#204: Demon Hunter Makaryūdo (1989)

 

Director: Yukio Okamoto

Screenplay: Yukio Okamoto

Voice Cast: Minami Takayama as Yama Rikudou; Rei Sakuma as Kaoru; Ryo Horikawa as Sawaguchi; Toshihiko Seki as Shou Kurogane; Masashi Ebara as Chaos; Miina Tominaga as Naraka; You Inoue as Rijityo

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

I will likely say this a lot with OVAs, at the rate things are going, but this should have been more than a one thirty minute episode in the perfect world. It's plot has been done so many times - a female demonic entity called Yama steps down to Japan from above, secretly enrols in a high school as a student, and deals with an evil witch taking control of the place - be it a male or female lead, or what supernatural entity they are. It is how you tell it that is the interest, and for me, this would have to be an OVA series, rather than a television series, to get the best results, this standing out for some idiosyncratic designs you would have to censor on television. In that perfect world, we sadly never got, a longer work would have been fascinating to see even if becoming a third tier horror anime, still likely to have been entertaining if it got a chance.

At the school, a witch posing as the principal's granddaughter, now the school's stand-in head as a result, is terrorising the place. The reference to the designs comes from the fact, with the monsters in her charge, the most common are monstrous birds with the torsos and heads of beautiful women, a deeply twisted and inspired touch for the surrealistic in me, as they are sensually designed, and yet are still giggling bird monsters giving house cats to chew on in the principal's office or sent out to maul students at night. There is little that happens, feeling like an episode in a larger narrative, but this won me over just for its tone, this specific creative style of horror where you have creatures like this onscreen. Others exist such as this witch being able to brainwash people with spiral shelled molluscs, or a giant version with a feminine human head that attacks with tentacles. Makaryūdo looks very cartoonish next to other anime OVAs from this time for me, but far an okay production with okay animation, it is tantalising to see this imagination on display.

Barely a taste is here but already you have Western and Eastern iconography smash into each other like cars, with a nihilistic streak that the lead Yama is assigned to rid the Earth of the wicked and demonic, but that this will pave the way to the end of humanity at the unseen time when all of the demons (including herself) can go back home to "devildom". She is fixated on one boy at the school named Shou, who it can be invoked is reincarnated from someone she loved a time ago. So many times I am finding myself seeing how the religions in Japan, reincarnation a part of them, feed into pulp, all whilst Yama herself looks like she could have stepped out a Western cartoon as a Judo-Christian demon, with her big hair and tuffs of said hair shaped into horns that are cute and cannot hide her supernatural nature.

She even has a little dragon that talks and looks more western in design, which can grow into a giant when required. Yama herself is even the traditional brooding hero, imprisoned by another demon who she reluctantly helps in ridding evil to be freed from her sentence, because of using a magical mirror she should have not touched, still an interesting plot point even if a cliché to work with. (That the use of the mirror is likely connected to Shou and reincarnation adds to obvious and potentially compelling content to work). Obviously this all feels like a pilot for a larger tale, but sadly, we live in the dimension you only got a one-off barely seen by many. Almost any idea, however dumb, should get a multi-episode anime, or long enough to breathe, with only the execution the concern. Here, sadly, we are dangled in front of us a ghoulish action-horror narrative, cartoonish but exciting, where even an abrupt philosophical argument (subtitled in Japanese) between a demon that can just growl and Yama who can understand them transpires before they clash. It feels like something where even a kitchen sink could be thrown in on a whim, but sadly life did not give us a sequel.

Adding to this is that, looking into credits, its director Yukio Okamoto, who had a small filmography, also wrote the script, did the storyboards, and generally invested a lot into a production that sadly never went anywhere. A shame, though this review will be a sympathetic one to a title one person put a lot in clearly expecting a lot from. Even the anime studio behind this, Studio Fantasia, was just getting into the OVA market with this, lasting until an unfortunate bankruptcy in 2016. Something obscure like this, even if not the best, should have been something more as it had the potential.