Director: Masami Obari
Screenplay: Hideki Kakinuma
Voice Cast: Kōichi Yamadera/Roger
May as Tomoru Shindo /Orgun; Emi Shinohara/Katherine Devaney as Yoko Mitsurugi;
Nobuo Tanaka/Justin Thompson as I-Zack; Yumi Touma/Joanna MacInnes as Michi
Kanzaki; Bouya Ueda as Bannings ; Hiroko Kasahara as Kumi Jefferson/Mhiku; Kenji
Utsumi/Bill Roberts as Zoa; Kiyoyuki Yanada as Wedge; Masashi Ebara as Virgil; Norio
Wakamoto as Lang/Simmons
Viewed in the English Dub1
Detonator Orgun, from the era of OVAs' heyday, has many interesting factors. A solidly made three part sci-fi story with elaborate mecha designs, it naturally has Masami Obari, known as much as a talented mecha/character designer and animator, in the director's seat long before his career went into tangents such as fighting game anime and even hentai. Susumu Hirasawa, in the first time he composed a score for an anime in its entirety. Also in its very nature, Detonator Orgun's world itself is an intriguing one to step into especially in context to how anime science fiction changed or altered the type of tropes and clichés it would have over the decades away from this.
Set far in the future, at least past 2100, Orgus can be argued to be set in a world of both great advancement but also a dystopian is you found the world cold and disheartening. In a world where his city is just called City 5, Tomoru is a young man who is not interested in the modern day, he fixates in the 20th century especially the early decades of aviation and heroics during the World Wars. The only thing of any real interest to him of the modern day, dressing clothes considered gauche due to them looking more 20th century, is that alongside humankind having expanded into space he also has access to technology to record dreams or have artificial ones where he fantasises of heroics of the past he feels he will never take part in.
Beyond this, Detonator Orgun is a pretty easy to follow narrative. There is a biomechanical alien race called the Evoluders fixated on war and conquering the galaxy, their single minded goal they have been taking part in all this time, only for one of them called Orgus to defect and on Earth to protect it. By luck, and contact through the dream technology he uses, Tomoru is picked by this figure, a being whose body is mostly a robotic form that, whilst effectively sacrificing himself, lets himself by a machine for Tomoru to be fused into the defend his planet, his memories intertwining with Tomoru's and revealing where this invading force is from cryptically. Not a lot of this series really movies in very different tangents from this - but that is interesting in itself as, in its conventions, there is not a lot that is similar to work decades later with the same premise. Even though Tomoru is your stereotypical young male lead, this without a high school student involved is alien and immediately different; once probably because of the type of anime distributed in the West by the likes of Manga Entertainment, you seemingly had a lot more adult male protagonists alongside the teen ones, which even if artificially constructed as an illusion really time stamps this to a different era.
It is also very well made and distinct, a case of meat-and-potatoes storytelling, where it fully embraces a mechanical, manmade world of elaborate cityscapes, contrasted by the more mystical details which becomes one of the more curious touches. In this plot, eventually the relationship between the Earthlings and the opposite force of Evoluders (whose main lair is dubbed "Zoma the Combat Planet" in the Manga Entertainment) will have more complexity, and there is a female psychic named Kumi Jefferson who is popular on television and able to predict disasters, who also has an importance to the narrative as well. There are plot points which never are elaborated on further, such as the lead female character Yohko, a scientist, being bred from a special project, never elaborated on at all. There are also moments, such as Orgus' love interest, a female robot, appearing in the second episode only to ungraciously leave, which do show that this was not entirely firing on all cylinders in terms of the story telling.
It also is a production where the mech animators and designers were encouraged to push themselves, which is not a surprise considering Obari's talents in the field, and that does succeed. It is weird that someone as highly regarded as Obari, known for his craft in mecha design, did not direct as many mecha anime until into the later 1990s and 2000s, and deviated in video game adaptations games and porn. Here in his element, naturally the robots and combat scenes are elaborate.
This OVA, in truth, does feel like it is merely dabbling in very interesting ideas. Coming from a rich era of science fiction for anime, you find a bit of playfulness, including having a fake promotional commercial for the outer space military group "the Link Men", all bombast and even a cute female mascot asking viewers to join them. Its one virtue is presenting an elaborate world of sci-fi, where human beings are colonising the universe and where one of the side characters is actually I-Zack, the A.I. intelligence Yohko works with who even has a face from computer graphics on the screen. Even if it never really has the ability to expand even further, it is amazing how many anime, even these forgotten straight-to-video titles, can build up interest landscapes even from unoriginal material. Even if this is mostly an action story, of a lot of robot versus robot fight scenes, this is a huge factor to consider.
Also worthy of interest is this being the first time Susumu Hirasawa was the composer for an entire anime production, which would be the start after this show's three soundtrack albums' worth of music of a very interesting career. His anime soundtrack career however is surprisingly small, sadly more so since the passing of his regular collaborator Satoshi Kon, as Hirasawa's career as a musician is significantly larger than his work as a composer, the only other work he has really worked on being the Berserk franchise. Hirasawa himself has been documented as not being fond of this production, especially when with the third album, though finding it a building block for his work on the 1997 Berserk animated series1. Here you can feel it as the early steps, with some very dated (if charming) synth of the time, but eventually by the end credit song Root of Spirit, which closes off the Manga Entertainment release, a little gem in itself is heard and you see immediately how significantly Hirasawa's career in the medium would be despite the small CV.
Detonator Orgun altogether is not a perfect work. It does feel conventional in context to other anime of the era, even if there has always been a reason (just for the Hirasawa's score and art style) which keeps bringing me back. The show definitely gets a bit peculiar when it reaches its final, a sci-fi tale which gets far more esoteric then you would presume it. This for me personally is actually fun. One of my favourite clichés, the out-of-body dreamscape, appears in all its delight, and whilst I openly admit a finale involving something using their psychic powers to move the sun is ridiculous, I am amused by this ridiculousness. The English dub is poor, which has never helped the title, additional swearing in the rewrite and all. Certainly, in the grand scheme of this era, it is not the best, but as someone with an interest, there was still so much to appreciate.
Even in context to Masami Obari as a director, this is interesting, as whilst Fatal Fury: The Motion Picture (1994), his next project which is held one of the better video game adaptations, his career in general as a director has been very divisive. Just his nineties work took an odd director for sure, with the likes of Voltage Fighter Gowcaiser (1996) and Virus Buster Serge (1997) not very well regarded. He also went further in more sexualised content, even with shows like Gravion (2002) and its sequel Gravion Zwei (2004), fun mecha shows, made at the same time as the hentai titles. Here, you do get a few showers scenes, but this is incredible chaste in comparison. Even in terms of one of his most distinct and divisive trademarks, his very idiosyncratic characters designs which became more exaggerated over the decade, that is not to play here either as the character designer for Detonator Orgun was Michitaka Kikuchi, who under his manga pseudonym Asamiya Kia, alongside a career in the anime industry, created the series Silent Möbius (1989–1999). It is, in context, an outlier of all things.
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1) The English dub for the anime, for the old Manga Entertainment release, who also put together the episodes into a feature length production for the 2003 DVD release, is bad to the point of affecting the film immensely, something worth elaborating beyond the little mention of in the main review. Just the amount of times characters are calling each other "bastard", part of the company's habit of increasing the language to raise the age rating in the United Kingdom, this dub has not aged well in the slightest.
2) As remarked upon by him in this interviewer HERE.
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