#86: Urban Square: In Pursuit of Amber (1986)

From https://a.ltrbxd.com/resized/film-poster/1/1/2/3/8/9/112389-
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Director: Akira Nishimori

Screenplay: Kazunori Itō

Voice Cast: Akiko Hiramatsu as Naomi; Eiko Yamada as Yuki Tamura; Kazuhiko Inoue as Ryou Matsumoto; Hirotaka Suzuoki as Shimohara; Kazumi Tanaka as Hasebu; Kei Wada as Professor Naratomo; Makio Inoue as Henmi; Nobuo Tanaka as Detective Mochizuki

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

Synopsis: Failing author and deadbeat Ryou Matsumoto finds himself in the middle of mystery, potential love and the chance of losing his life when he witnesses a man being gunned down on the street in a chance encounter.

When Adolphe Sax invented the saxophone, did he envision his instrument being the soundtrack of cheesy eighties lounger jazz? As someone who played the alto sax until sixteen-eighteen, at college, I have a bias for arguably one for one of the best looking, designed and sounding instruments ever created (including the non-alto variants), but I am also painfully aware of how the nineteen eighties made the instrument a joke. It's not the "Sexy Sax Man" in the opening of The Lost Boys (1987) that's a bad example either, that example a meme which became awesome, but all the terrible soundtracks instead which marred the reputation of Sax's instrument. Its particularly poignant when one reads of Sax's life and how he nearly died multiple times in his childhood - a three floor fall, drinking vitriolized water by accident, swallowing a pin, burned twice, nearly being poisoned trice, near drowning and other freak mishaps - to the point his own mother thought him cursed to eventually die, only to realise how he managed to still scrape through, designing the saxophone alongside other cool looking instruments, only for really tacky muzak to besmirch his hard work. Now Urban Square's, actually getting to the anime OVA itself and the score by Chickenshack, isn't that bad, but it does have the cheesiest aspect to what is an anime very aware of its own clichés for good humour*.

In this short form action thriller, which treats moments of death and potential severity as a playful farce, there's a reoccurring gag which plays on our hapless protagonist Ryou Matsumoto, who escapes bullet fire like a Lupid the 3rd character in cartoon motion, never wanting to write anything based on his own life despite people constantly recommending this advice to him. The irony is not lost when one character later introduced, a stereotypical hard boiled cop eventually thrown off the police force, shots a helicopter with just a big gun. It is a predictable narrative - one hero, villains who are very bad, a female love interest named Yuki Tamura who is sweet and in peril a few times - with the only real quirk being that the story's over faked relic certificates. The rest could've been a live action Hollywood film.

From http://animediet.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/US3-600x374.jpg

Probably the other idiosyncratic detail is the story being animated, which is important for myself as animating an action scene rather than shooting it on a set has a different effect. I must confess I can find action films dull despite the hard work making them, but due to the inherent hard work to put together an animated action scene, I had to appreciate animation when it's actually good, Urban Square for what it managed to do also good, especially as it is a solidly well made and stylish production. Noticeably as well, whilst it plays itself as comedic, it does play its actions sequences with real deaths involved, providing a sense of gristly consequence that does give the OVA an edge; all the while with its lead is still constantly referencing the clichés being used within the story itself for an added flavour to the material.

A large part of this is just because its screenwriter is Kazunori Itō, famous for the Patlabor franchise, the first 1995 Ghost in the Shell film and other famous productions which vary between serious and comedic tones. He is, alongside everyone involved with the production, playing to the clichés for fun. Whether it makes sense to or not doesn't clearly matter, one assassin sent after Ryou not a gun toting villain but a martial artist sent to just destroy him (and his entire apartment) with kicks and punches, nor the man versus helicopter segment which feels entirely from the American action films being made at the same time with more self awareness of itself as a moment.

Helping with Urban Square, as mentioned, is that it's one of the better made anime OVAs I've seen from the eighties. Beginning with Akemi Takada's character, her career with famous eighties work like Urusei Yatsura to Patlabor as well, it's a solid production whose action scenes are fluid and gleefully unfolding its clichés up front, from Ryou escaping an assassin with a giant machine gun to the hard boiled cop who risks his career for what he believes is right. There's even a properly executed joke just about a film the characters see within the narrative, a Friday the 13th pastiche where Jaws interrupts the proceedings. Because of moments like this, I've had to rethink my opinion of Urban Square: In Pursuit of Amber a lot in the time that's passed to this review. I was ready to dismiss it originally as predictable but now in lieu to a lot of time to have passed, the anime's developed a justifiable charm...even the eighties muzak jazz.  

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRmkixoLVm7Mzv-Df_EmzhPzzciYGwMhEtIegB2MTSVJjebneZYXJ7GbtdBY1-XZKPbsGcSIUs565GhpcDZun0nwYwVXnoOtJr6IofnOq3clCZsVipDCA8jmYPCvOsYMjCqCNJpKXhKO8/s1600/Urban+Square+THAT+AIN%2527T+REGULATION.png

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* Arguably, Lisa Simpson and her sax playing, which was why an impressionable young boy like me, who watched The Simpsons obsessively, started to learn the alto sax in inspiration from the character, was a major benefit to jazz's reputation just for the Bleeding Gums Murphy stories.