#208: Battle Royal High School (1987)

 

Director: Ichirō Itano

Screenplay: Ichirō Itano

Based on the manga by Shinichi Kuruma

Voice Cast: Kazuki Yao/Michael Granberry as Riki Hyoudo/Byoudo; Kazuhiko Inoue/Michael Granberry as Toshihiro Yuuki; Paul Sincoff as Zankan/Hideyuki Tanaka; Sakiko Tamagawa/Susan Grillo  as Youko Takayanagi; Chieko Hondo/Kristen Graf as Megumi Koyama; Mari Yokoo/Hadley Eure as Fairy Master Kain; Shin Aomori/Pierre Brulatour as Baba

Viewed in English Language Dub

 

Coming from Ichirō Itano, any work directed by the celebrated animator, in contrast to his work on others' projects, has however the potential to be infamous. He is rightly acclaimed as an animator and a secondary director, a man so talented that, from his work on the Macross franchise, he gained the named flourish "the Itano Circus" for just how he animated missiles. As a director however, he is notorious for the likes of Violence Jack, specifically the OVA episode he directed called Evil Town (1988), or Angel Cop (1989-94). Even his flirtations with television series led to something like Gantz (2004), which had to be censored for Japanese television and, as a violent and nihilistic work of resurrected people forced into real shooting game scenarios, hit me at the wrong time in life in its tone to the point I never finished it. Even for a work with the leads, which die easily, fighting aliens in the shapes of bird people or Buddha statues, Itano can find a way to make something feel on the edge. Considering, coming to this review, I have learnt that the Itano Circus was inspired, as a motorcycle enthusiast, by him strapping fifty fireworks onto one he was riding at a young age¹, there is a sense, for good and for bad, including some of the undefendable content (Evil Town's content, Angel Cop notoriously in its uncut Japanese dub having an anti-Semitic plot twist), Itano as a young animator onwards may brought with him a nihilistic punk ethos to his work that finds its way out in the directorial work especially.

Battle Royal High School is obscure from his small directorial CV, nearly sixty minutes and cramming an entire lengthier narrative and a few genres inexplicably together for a mad roller coaster ride of tone. It is set up with a fighting genre premise, as Riki Hyoudo, a male high school student, is strengthening himself by wearing a leopard mask he found one day and getting into brawls, even managing to get an enraged female tag-along Ryouko, from the judo dojo on-campus in danger now of closing because he beat their sensei completely. He is so good, a demonic lord Byoudo enters his dimension, revealed to be his parallel self who, realising this, decides to not fight Riki as initially but occupy him in a co-operative form. Byoudo is probably with evil intent for our dimension, but one of his side, a Faerie Queen called Fairy Master Kain, has decided to commit a coup d'etat with the added threat to our side that the fairies will take over people and infect our side.

Yes, fairies are a threat here, and in one of the best ideas of this strange title, along one of the most gruesome and inspired plot points, they are explicitly compared to wasps as, like the real life and grotesque idea of the "parasitoid"², larva which live inside a host, fairies take over a human host in this narrative. Sometimes even disguising themselves as the cute wish givers of fairytales, as happens in one case, they possess an entity to the point that, taking that person over, they take over their mind and can even transmogrify them into horrifying shapes and forms. There is content in this anime, if it had been a longer work, which could have been a compellingly dark horror anime, but here this goes further in that. Alongside this premise, and Itano's obsession with not only gore but fully detailed human biology, you also have a demon hunter but also a trans-dimensional policeman, spotting Byoudo's transition from a satellite base secretly, who is armed with sentai superhero power armour. More action than horror, it is still a strange cocktail from the eighties and the OVA boom to experience, especially as manages in less than an hour to have a full narrative of some sort with everyone involved.

Here you can have a girl, eventually possessed by the fairy which tricks her, accidentally wishing her love rival to Riki, Ryouko, to be mauled by her teddy bear, turned into a giant monstrously sized one. Or that this probably has the most lovingly (and grossly) detailed resurrection of a person by way of complete rebuilding of the human body, taking a monstrous flesh mound and sculpting it, from bone to muscle and flesh, back into a high school girl. This is all lurid and ridiculous, but the later is a huge note as this is no way near as nihilistic as the material from Ichirō Itano I have seen. This possesses so much of the dark content which made him infamous, but alongside how curious it to mix the cast it has, a sci-fi sentai hero the third wheel, it is gleefully ridiculous even if unintentional. Sometimes it feels so if awkwardly, where grotesque transformations violently juxtaposed with high school comedy as Ryouko becomes a proto- tsundere to Riki in her love-hate relationship to him.

Considering Violence Jack: Evil Town, even censored for the Western releases originally, was still gruelling, and Gantz I have mentioned felt too much at a bad time for myself to binge it, Battle Royal High School feels positively more brighter for what is still, even in context for this era of lurid eighties horror-like work for the video market, an incredibly violent and nasty work at times. Not helped (or helped depending on your opinion) by the English dub, including the crassest response after a graphic bodily resurrection just remind you this is of the time, this is of an entirely different era just in terms of anime released to the West, in the nineties, which was sold as being more adult. It is hilarious admittedly, only released in the USA, this is not an obscure title from Manga Entertainment, who released the whole of Violence Jack, or Central Park Media, but AnimEigo of all companies, who behind their utter devotion to the likes of sci-fi like Bubblegum Crisis (1987-91) are not the kind of people of this era to release titles that created the stereotype of anime being adult and violent Japanese cartoons. It is admittedly an outlier as, ironically, this is probably one of the better Itano directed things I have sat through, more so as he was the director and screenwriter and main storyboarder on the production; contrast Evil Town to the elaborate animation in just the grotesque body horror sequences here, and it is night and day in production aesthetic, yet this is an obscure title. Itano, morbidly fascinated by his directorial career as a one-off, really has not made a lot as a director since the 2000s, baring the television series Blassreiter (2006), and has been more a veteran of great talent on other productions. It says a lot for me that, in the little I have seen between them, and in mind he wrote the script for Evil Town, that Noboru "Shō" Aikawa, despite that and penning Urotsukidōji: Legend of the Overfiend (1987-89) among other notorious titles from this era of straight-to-video anime, comes off less nihilistic than Itano, a man he wrote stuff for. That is perversely hilarious to even consider.

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1) Recollected HERE in interview form.

2) Oh, and whilst body transmogrification does not happen with this breed, the wasps of the genus Glyptapanteles, injecting their eggs into living caterpillars, are a good enough real life horror show as the larva take over the host. You do not need lovingly animated as anything with the fairies here to have something to grimace at in nature itself.