Another "best of" awards, but with one major difference - last time, between the 1st and the 100th being covered, there was over five years of a blog and also many titles to shift through for the last of these indulgent "awards". Feeling that was ridiculous last time, covering the last fifty anime I have covered is a wiser decision. It also offers a greater sense of introspection as, with fewer titles to go over, some may have a greater chance of recognition this year.
We start however with the "most disappointment". I am not happy to use the phrase "worst", and in fact, if anyone had a defence of these titles, I would be fascinated to hear their defence. They however mark out a common theme - the slippery slope of fan service, gross undercurrents in the depiction of sexuality, less than stellar CGI animation, very lazy screenwriting and a lot of padding.
The list is a testament that arguably the truly worse is not that which is compelling, as neither Mars of Destruction (2005) nor Skelter Heaven (2004) are not on the list. They are terrible creations, Skelter Heaven the most striking, but they are too short to have a negative impact, and compelling for me to watch. For some Mad Bull 34 (1990-2), a notorious Magic Bus adaptation of a Kazuo Koike manga, would justify its position on a worse list and feels even scuzzier nowadays in the summer 2020 with its take on an American bad cop with a heart and all its problematic interest in sexual violence. It yet is so bizarre, with so much that is weird within it, that I will feel even if it deserves to be on the list, there is material which is surprisingly worse and also without even that sense of a car crash fascination.
Oh, and likewise, La Blue Girl Returns (2001-2) does not get on the list for how bizarre it was too. Also, I had only covered the censored British release, which negates it for the list anyway as it is turned into something else for how much was cut out with scissors.
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The Disappointing
5) Arcade Gamer Fubuki (2002) starts off the list properly with a great premise, imagining if competitive video gaming contests were for the fate of the world, and even has Sega licensed properties, but instead is, urgh, fixated on young teenage girls' underwear instead. That elephant in the room, really creepy objectification which is presented even more here than in other anime, is found all alongside the fact this is an exceptionally lazy production in pace and story, only getting any interest when the final episode gets ridiculous in its plot details. That it is this low on the list is for the fact it is the most technically accomplished in production on the list, and for there to be some good moments (like Mr. Mystery's English voice actor) to soften the experience.
4) Out of all these titles Zaion: I Wish You Were Here (2001), studio Gonzo's attempt at an ONA (straight to online anime) early into their foundation and when this format existed, is unfairly among titles which are far more problematic. It also has one huge virtue in the score by Kenji Kawai, which is exceptional. It is also unfortunately the blandest title I covered, all the usual plot points reduced to their most apathetic. Worse is that this has a similar plot to Mars of Destruction - an alien infection turning people into mutants, sci-fi super soldiers, empty streets and shanky 3D models - but has less personality than the notorious bomb made a few years later, and feels worse as that production was less the nineteen minutes long. Hence, it has to be here.
3) Back to the unfortunate sleaze, and if there is any virtues with Sorcerer Hunters OVA (1996-7), a) it is the main theme, which is catchy, and b) I do want to see the original television series these were created for. These three episodes, which are allowed to be more adult and explicit, are fluff but unfortunate that also means the episodes suffer from their worse moments, baring a sweet final one surrounding a tree that only blossoms after long periods of time. These worse moments are unfortunately creepy sexual aspects, including what is the main hero, a klutz, effectively having a rape fantasy playing on in his head, and a gay stereotype. It is not a technically bad show, sometimes fun, but the combination of generic plots and the more problematic aspects means this deserves a place. It says a lot that one of your heroines' alternative forms, in her S&M costume, being based off The Night Porter (1974) is not the concern to have than other aspects.
2) Into the 2020s, unfortunately COVID-19 has left a drastic mark on life that is more significant. Anime has been affected, but titles were already completed before the brunt of it still were released, so even if television series and theatrical releases were delayed into the later months of 2020, and others until 2021, there are titles out there. It has also left the potential for The Island of Giant Insects (2020), unless it has been forgotten already from its Crunchyroll premiere, to be a significant title for the year too. Having seen Calamity of a Zombie Girl (2018), which I came to with zero expectations due to reviews, only to actually find a bit I liked, we can still touch back upon the older era of very lurid OVAs occasionally in the modern day.
The thing I do not want, which sadly this feature length production does, is this. Where, despite being a throwback to the eighties and nineties OVAs involving gore and sex, the violence was censored in the version I saw, and presents problematic sexual content that is very different from a deliberate ero-guro presentation, presenting as well how this is a production based in a schism. That it is, in its premise about such an island of giant insects, a hyper-sexed up and gorier take on an American fifties b-movie, but it is a modern anime production designed to sell nudity of drawn female characters, one that is both chaste and yet for more perverse in an uncomfortable degree than a deliberately transgressive version could have been. It is also a production, between its bad 3D insects and an egregious moment of padding involving a character walking down a corridor, that it is neither the compelling trash anime or something great but utterly inert.
1) Well, what else should be here but My Sister, the Writer (2018)? A production so notorious you have sympathy for the animation staff, which was leaving distress signals in the production credits. It is perversely not the incest plot, or even the character of Ahegao W Peace Sensei as a female creator with a taste for problematic transgressive porn, which will make one feel filthy, but how utterly innocuous the entirely ten episode show is. It is an incredibly bland series, and that is before we get to how bad the animation gets, a cavalcade of misaligned character faces and torsos, captions posted online as this show was sinking like a capsizing ship just two episodes in. It is not even a compelling bad work, but something utterly inane in spite of its problematic subject treatment, a downward spiral of when productions go wrong we will evoke in time to come if it is ever remembered.
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The Weirdest
The last time I made this award, and also again this time, the Weirdest will be the longest list as the strangest titles in pop culture have always fascinating and enticed me, with their peculiarities and idiosyncrasies. Last year, the top spots were taken by the best, but this year, the rules have been changed (for the most part) to emphasis the weirdest, good and bad.
10) It is probably unintentional meanness to include Virtual-San Looking (2019) - this is not dissimilar to a large variety of shows about characters talking, but adding a new take is that it is a television series starring "virtual YouTubers", who take on moving avatars and personas, with the show filmed with these stars in character moving, to the point the digressions about the camera being unable to follow them are probably real. Virtual-San for an outsider, full of references I did not understand and with hyped up stars wanting to succeed springing about full of enthusiasm, is strange and compelling for a sight of an obscure community. Also, it is the one title on the list, to avoid it sounding a crass nomination, when it is given with affection like a parent to one happy to see their children creating something by themselves and trying their hardest.
9) You would be thinking a metaphysical contemplation of death, with the cast (mostly) depicted as humanised cats, with a scene of a character capturing candy birds, would be higher on the list. Night on the Galactic Railroad (1985) is also a sombre film, methodical even in context of anime, arguably making this material much more meaningful and actually synthesize together into something truly profound. Undeniably though it is strange, including the fact that this is based on a novel unfinished by its creator by his death, with multiple versions before one finally became one of his most beloved pieces of literature, that this was also originally meant for children as a novel and the fact that the production felt it could only work by making the cast mostly cat humanoids, that becoming iconic to the point that whenever Kenji Miyazawa is depicted or adapted into anime, cat humanoids characters have been used multiple times. It is strange enough still but in a meaningful way.
8) And in the opposite direction, a lot of Gundam Reconguista in G (2014-5) feels like it makes no sense. The reason why what should be a very straight forward giant robot show drama, another entry in the iconic Gundam franchise, both gets onto this list and was, until 2019 and 2020, never even getting a compilation film or two afterwards, as is traditional for entries in the franchise, is because of Yoshiyuki Tomino. Tomino helped create this franchise, but it is also evident that he is a great idea man but a very erratic creator, here even penning the screenplay as well as directing like some mad auteur. Character mood swings of the extreme sort, tonal shifts, a main male character who comes off as a sociopath by accident and that is not even taking into account that, nowadays, a twenty six episode is rarer and, as a result, a long series which builds to a greater level with the confusing layers. Who knows what would happen if, like other Gundam series which were successful, this managed to have over fifty episodes.
7) Mad Bull 34 (1990-1992) is a deeply problematic OVA, the scuzzy tales of a New York City police officer and his new partner which will likely age far worse nowadays as the hero is both the cop on the edge, who uses violence and trigger happy justice, but has a heart of gold. As a Kazuo Koike adaptation, the legendary manga writer is notorious for never taking any conventional direction, and likewise in-between the uncomfortable levels of sleaze, you also however have someone having to gamble on which drink can has not been rigged with explosives, and a final episode which is the best for jettisoning the unsavoury content in favour of weirdness. As in someone killing police dressed as a Predator, involving a fight in a stadium with a cameo by an Alien franchise power loader and ending on a marriage-suicide pact on a snowy night.
6) La Blue Girl Returns (2001-2), even without the drastic censorship for the UK DVD release that makes the last two episodes incomprehensible, would have gotten onto this list for the first two, which have been permanently sketched into my brain for a long time. An unholy combination of hentai erotica and body horror action, where God or the creator of this world can be entered inside as a dimension, even into Their colon, and sexual ninja skills allow a woman to project acid from an intimate area alongside other talents. It is also meant to be a comedy despite all the rape that was excised, and everything as this is just after the 2000s began is colourfully gauche. And the studio, mostly known for a lot of non-hentai ecchi and erotica programming, also made Elfen Lied (2004) which now baffles me as, whilst it was a notorious and imperfect show with nudity and extreme gore, is one I will defend and had fans. How the same studio for that is also the same who made this, just a couple of years earlier, is a perplexing question.
5) The Burning Buddha Man (2013) is perversely more wholesome in comparison, and when the creator's nom de plume is "Ujica", the name for green tea ice cream, it reveals we have something special on our hands (and coming to the UK on Blu Ray with Violence Voyager (2018), thanks to Third Window Pictures). The innovator of "geki-mation", paper puppet stop motion done entirely by himself, his art style with grotesque detail is already distinct before you get to the plot, where a shady organisation are fusing themselves to stolen Buddhist statues to cheat in attaining enlightenment superpowers.
4) Yuri Seijin in Naoko-San, either the 2010 OVA or the 2012 OVA, are strange but the first is a holy grail of concentrated weirdness about a female alien from the Planet Yuri, wanting to make the world gay. Her attraction to little girls, which borders on a line between both OVAs as tasteless but also sickly funny, as is her habit in the second of leaving porn magazines everywhere even on the street. Here a super punch is super because a train can materialise on the tarmac of a street to hit the opponent. You can even ride said train, and someone suddenly has an existential crisis voiced in monologue by an increasingly deranged male voice. Yes, Yuri Seijin is peculiar. Unlike Utsu-musume sayuri (2004), a notorious three minute sort which never got on this list or the Disappointing one, because it just felt slight, together these two OVAs despite being only thirty six minutes together are memorable.
3) In the Aftermath (1988) marks the only bonus episode of the last fifty anime covered, but woo, what a curiosity it nonetheless was, made stranger knowing this alternative Roger Corman produced cut of Mamoru Oshii's Angel's Egg (1985) has even had Blu Ray releases in the West, even a British release through Arrow Video in 2019, but the original gem from Oshii is clearly stuck in a licensing or pricing issue. The history is weird enough and a warning of how "foreign" titles were once cut about to sell to English speaking countries - someone at Corman's New World Pictures, when they acquired the rights to the original existential gem, felt they could make the film better by adding live action sequences and turning an existential avant-garde sci-fi about loss of faith into a regular post apocalypse story. Their attempt to make the film better, reeking of narrow-mindedness, managed to make even less sense as men cry about there being no fish and spirit girls being spanked with meteorites. I openly admit I enjoyed the film but, yeah, managing to be this weird when trying to make something make more sense is also hilarious.
2) Whilst I said this list would have more emphasis on the weirdest anime, there are exceptions and Adolescence of Utena (1999) is both one of the oddest things in even Kunihiko Ikuhara's career, which speaks plenty, but also exceptional. The idea behind the theatrical follow up film to his seminal 1997 television series is strange already, trying to condense a thirty plus episode story into under ninety minutes, is a challenge as is the fact it is clearly meant to be seen when you have already seen the series, much more darker in tone and franker about its LGBT romance in the centre. (This was something which MVM Entertainment (bless their cotton socks) missed when they first licensed the film for a British DVD release.) A popular character only makes a cameo as a cow, and the world is a fairy tale high school crossed with an ever shifting M.C. Escher drawing. That is not even mentioned that someone in the ending turns into a car. It's one of the best sequences, one of the best conclusions, to an animated film of any origin, but it is certainly one of the weirdest too.
1) So, is it blasphemous that instead The Lost Village (2016) is number one? Well we can explain why Adolescence of Utena came to be as it did from Ikuhara, even in knowledge that he can be deliberately coy on interpretation, but with The Lost Village so much has to be asked. Mainly about what the hell transpired with this horror series even in terms of its existence. How did this turn out as erratically as it did? Was this an off-day for screenwriting superstar, and future director, Mari Okada, or was this deliberately a parody of horror as Nick Creamer at Anime News Network had argued. Can the blame be put on director Tsutomu Mizushima, who gained recognition in notorious black hearted comedies like Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan (2005), and whose work on horror like Another (2012) was never subtle to begin with?
Before we even get to the village, by episode one characters like Love Pon, a girl with distinctly shaped irises, are already visibly insane, and the CGI bus not only does stick out from the 2D animation, but also becomes a viable MVP for the series for all the times it appears out of nowhere and just misses running over a nearby character. One episode ends just about when a character confesses a truth, mid-sentence, like the ultimate tease to annoy viewers. Then a literal giant boob, a silicon implant the size of a mountain, appears to terrorise a character alongside other monstrosities, also rendered in CGI and thus a 3D boob. That is before The Lost Village really stumbles about dazed and ending with little concluded as it begun. Hence, a true candidate for the strange, and a possible candidate for a cult audience if a whole bunch of us deliberately watch this on Crunchyroll over and over, and confuse the people who run the site. Oh, wait, Crunchyroll even published a defence of the series, so I think they would be smirking if we did.
TO BE CONTINUED...
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