roger Smith in the military police force and stayed friends, is a great side character who has a lot of angst to also work with, as the military police he is part of, the closest to enforcement, is under the pocket of the shady group who run Paradigm City, and are powerless when they need to constantly bring in Smith and The Big O to deal with threats they cannot even with tanks and military weaponry.  Antagonists are the same: Alex Rosewater is perfect as the sinister head of Paradigm City, given more by the second series as he collects fallen foes of Smith’s, resurrecting the robots and unlocking their memories for nefarious means. Beck Gold, who looks like a parody of Lupin the 3^rd, is a lovable git even if his constant crimes and smugness definitely makes him a villain, and thankfully he gets a few episodes for himself, including a parody of Japanese super robots, and even stays by the end of series two when you would presume he would stay merely a tertiary figure. Then there are the more ambiguous figures. One, the femme fatale for Roger Smith named Angel, will become a much more complex character, seemingly a “foreigner” in a world without other countries, by the end an integral part to the complicated twists that key screenwriter Chiaki J. Konaka set up. The other is the one character who should have had more time devoted to him, though thankfully in a form he gets to the ending of his goals: that will be a former journalist who became Schwarzwald, seemingly a villain in his mission to cause mayhem but, standing out for his bandaged visage, he is a figure who will use any means to learn the truth of Paradigm City and open the public’s eyes to the reality of the world. He emphasizes how, from the get-go for all the episodic stories, the huge concern in the series' narrative is how this amnesiac city came to be and what is the truth of its origins, which Schwarzwald is obsessed with learning.

Schwarzwald‘s smaller role does present the issues with The Big O, that whilst it leads to a proper conclusion, and that I already view this as a gem from the era it was made, it suffered in terms of pacing itself out and telling said story. When I first saw the series, it was only season one I had access to, which has episodic stories I now enjoy more but were clearly the backdrop for a larger story already being drip fed. Infamously, when cancelled and seemingly gone for good, the first series ended on an abrupt “To Be Continue” moment without any chance for anything to be explained. Sadly when I first saw this, the Bandai DVD releases in the mid-2000s in Britain, through their Beez Entertainment arm in Europe, never released the second series, leaving this with some disappointment. Thankfully we did get that second series in the first place even if it never had a UK physical release, one I have now seen and was able to finally complete the story as supposed to be told, all because of this being one of those cases, in its form getting good ratings on Cartoon Network, where a Western company invested in the franchise seeing potential for more.

Set up in the final episode of season one, where Roger locates Rosewater's father, the founder of the city now going senile on a tomato farm in the countryside, and finds repressed memories are starting to cause him to question his position, it sets up Season Two where Chiaki J. Konaka wrote all the stories, rather than season one where three others contributed stories too. It however also leads to a conclusion itself which did not allow itself to breath, and all of this is entirely due to the final episode feeling rushed. The irony is not lost that, for a series I will praise to the high heavens for so much, the one caveat I have to make is that the final reveal, just the last ten or so minutes of the final episode, is likely to peeve or confuse a few people, and I say this as a person who likes and would normally defend the more unconventional and vague story reveals found in Konaka's other work, where they feel deliberate and not abrupt as here. Some may find the second series too esoteric when a more pulpy narrative twist would make sense, but for me, it is the case that everything works in logic, but that this literally rushed the final moments for what is a very existential story. [Huge Spoiler] That being that this literally all a stage, all an artificial construct but having gained existence and wanting to still exist [Spoilers End]. Thankfully so much works up to the middle of the last episode that means the ending does not ruin the show. So much before is set up well that it thankfully does not become a crushing disappointment for a show with a lot on its mind, merely one you are going to need to stop after finishing the series and digest carefully. Even by those last episodes a lot is already set up to the show's create to expose the real story, this being not a world of amnesia, people being killed for returning memories at one point, but that there is also by the end people who find their memories are being recreated on stages, and that Angel herself becomes far more important as mentioned to how the world works without realizing it. It is really a case that, for someone who even enjoyed Konaka's more vague endings for work like Malice @Doll (2001) that an exposition dump or a more visually explained conclusion for the last episode was really needed.

Thankfully so much did work, and that includes the plot build ups and the one-off stories. Stories of Dorothy adopting a cat in Season One, with its bittersweet end, or the abrupt Christmas episode involving a demon tree now stand out more for when they are connected to a story which, barring that final lack of clarity, get so much right. Even when Konaka took over the scripts for season two fully, he has his moments. to the season, Smith so unconfident his existential crisis literally throws him into an alternative reality of Paradigm City as a homeless man, is inspired as the Japanese robot parody is, the later more so for becoming as a work from a Japanese animation studio a parody of Japanese archetypes. Even plot growth works, between the growing involving of a splinter group of foreigners Angel is connected to, or the ways this can combine the episodic stories with this, such as a threat against all androids with memories like Dorothy which allows a story involving one android detective being brought in as an awkward buddy cop partner with Dastun.

It is a world too with so much rich detail that you do get some proper denouement over the second series, as Rosewater becomes more megalomaniacal and wanting to become God, and the sides clashing over it becoming more prominent, also introducing a season two only character, Alan Gabriel, as a suitably nasty sociopath on his side. It is also helped by the style being incredible through the two series. Inspired by Western works, and very clearly inspired by Batman in the Art Deco style let alone the character designs, it is a sumptuous looking series both visually and audibly, mixing its metropolis location and combining it by a jazz heavy score by Toshihiko Sahashi. Also of note for his own musical compositions is Rui Nagai, though his work sadly had to be re-dubbed over due to how heavily it paid tribute to other music. For the first broadcasts, season two used a piece indebted to British 1970 sci-fi series UFO's own theme, which was replaced quickly. Sadly that even included season one's awesome opening theme, which was on the DVD release I had, a Queen tribute specifically indebted to their song Flash for the 1980s Flash Gordon film, also eventually axed. Thankfully, Rui Nagai composed Big-O! Show Must Go On, as a replacement to both, which is awesome in its own way as a surf riff guitar song with a bad ass solo.

As a giant robot show as well, all this provides a distinct attitude for a title in the genre, especially as the aesthetic style is distinct. Batman and film noir are very distinct touches for a mecha show to have, feeling close to what Tim Burton brought to the Batman franchise with the 1989 film, which influenced the Batman animated series. Even its tribute to its own country's mecha stories is distinct though, as this also a world where these robots feel like giant tanks slowly lunging about, and where alongside its distinct “typewriter-punk” mechanics has details like how the robot punches are literally piston powered. Thankfully The Big O, despite not being a success for the first Japanese broadcasts, had its day in the sun eventually, with tie-ins like an audio drama, inclusion in the Super Robot Wars video game franchise with other cult mecha anime, and a lot of models/figures both for the Big O himself and its cast. It is a franchise I wish was better known in the United Kingdom, as nothing in this barring its final ten minutes rushing too fast would ever be challenged as being divisive. After my initial disappointment with the first series a long time ago, seen in its full form it is with positivity that they could have continued the story a little longer and avoided ever making a bad episode, still getting to the eventual final with everything as good as it was. If anything, this is the kind of show you introduce to someone curious about giant robot anime, and they could be made fans of the genre just from what this does differently whilst paying tribute to the genre's tropes, which is as high praise as I could write for this.

#273: Cyber City Oedo 808 (1990–1991)

Studio: Madhouse

Director: Yoshiaki Kawajiri

Screenplay: Akinori Endo

Voice Cast: Hiroya Ishimaru as Shunsuke Sengoku, Kaneto Shiozawa as Merrill "Benten" Yanagawa, Tesshō Genda as Rikiya "Goggles" Gabimaru, Emi Shinohara as Remi Masuda, Kyousei Tsukui as Versus, Mitsuko Horie as Kyōko "Okyō" Jōnouchi, Norio Wakamoto as Juzo Hasegawa

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

Madhouse would have success with Wicked City in 1987, one of their more infamous titles which helped when its director Yoshiaki Kawajiri pushed for a theatrical release and it paid dividends for the studio¹. That was however an adaptation, based on the work of author Hideyuki Kikuchi, and with Cyber City Oedo, Madhouse and Kawajiri decided to create their own original intellectual property, one which was meant to be a multimedia one. This came to be true as there was a video game, the 1991 game for the PC-Engine CD-ROM², and a novel¹. Cyber City itself, made for the straight to video format, was only to last for three forty plus minute episodes, never leading to anything further, but still became a cult anime in the decades after, even if by way of alternative dubs and music tracks being created for the images as we will get into.

Oedo is a cyberpunk tale where, with criminal sentences possible to reach longer than the average human lifespan, prisoners are forced to live in the orbit of space, presumably in a way to extend their lives to suffer for their cybercrimes. Three prisoners housed in an orbital prison are offered an alternative by Juzo Hasegawa, a police chief, that they can reduce their life sentences for each criminal they bring in, with each having to ability to return with life on Earth but with explosive neck collars permanently on that, able to be timed, prevents any prisoner to take this offer to flee once they are back in public. This explicitly nods to period chambara tropes places in the future as "Oedo" is likely a reference to "Edo", the original name for Tokyo, whilst in Japanese history, the weapon they are all assigned, jitte, if a science fiction version of a weapon, with sai-like blunt ends, that was used by police in Edo-period Japan. Beyond this, the straight to video series is a hyper-exaggerated world, where in episode one, the main location is a space-scraper, a skyscraper so comically impractical in height, now in orbit at the top, that if the central threat managed to disable the gyroscope fully and cause it to fall, it would have led to a natural disaster of cataclysmic proportions. This has a variety of tropes and clichés of this type of “cyberpunk” of androids, cyborgs with psychic powers, and one of our leads having monomolecular wire, a concept the likes of author William Gibson, a huge figure in cyberpunk fiction, among other writers were obsessed with where you have weaponised wire so sharp on a molecular level that it could cut through anything, even through the neck of a cyber enhanced saber-toothed tiger. The leads, interconnecting as regular characters, however do get the starring role each for the three episodes, Shunsuke Sengoku the lead for episode one in the space-scraper. Sengoku is your typical hothead, who is heroic as an anti-hero figure but also anti-authoritarian, with a love-hate relationship with Juzo and especially against the sentient computer that occupancies them. This computer is arguably the fourth lead and deserving it, as the deadpan retorts in the Japanese dub are very funny, all from the perspective as an AI which cannot understand some of the insults thrown at it, such as when it has to explain how, with an internal geo-map system, it cannot possibly “get lost” on command. For episode one, with Sengoku and his constant argument with this robot, you get a great first episode to begin this work, where the serious tone in spite of how absurd this is in truth works fully.

Rikiya "Goggles" Gabimaru stands out as a character that would rarely get to be a lead in an anime, an older man if with a Mohawk, the more conventional of the noble anti-heroes despite his visual look.  His is the type of macho melodrama, which is secretly sentimental and melancholic if filtered through acion tropes, encountering an old partner of crime who was also his old flame, involved in a conspiracy involving the corrupt military project of psychic robots. The owner of the monomolecular wire, and lead of the third episode, is Merrill "Benten" Yanagawa. Benten inherently stands out of the cast as, among very distinct characters in the history of anime, even minor ones, you have here an ultra androgynous final lead, a really distinct figure who is probably the most iconic for the whole production, bringing up a combination of glam rock feminization, with red lipstick and hyper feminine features, with kabuki aesthetic and a shock white mullet, aged in designed but entirely timeless. His episode also is the most idiosyncratic even in a very stylish and creative production, in that this brings horror tropes into science fiction with artificially created vampires. The result of this brings a gothic and moody sensibility to the proceedings with the first ounces even of tragedy to the production, as it involves a woman cryogenically preserved doomed in this life forced onto her by another, as it ups the gore in imagining an undead individual being driven out an airlock in space. It is this episode particularly where the show's ability to be serious despite also being ridiculous shows the virtue of this tightrope act, intentionally and unintentionally.

It is a ridiculous anime in a good way, where we are dealing with a premise where there is never a moment stopping to question its own logic or feeling contrived in a way that undercuts faith in the material. Cybernetic saber tooth tigers is a high watermark in the absurd, as mentioned earlier in the review, but found in episode three, this takes it further with them kept in a cryogenic hub in tubs among three hundred year old patients, a place in outer space connected to a hospital by a space elevator, and armed with lasers, with the anime managing to add more flourishes to these sort of moments. This is throughout each episode with all these "questionable" moments becoming highlights alongside the tone and style of the work winning you over. The seriousness of the production helps, feeling like the delirium usually found in a video game from this time, and helping this is how this is Madhouse at their highest of quality. Yoshiaki Kawajiri is an insanely talented figure in anime, even when he is in the animation department after his directorial career seemingly ended into the 2010s, but as much of the virtues is the entire staff too, where your mechanical animation director for an example is Takeshi Koike, the future director of Redline (2009), one of the most underrated theatrical anime in need of greater attention and showing where his work here before came from.

The audio is its own curious history for the OVA. I watched this in the original Japanese version, but the history needs to be marked how, whilst Manga Entertainment bought the license with great interest, they took their own decisions which added more to the story beyond a good pulp anime. They were known infamously for "fifteening" their dubs already, where to increase the age rating with the British film classification for all physical home releases, they added swearing into the dialogue alongside adding their own flourishes. This is an idiosyncratic production however in that they went further in changing the music track. I like the moody synth provided by composer Kazz Toyama, but if you are talking of Cyber City Oedo, specifically to its British release as the Central Park Media/U.S. Manga Corps release decided to not go forwards with this choice in the United States, you have to talk about this version as it is part of the legacy in the West. Rory McFarlane's contribution, combining hard rock, thrash metal and synth, even influenced by Mountain's Nantucket Sleighride (to Owen Coffin)¹, is a distinct score to hear, and thus it is worth talking about too as a highlight even heard in snippets. For Kawajiri himself, this is getting into the golden period of his career between the late eighties to the 2000s, one where you see here that, for all his notoriety with certain titles for their transgression, what his trademark was, whether the screenwriter of the story or not as in this case, his trademark where these kinetic stories of larger than life figures, in larger than life scenarios, which never for all their moments of absurdities feel entirely a high quality in grandeur for this era of pulp anime storytelling. Even Ninja Scroll (1993), which shared in the more notorious content of his career, showed this and, in spite of the knowledge Cyber City Oedo was not the biggest hit as Manga Entertainment hoped for¹, that would benefit from the virtues found here, in a period chambara tale, and gain even bigger status in Western anime pop culture among the other titles Kawajiri would helm.

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1) Taken from the documentary Inside Cyber City Oedo (2020), directed by Andy Hanley.