Bonus #14: Fist of the North Star (1995)

 

Director: Tony Randel

Screenplay: Peter Atkins and Tony Randel

Based on the manga by Buronson and Tetsuo Hara

Cast: Gary Daniels as Kenshirô; Malcolm McDowell as Ryuken; Costas Mandylor as Lord Shin; Downtown Julie Brown as Charlie; Dante Basco as Bat; Nalona Herron as Lynn; Melvin Van Peebles as Asher; Clint Howard as Stalin; Andre Rosey Brown as Sandman; Paulo Tocha as Stone; Chris Penn as Jackal; Tracey Walter as Paul McCarthy; Rowena Guinness as Jill McCarthy; Isako Washio as Julia

 

Is it peaches? Sounds like peaches.

My knowledge of Fist of the North Star was limited to the point that this, in honesty, was one of the first versions of Buronson and Tetsuo Hara's legendary manga I had seen. The first was anime, New Fist of the North Star (2003-4), but worth mentioning is that, if the history of bringing Fist of the North Star into the United States only took to the late 2010s into 2020s to succeed, we in Britain got less of this legendary series. The United States finally got the full and uncut 1984-8 television series only in 2010s with Discotek, whilst in Britain, we only had 36 episodes of Manga Entertainment's attempt to sell the show, coming in the mid-2000s in a long gone box set. Fist of the North Star, this curious attempt to sell this franchise in the West, had the advantage in the DVD era that Hong Kong Legends picked this up as a title. A British DVD company, now long gone, who strove to preserve and release Hong Kong martial arts cinema with a care for extras and full versions pre-dating the Blu-Ray era, where even Criterion is preserving titles they once released, unexpectedly included Fist of the North Star itself among their catalogue.

This is not the first live action version, bootleg or otherwise, but with Clint Howard having his name over pro wrestler Leon "Vader" White on the opening credits, it is clear this is a curious adaptation. To those with no knowledge of the franchise, as this film tells, the world has descended into the post-apocalypse, with those who wish to acquire power having taken over as marauding hoodlums. One figure named Lord Shin (Costas Mandylor), having dominated with an iron fist, as the practitioner of the Southern Cross martial arts style, has created a city, his desire to improve the world contrasted by his ego and letting his men commit atrocity by invading smaller communities for supplies and slaves. His rival, who he has taken his love Julia (Isako Washio) from, now a caged songbird to him, and marked his body in permanent scars, is Kenshirô (Gary Daniels), practitioner of the North Star style. North Star, as interpreted in the manga, in the anime, but also here, is that contacting certain pressure points on the human body causes that person to explode, as gory as that sounds, and Kenshirô approaches Shin's world in attempt to defeat him.

Gary Daniels as Kenshirô looks like the muscular brother of Benedict Cumberbatch, who can still make your head explode, which is a compliment to both men. Daniels, a martial arts action star of films like Bloodmoon (1996), born in London, was also the person who came to this as a fan of Fist of the North Star, enough to call his son Kenshiro Daniels, who would go on to become a football (soccer) player when he grew up. Things obviously however made it clear the Fist of the North Star, this live action film, is not quite what it should be. It is conventional, which is the biggest sin it commits, that Tony Randel, most famous for Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988), came to this film and made it very conventional, more concerned with trying to give the character of Kenshirô angst-ridden rather than a narrative exploiting its premise. Even for a lower budgeted film, it has a lot to get the tone right, the production design team and model builders deserving all their praises for a film which, when exterior location shots, feels post-apocalyptic, but those involved beyond this clearly missed the point.

Despite being part of the wave of pop culture films from the 1990s that I am obsessed over, this is just has one pace, to tell a very simplistic tale of this Kenshirô beating Lord Shin, and not a lot else to work with. A film presenting Clint Howard, Ron's memorable acting brother, getting to be a murdering bastard in the first half, shooting people indiscriminately should sound like a lurid pulpy movie, especially as this does have fight scenes, and one of the most curious casts you could imagine for such a film. One thing you cannot deny, and should have excited people coming to this film, because Randel comes to this as a horror director behind films like Ticks (1993), is that they did not ignore how these characters can make people explode with a punch, or Lord Shin's special glowing hands attack causes veins in the biceps to burst in jets of gore. Even then, however, this does pull back, and never was there a film whose personality is against itself with moments this adult and violent, against content you would expect in tone from a child-friendly comic book adaptation.

Explain, for example, that this is a film with moments of gore, where the troops of Lord Shin, the South Crossmen, are explicitly raping, pillaging and murdering nearby locations, but contrasts this with a blond haired teen male character (Dante Basco) who is a goof and a wannabe kung fu expert, whose friend is a cute blind moppet who Kenshirô cures of her blindness. The film’s narrative is incredibly generic, and for a film that needs good fight scenes to work, the compromise to their presentation undermines the whole project, alongside the fact that, for the few moments of gore here, there are also points where the gore from the original manga are removed for the most part too. What it becomes is a strange concoction of who managed to end up in the film. Even in style there are weird moments that show this, like inexplicably, for a sombre toned film with an orchestral score by Christopher L. Stone, for it to suddenly splice in a Machine Head song A Thousand Lives into the soundtrack.

Malcolm McDowell, entirely separated off from everyone in his scenes, is a North Star martial arts master named Ryuken existing in the afterlife, continuing the obvious concern of Western actors having Japanese characters to play, levitating in a room or inexplicably appearing as a zombie to Kenshirô, voicing another actor, to tell him to not flee his role as a hero. Vader, the legendary pro wrestler, especially in Japan as much as in the West, is perfect as a Fist of the North Star baddie, and is just being Vader, pulling a promo on a small girl, as awesome as that sounds whilst performing moves on Gary Daniels. But with that fight ending in an anti-climax belittling both of them, even Vader is misused. Melvin Van Peebles is a really curious choice, a legend in African American cinema for directing Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) alone, here as an actor, as with Downtown Julie Brown, a British video jockey (VJ) and personality, neither ultimately given much to do as members of a village Lord Shin is terrorising. Unfortunately as a result, neither were really worth having hired in the first place despite both, Van Peebles especially, are inspired figures to have hired.

Costas Mandylor himself is also a curious choice as that unfortunately means, as a former soccer/football player with no martial arts training, they had to work around this with stunt doubles, in a film which has Gary Daniels but not many who can do the martial arts fights. Japanese actress Isako Washio likewise, an actress from films like Bloom in the Moonlight (1993) is also stuck here trying to perform in a language not her own and feeling lost too. The one curious choice who managed to grab something from this is Chris Penn as Jackal. Penn steals the film, the actor from films like Reservoir Dogs (1992), with the advantage, playing a sleaze ball goon who managed to tape his head together before Kenshirô's blows caused his head to explode, that he could find a character he could relish the lines of.

It is a project which ended up with people who really had no idea what to do with this - co-screenwriter Peter Atkins mostly worked on Hellraiser and Wishmaster films, making this frankly a case of someone dropped with a title they had no investment it, Tony Randel likewise feeling entirely out of place here. Even in mind that huge chunks are clearly missing, such as the aforementioned Clint Howard disappearing entirely eventually, the live action Fist of the North Star film feels entirely at odds with what it is was adapting, a franchise which would have to take decades to finally get a lot more recognition in the West. This is a fascinating film to see, and has aspects which are worthwhile, just in how it looks, but never was there a film which really did not have a lot going on despite having such a curious production on and off screen.

#219: Wicked City (1987)

 

Studio: Madhouse

Director: Yoshiaki Kawajiri

Screenplay: Norio Osada

Based on the book series by Hideyuki Kikuchi  

Voice Cast: Toshiko Fujita as Makie; Yūsaku Yara as Renzaburo Taki; Ichirō Nagai as Guiseppe Maiyart; Mari Yokoo as Spider Woman; Takeshi Aono as Mr. Shadow

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

This is a significant film for me to reach - one of the key films of Yoshiaki Kawajiri, a director who became a name in Western anime fandom in the nineties, but one painted for me getting into the medium as a notorious one. Kawajiri in truth, getting into anime in the 2000s, was once for me the director known for sex and violence, but when it comes to actually viewing his work, which is not a lot of his career. Action anime and a high quality to the work with his collaborators, as a studio Madhouse director, is more his trademark. The infamy I heard second hand of him came from Wicked City and Ninja Scroll (1993), and even then, Wicked City was a title available in the United Kingdom, as in the United States, but Ninja Scroll was more freely available and a stock title for Manga Entertainment to have into the early DVD days. Ninja Scroll has held up well, and whilst it is transgressive in a lot of its content, it feels like a pulp narrative whose content was trying to be more thoughtful even if it dealt with gore and sexual violence. This is something to consider as, whilst of its era, anime in the decades afterwards even if not more explicit in these subjects, or having to work around television censorship, have tackled just as extreme content to this day, whilst Ninja Scroll's shock nowadays in how it tackles it explicitly as a high budgeted production. Wicked City was the title I hesitated to get to from the director, and for all its virtues, you cannot ignore that just ten percent of the film's content, some of its more controversial aspects, are going to be off-putting and unacceptable for anime fans. The irony is that, yes, it is only a part of the film altogether and that Wicked City itself has more to consider even beyond what I considered it would have been.

A factor to consider with Kawajiri's career is how significant author Hideyuki Kikuchi is to parts of it for source material, especially with some of the more adult work in content. His most well known work is the novel series Vampire Hunter D, which has now become a multi-medium franchise and has not stopped since the first novel in 1983, but he has worked on other titles, Wicked City based on the novel series of the same name from 1985 to 2016. Barring Ninja Scroll, more of the overtly horror and violent titles in Kawajiri's career come from Kikuchi source material, and Wicked City would have been released after the third novel came out, set in a world where demons and humans co-exist in a treaty skating on thin ice. A new treaty after centuries is to be signed, with a demon terrorist group wishing to snuff out the demon representative, Guiseppe Maiyart, sent to our side to sign it. He is to be protected by a human member of the Black Guard, secret agents guarding the "Black World" of the demons against ours, called Renzaburo Taki, with Makie, a female demon member of the Black Guard as his mirror to also protect Guiseppe. In terms of the Wicked City itself, it has a basic plot, which is traditional for a few Kawajiri titles, although in terms of his career, this one does feel the weakest. Compared to Ninja Scroll's, which is surprisingly more complex in back story, this does have a huge contrivance that, to get Renzaburo and Makie to fall in love, which is the real goal for peace, this film does have to work around some abrupt emotional whiplash and contrivances which other Kawajiri productions avoid.

You also have to accept that Guiseppe Maiyart's main characteristic, despite being someone revealed to be wiser and being a diminutive man with thunder abilities, is also having a horniness bordering on a suicidal streak in the risks he takes to please this. Among a curious duo with Ninja Scroll's Dakuan of Kawajiri having a fixation on short old men who are cocky tricksters, It has humour as well. You also have to accept that Guiseppe Maiyart's main characteristic, despite being someone revealed to be wiser and being a diminutive man with thunder abilities, who is also with a horniness bordering on a suicidal streak in the risks he takes to please this. This will put viewers off too, among a curious duo with Ninja Scroll's Dakuan of Kawajiri having a fixation on short old men who are cocky tricksters, but thankfully this does succeed with some light humour as much as it feels like another aspect Wicked City as an early work from Kawajiri does feel like a template for his later work, including the fact the villains in later stories would stand out more than the one here.

Wicked City also has a huge caveat already hinted at which cannot be ignored, even in mind to this being a film which I will talk about having incredible aspects to it, and has left a lasting legacy alongside other Kawajiri productions which influenced Todd MacFarlane for the creation of Spawn¹, to being admired by Hideo Kojima². That being, that in representing its transgressive sexual body horror content, where sex is used as a weapon including rape, this has the exact same problem you deal with in Urotsukidôji; that being, whether you think those subjects in transgressive depictions would still be defendable or not, how this is depicted is with having this subject always involving a female victim, and is clearly lurid for the sake of it with no reason to be there. The problem is worse when the sole figure of this content is Makie herself, the sole female character of note, which makes the content more problematic. This is worse here as, alongside undercutting a character who is a demon who has inhuman abilities that should make her powerful, she is the figure who exists to mirror Renzaburo Taki as well as emotionally connect to him, someone too who like Jubei in Ninja Scroll, is deliberately the male lead who scrapes by and gets maimed in scenarios as much as he succeeds.

Some may actually be offended by the suggestion you can tackle sexual violence in a way in art or even pulp storytelling which can be transgressive on purpose, but the problem is that, before you can either get to the subject of whether it can be defended or not, Wicked City alongside other anime fall into the issue that these subjects this same way. Always involving the victimisation of female characters, and always feels like it is done for shock value than with note. That this is just a fragment of Wicked City makes this worse, making this a difficult film to defend, even with aspects involving the sexual body horror, whilst grotesque, which are startling in a way without these issues and can be defended. It was not as explicit as I had feared, but with one scene in particularly reaching a fine line, this ten percent or so of the film's content of how Makie is victimised is uncomfortable. We did get Wicked City for VHS and for even cinema releases back in the nineties from Manga Entertainment, but is was censored for these scenes, only coming to us uncensored in 2022³. These scenes once censored neither have any real weight to the content or narrative of Wicked City either, making them pointless to even have had.

Beyond this, Wicked City is still a very violent and very grotesque film from Kawajiri, and it is infamous as much for its body horror, yet I feel I can defended this even if, on purpose, they are startling too with the advantage of the production being as highly crafted as it is. This film has the most infamous moment of his career, within the first scenes, where Renzaburo Taki is introduced courting a lady for a one night stand, only for her to have been knocked unconscious and had a demon spider woman masquerade as her in the hotel room. Explicit vagina dentata is involved, starting this film's melding of sensuality with the perverse, where he just avoids death as she casually scuttles out the window on her spider legs out the hotel room. This is where Wicked City, like Urotsukidôji, is still extreme, but has transgression be the ero-guro (erotic grotesque) which has artist merit, flourishes in its imagination to striking effect as much to horrify. An argument can be made most of these have the theme of the female body being dangerous, with a couple of womb-like metaphors and one blatant one, but these scenes will make the men just as likely victims as the women to these horrifying threats. One literally involves a giant stomach vagina and Renzaburo Taki literally return to the womb before he snaps out of it. Some anime fans, understandably, will find this scene disgusting, but rather than alien the viewer with transgression of the sexual kind which is exploitative, this is the kind of perversity that at least has more meaning to it, significantly in this example as it transpires within the same scene as some of the problematic sexual violence, which does not have these virtues.

Some will not be able to get through Wicked City because of some of its content, which is tragic as well as, one of Kawajiri's earliest productions by himself in the director's chair, this also has incredible artistry, the horror contrasted by a lot of the film even in its quietest moments which are startling to see in the modern day for how more subtle it can even be. A lot of Kawajiri's work is very simplistic in their characterisations, even in how they are structured around figures the protagonist has to fight to reach the main boss, like a video game template, but his productions, especially with the original character designs by himself, are incredibly ornate and aesthetically beautiful even in spite of how some are very gory and nasty. One of the biggest surprises for me as I became more a fan of Yoshiaki Kawajiri has been how  mood plays a role in his films, even when the action stops and the characters are allowed to breathe in his narratives. Wicked City embraces the horror genre even in terms of eeriness within sequences, and it is also a film, unlike the reputation it has been painted for me, with a willingness to stop and contemplate. It is a film only eighty minutes long but stops for Renzaburo Taki, when they initially have Guiseppe Maiyart secured in a hotel with a security barrier, playing chess with the hotel owner and contemplate his place as a bachelor.

As mentioned earlier on in this review, it feels Yoshiaki Kawajiri is still early in his career here, and Wicked City feels as much a prototype of Ninja Scroll. This is not to downplay the virtues of this film, which is a gorgeous production, possessing an atmosphere which, whilst not redeeming its major problems, which is compelling. It looks gorgeous, the music is gorgeous with Osamu Shoji's moody score, leaving Wicked City a fascinating production unlike other lurid and controversial anime from the eighties in that its artistic value is higher than the likes of Violence Jack from the decade. Kawajiri, even for his OVA work, had a high bar of quality of work, which makes the sad fact he stopped having directorial work in the late 2000s onwards more tragic, if thankfully contrasted by the fact, even if in the storyboarding credits later on, he still had his mark on big television series in the 2020s. Finally seeing Wicked City, my concerns which caused me to hesitate watching this were proven, and it is entirely per individual viewers if they feel comfortable sitting through the scenes whether to watch the film or not, rather than say whether it is recommended. In terms of the film's virtues beyond these scenes, this for horror anime shows the director's talents and those of Madhouse altogether exceptionally.

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1) Examining the Work of Anime Director Yoshiaki Kawajiri, written by Padraig Cotter, published for Den of Geek on May 26th 2015.

2) My Favorite Films by Hideo Kojima, translated by Marc Laidlaw from METAL GEAR SOLID naked (2004), published by Kadokawa Shoten and with the translation from Junkerhq.net. For a side tangent, for fans of Kojima's, and speaking of a huge cineaste myself, this is a fascinating selection of films, including some obscurer gems like Burst City (1982), even I would dig through for the titles I have missed over the years.

3) "Wicked City... 1987 Japan anime horror previously cut but now released uncut on DVD and Blu-ray", published on December 21st 2021 for Melon Farmers, a site dedicated to documenting film classification, censorship and censorship of culture in general. Their name, before anyone asks with curious bafflement, is based on the infamous "TV Edit" of Alex Cox's punk genre film Repo Man (1984), for another tangent about a film (and that infamous edit) worth looking into.

The Guyver (1991)

 

Director(s): Steve Wang and Screaming Mad George

Screenplay: Jon Purdy

Based on the manga by Yoshiki Takaya

Cast: Jack Armstrong as Sean Barker/The Guyver; Vivian Wu as Mizky Segawa; Mark Hamill as Max Reed; David Gale as Fulton Balcus; Michael Berryman as Lisker; Jimmie Walker as Striker

Bonus Review

 

Note: The version of The Guyver (1991) watched is the director's cut, which involved a flashy editing technique added to cut between scenes, but also visibly removing shots of violence which is brought up in the review.

This review will also be re-posted at my other blog Cinema of the Abstract for a little cross-promotion between them. Please take a look at a wide selection of reviews I do there as well.

 

Yoshiki Takaya's manga The Guyver was at one point one of the first Japanese manga and anime franchises to transition over to the West, and one of my earliest memories as a child to the idea of "manga" or "anime" involved the 1991 film itself, a small news article about The Guyver with the exceptionally deceiving poster of co-star Mark Hamill's face against one-half of the iconic Guyver helmet. In Japan itself, Yoshiki Takaya's manga started in 1985 and is still going thirty plus years on through multiple magazines, with two anime adaptations for straight-to-video, 1986 and 1989, and one I grew up with getting into anime, a television series between 2005 to 2006 which was an attempt rejuvenate the franchise. The OVAs, specifically the 1989 multi-episode one, gained an infamy when released in the West for its violence, whilst the TV series was undermined by not having ultra-violence that made the anime notorious, despite the late anime distributor ADV Films selling the series off this infamy, and that it does not have an actual ending. In the West, two live action films were made, one produced by Brian Yuzna with Steve Wang and Screaming Mad George making their directorial debuts, the sequel three years later with Steve Wang on his own in the director's chair and taking a drastically different direction in tone. Together they are curiosities.

Made as a Japanese co-production, Yuzna himself is a man I admire. Connected to Stuart Gordon, the director famous for Re-Animator (1985), Yuzna himself as a filmmaker has a fascinating series of strange and imaginative horror films, some involving Screaming Mad George, birth name Joji Tani, a practical effects designer from Japan whose reputation when he moved to the United States and worked in cinema have had a lasting legacy. Steve Wang, a Taiwanese makeup artist and creature designer who emigrated to the USA as a child, would comes into the directorial chair in his small filmography here as a co-director, and especially with a film called Drive (1997), gained himself cult recognition.

The Guyver, as the 1991 film, is however a strange mess. The plot is from the source - an evil corporation called Chronos are after an alien bio-armour, the titular Guyver. Set in the United States, a young man named Sean Barker (Jack Armstrong) finds the Guyver and is infected by it, creating living armour which grows from his body when he needs it. The Guyver is a tokusatsu influenced production, like an ultra-violent Power Rangers in the image most have of it, as Chronos has its members and test victims used in experiments where they turn into horrifying monsters. This is contrasted by the weapons the Guyver has, with its arm blades to a chest laser beam, designed to slice them the pieces.

Yuzna's Japan-US co-production decided not to follow his wheelhouse of gore and elaborate special effects in films like Society (1989) or Bride of Re-Animator (1990), but only have the special effects...at least at times. The director's cut, the more readily available version, has scenes of gore cut, but even the film without these missing fragments is incredibly goofy at times, creating a contradiction of a film you could not give to a child without causing potential nightmares, at least its most lasting moments, but other times has incredibly silly humour. The first Guyver film, the more easy to find, is a peculiar thing with its tendrils connected to Stuart Gordon and Yuzna, with the evil Chronos Corporation headed by leader Fulton Balcus, played by David Gale who is famous for Re-Animator. Balcus wants the Guyver bio-armour and sends "Zoanoids", humans who can turn into humanoid monsters, after Sean Barker.

The one success, the only success, in terms of consistency is the practical effects. Screaming Mad George is legendary and notorious for his work, from the human cockroach sequence from A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988) to the "Shunting" scene from Society, visceral body horror which even if you can see the seams is so nightmarish and gooey that it borders surrealism. Moments show this in The Guyver, seeing him and everyone in the practical effect department having a field day with the premise. Whether it is horror film veteran Michael Berryman and various actors turning into various humanoid beasts or the spectacular Guyver armour itself, a warrior with cyberpunk and insect-like traits, they are all applaudable. It is, however, a film struggling with a premise, possible in anime and manga, which has an apocalyptic tone on a large scale, and also requires martial arts to pull off even fights between men in rubber suits. Guyver: Dark Hero will try to overcome this, to greater success, but this prequel struggles.

It is a really strange film, not in surrealism, but how it ended up as it did. Mark Hamill, the legendary Star Wars actor a year before he took on the voice of The Joker in Batman: The Animated Series, creating for him a career flourish as iconic as Luke Skywalker, does stand out, playing a cop on the edge trying to get the scope on the Chronos Corporation, with a sense of grandeur to his appearance. The late David Gale steals scenes with his bizarre intonations and wall chewing, even enraged by burning toast as he is by the incompetence of his minion. Vivian Wu, as the female love interest, is visibly struggling with her dialogue and not helped in the slightest by a wet, one dimensional female character she has. Alongside the fact she is cast as a Japanese character, which is dubious for her as it is as casting, she is a really strange inclusion as between Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1987), a huge film in his later career which was her onscreen debut, and Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book (1996), Wu, a Chinese actress whose career is mostly in dramas in the West and China, found herself in this film sandwiched between a Bernardo Bertolucci film and Greenaway which is a curious tangent. Even her appearance in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III (1993) at least makes sense as a second sequel to a franchise which was huge at the time and whose first feature film was a box office success.

Jack Armstrong as the hero sadly struggles out of the whole cast, in a role that, to be brutally honest, was made an a absolute charisma vacuum even by the standards of a pulp story that emphasises practical effects first, which does not help him out at all. These stories, and this is something I think of in terms of the Guyver television anime, is structured around protagonists, male leads, who are usually bland, especially in many ultra-violent anime too where the worlds and context around them are more meaningful. More so as he is put against Hamill, the advertising cynically suggesting a key Star Wars figure as the lead in some posters, as well as against Michael Berryman as the main henchmen, one of the most visually striking figure in cult cinema. Even Spice Williams, a prominent stunt actress who stands out physically here with Berryman as a physically imposing female henchwoman, gets to play out a more memorable and playful romance with Berryman in one of the few jokes of the film which do work.

Despite Steve Wang's later work such as with the Guyver sequel and Drive (1997), with fight choreography from the tokusatsu school, and of an incredibly high quality in terms of fighting and stunt work, the fights here look stilted and suffocated by the presentation, lacking what the sequel did. In sacrificing some of the practical effects in terms of beast designs in favour of men in rubber monster suits, likely injuring themselves in painful stunts but bringing an exhilarating air of chaos to the proceedings, that sequel as we get to found a kineticism which works. The result beforehand in the prequel is as stiff. More surprising is the lack of scale even by the standards of a small budget genre film, feeling like only a couple of rooms and some exterior shots were used, the script as swift in getting to its end without any sense of dramatic conflict being found.

The final issue, ultimately the creative decision which maims the film fatally at many times throughout itself, is deciding to play most of the film as a comedy, coming clearer to me now as a result of having to work around the limitations. Even if it worked on other Brian Yuzna productions like Re-Animator, the humour in those cases was incredibly grim even if there was slapstick. This has more broad, goofier with characters being buffoons, and one of the more contentious running gags being the character of Striker. Jimmie Walker, playing him, is a prolific comedian and actor especially in television, all the way back into the seventies with shows like Good Times (1974–1979), a spin-off of a series called Maude which is significant in terms of an American sitcom from that time period about an African-American family. I can see Walker's completely natural charisma here, though when he suddenly indulgences in some early nineties cheesy rap, you realise with The Guyver how tonally this is not an adaptation of Yoshiki Takaya's manga. His fish-monster character is a memorable costume, and he has one good gag of accidentally wandering on a cheap horror film scene with a Linnea Quigley cameo, but his character in general has mostly cringe inducing humour from Striker as a gag character, more an issue as his character in general and especially how his monster version looks has uncomfortable stereotyping that cannot be ignored.

This version of the concept does not really work with its material at all, and it is telling that, with a Director's Cut cutting out violence, there is a misinterpretation of the source material that undercuts it. There are moments you could not show children, and yet they are actually some of the most striking moments. Taken from the source, and recreated in the TV- series, is that the giant orb in the centre of the Guyver's head is its weakness, leading to the death of the lead and an absolutely memorable sequence of body-horror resurrection. Even if it is played for goofiness, with a knock-off Jaws theme riff, that sequence has a morbid grace, and has some humour which actually works beforehand, mainly the fact that Yuzna alumni Jeffrey Combs, of Re-Animator, makes a cameo chewing the scenery and is involved as a weird goat creature by that point. Famously [Spoiler Warning] this is the film where Luke Skywalker gets painfully turned, with Hamill submerged in practical effects latex, into a cockroach-locust hybrid, a moment that if it had been in another production would haveve been up there in Yuzna and Screaming Mad George's filmographies as being iconic. Here, the film around it does not live up to what, in between both films, is the best sequence of these American adaptations, a scene which is actually horrifying, actually tragic and adult, and is one of Screaming Mad George and the prosthetic team's best moments on this film. It is a scene which has clearly stayed with George as, alongside the woman turning into a cockroach in an Elm Street sequel, he is referring to this idea with Paranoiascape (1998), an experimental pinball game he worked on exclusively for the Japanese Playstation One market that explicitly references this as much as Society in some of the grotesque sights within it. [Spoilers End]

The Guyver is a film so painfully bad in its humour at times that it both makes little sense tonally but loses its power in context. It feels like a cheesy American action film from this era, not in terms of when they are fun, but just the clichés, whether it is the moment with a multi-ethnic gang of clumsy hoodlums, or the humour being at the expense of Michael Berryman, rather than embracing his comic timing and imposing nature more, or that no one is taken seriously even as comic characters. Jimmie Walker is even paired up with an actor named Peter Spellos as bumbling henchmen, with Spellos having a vague Eastern European accent, in scenes that undercut the actors themselves. Peter Spellos, who can go from Jim Wynorski films like Sorority House Massacre II (1990), sometimes playing the same character of Orville Ketchum, to a career in anime voice acting for work like Naruto to Cowboy Bebop (1998), is someone with clearly a lot of charisma to try to make this material work, but The Guyver is a case of a cast of fascinating individuals, from a variety of idiosyncratic areas of pop culture, not being helped by the script and tone. From anime voice acting to Star Wars to Peter Greenaway art films to prolific American sitcoms, everyone in and behind the film camera is a fascinating figure who could bring a lot to the table, but the work onscreen from the production really does not connect together.

Ultimately, it is the emphasis on the humour especially, against the paltry production, which makes The Guyver insufferable at times even when it can be charming at other times. A Jeffrey Combs goat demon, or Vivian Wu and Mark Hamill running away from what apparently is a flea monster, like characters in a one-reel silent film comedy, are charming to see, but in mind that this is The Guyver, a tokusatsu work at heart, whether you kept the gore or not, this feels like a project which grabbed at the wrong point. This is stranger considering Brian Yuzna, even if he might have not had a taste for martial arts, had a taste for horror films which got the tone for humour and the monstrous perfectly, or his fellow producer Aki Komine, who produced a series of films with Yuzna or by himself which did attempt manga adaptations with heavier leanings on action, by it Christoph Gans' Crying Freeman adaptation from 1995, or the Fist of the North Star film from 1995 which, whether good as an adaptation or not, was an attempt to get the original violent post-apocalyptic narrative to the screen¹. Komine, with Steve Wang, would also work on Kamen Rider: Dragon Knight (2008-9), Wang's attempt to bring the legendary Kamen Rider series from Japan to American children's television, so there was a sense of Komine being interesting in the type of storytelling The Guyver did not turn into inexplicably. With these curious names involved within its production, it feels instead a sense that, together, The Guyver whilst fascinating just did not gel at all in terms of creativity.

In contrast, Guyver: Dark Hero even with its own flaws managed to be more successful, but that is a review for another day....

To Be Continued...

 

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1) That and this Fist of the North Star adaptation has the curious mix of action star Gary Daniels, Malcolm McDowell, professional wrestler Leon "Vader" White,  Costas Mandylor, Downtown Julie Brown, Chris Penn, and African-American cinema pioneer Melvin Van Peebles involved, which is a strange cast to ever get in an adaptation of a Japanese manga.

#218: Kimera (1996)

 

a.k.a. Ki*Me*Ra

Studio: Animate Films

Director: Kazu Yokota

Screenplay: Kenichi Kanemaki

Based on a manga by Kazuma Kodaka

Voice Cast: Yasunori Matsumoto / Brett Weaver as Osamu; Nobuo Tobita / Kim Sevier as Kimera; Ryotaro Okiayu / Tristan MacAvery as Jay Gibson; Juurouta Kosugi / Bryan Bounds as Kianu; Mugihito / Guil Lunde as Ginzu; Kinryuu Arimoto / Robert Peeples as Dr. Gibson

 

He's even worse than my haemorrhoids!

Sultry electro on the soundtrack introduces the viewer to an entity in a space pod landing on Earth. A tentacle monstrosity, to the horror of the hunter watching on in the woods, tragically kills and drains the life-force from his dog to emphasis in dangerous nature, before he is targeted off-screen. This prologue intertwines with two cornflake cereal salesmen, (yes, that is what they are), one a married American man named Jay, the other a Japanese bachelor named Osama, who together cross into the aftermath site only to get involved with an obvious cover-up.

This is where I should nod to the author of the source manga, Kazuma Kodaka, and that Kimera, despite what the ADV Films English dub tries to cover up, is explicitly an LGBTQ horror story. Kodaka, born in 1969, is known mainly for her work in the "yaoh" genre of "boy's love" manga. Different from "bara", work written about gay men by gay men in manga, yaoh is a huge genre in itself, in genre and popularity, crossing into anime with Kimera interesting as a violent horror story which is yet connected to this genre. It is a tale of Osama meeting the titular Kimera, a sensual androgynous space vampire, nude in a containment pod, one he falls head over heels with the moment he finds them. Osama, in his banter with his friend and colleague, even gets into denial about not having a girlfriend when teased about, befitting a tale which is not going to beat around the bush about its central romance. With incredible progressiveness too, it is not going to think about the two central figures' having any conflict with their desires or sexuality either, even if one is a sexually fluid space vampire, next to an apocalyptic scenario with a former lover and a group of evil space vampires are involved too, and are a significantly bigger issue.

The ADV Film English dub tried to hide this, with "Kimera" dubbed with the pronoun "she" but being an unnatural otherworldly beauty, an intersex  entity who can reproduce with women if men are not available, a figure who is unfortunately destined to destroy (feed off) the Earth which their children when birthed. In the original Japanese dub, as the manga, Kimera is explicitly male, if physically intersex, with only one minor female character in the anime at all, and the drama entirely about this physical beautiful figure. This is complicated by ADV in that the English dub has Kim Sevier play them, a voice actress who voiced Yui Ikari in Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995), protagonist Shinji's deceased mother, whilst in the original Japanese dub, they are played by Nobuo Tobita, a prolific male voice actor. In hindsight, it comes off as dubious on ADV Film's part, particularly as Sevier does use a voice that is gender neutral in tone. Beyond the idea that yaoi stories were not commonly available at the time in the West, it is a strange creative decision which barely hides what is actually happening in the anime.

And Kimera beyond this fact is fascinating. In tone, this sits nicely among the ultra-violent horror anime works from the eighties and nineties fully, with only the sense of it looking of the late nineties present for myself, with a very distinct look in simple colour tones used. It has no qualms with being grotesque even when gore is not onscreen, as one of the humans Dr. Fender, a contrast to the handsomeness in the leads, as a dated trope, of being an figure depicted ugly physically as well as his behaviour, has sided with the evil space vampires, but through one of the sloppiest methods possible of ordering fresh cadavers and organs (of the freshest quality) which can be easily tracked by his fellow scientists. When it is physically violent onscreen, it has in less than fifty minutes mutilation, death, tentacles pushing peoples' eyes out and gore, but with gender subverted, coming off as a sibling among all the violent anime that parents warned us about that came to the West on video, but with this distinct aspect to subvert things. The trope of space vampires is one I have inexplicably come across in anime a lot, as baring the Hellsing franchise there is usually a habit of them being tangibly placed near outer space if not from it, but this packs a lot that, if remade, is pretty striking and would be fascinating to see expanded out, both in subverting that trope but also what the narrative is too.

It has its quirks already, in which the vampire planet is a beautiful fantasy land of lizard birds, but even that slides next to what is an insane melodrama with potential, even those idyllic scenes, with Kimera depicted closer to the kind of elegant female leads of other work, particularly Belldandy from the famous Oh My Goddess franchise, being contrasted by the horror and tragedy of their narrative. That Kimera, having witnessed their own mother become a figure, in a tube, only to breed on their planet, biologically existed in their home world to just breed for their species, even their former lover now having come to Earth too to kill Kimera and spare them this fate. Yaoi in anime and manga, even as someone with barely any knowledge when I came to this anime, was something I still knew in mind of not being a genre, but a theme which crosses into a variety of genres (even American buddy cop tropes with Fake (1994-2000) for an example), which the authors of could take in any direction they could. With yaoi's prime audience a female one, not excluding the potential interest for a gay or bisexual male fan of this work or the manga, the idea that this is proudly a gory horror anime which is yet based on a source, also a horror story, for women with this central romance is really spectacular and something to appreciate decades on.

This manga was also published in Super Jump, which is a "seinen" work targeting young adult men  and adds an additional layer to viewing this title. In the same biweekly manga anthology with Bartender (2004-2011), adapted into an anime series and a drama about a bartender soothing customers' sorrows with the power of alcohol, and the magazine where Buichi Terasawa's legendary Space Adventure Cobra manga was partially published through, Kimera being this explicit as an anime in its gender relationship is even more fascinating, especially as playing to the trope of sex intermingling with death, there is a very explicit threesome with Kimera and two men which is long, and eroticised only until those two mortals get eaten. Considering as well those involved in the production, the legendary Toho among those involved, this is just among the many anime of a variety of types they worked with. For the central studio behind the anime Animate Films, who cut their teeth in this time on horror OVAs like Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei (1987), but could also do the erotic OVA Kama Sutra (1991), making their day job putting Kimera together as it becomes progressive in the sense that, for them, it was as worthy for a potential audience as any of the others.

It is still a cheesy sci-fi horror narrative at its heart, even with some classier choices like In the Hall of the Mountain King on violin on the score in terms of style. It is still very conventional in terms of this type of ridiculous horror anime, in terms of the gore, the character archetypes, the aforementioned obsession with space vampires, and a lot of exposition to cover the lore in little narrative length it possesses. In the latter case, emphasising a troupe of human beings as unreliable and destructive figures which appears in a lot of anime in general, you even get the choice dialogue, alongside side this narrative being based around the real myths of vampires stemming from this alien planet, that dissecting a vampire who came for peace talks with us, and keeping their brain alive in a jar, was a bad move of ours. Even in mind to Japan's relationship to vampires, i.e. a concept alien to their mythology that, when embraced, their pulp stories have had to explain and interpret in their own ways, Kazuma Kodaka as an author herself still kept the idea of their morbid sexuality as a prime part, which shows how they have a universal quality regardless of country. Even here, the final fight takes place in a Christian church, western iconography, with someone impaled on a giant cross, so I credit even Kimera the anime nodding to the lore it is reinterpreting for its original audience.

This even has a happy ending...if John Carpenter, with one of his famous doomsday endings from his horror films, made a horror romance story with either hope or the end of the world potentially happening. Kimera is still not the greatest horror anime. It is sadly one that might be difficult to re-release too, simply because so much straight-to-video anime exists, and ones which are less than an hour long with no further episodes like this are a struggle to re-release even today. It is however fascinating, it is entertaining, and even decades later, it still stands out as being one of the gory OVA anime from this older era which was also an early LGBTQ title that we did get in the West if just in North America.  

#217: Jinki:Extend (2005)

 

Studio: Feel

Director: Masahiko Murata

Screenplay: Hiroyuki Kawasaki, Hitomi Amamiya and Naruhisa Arakawa

Based on a manga by Sirou Tunasima

Voice Cast: Fumiko Orikasa as Aoba Tsuzaki; Takuma Takewaka as Ryouhei Ogawara; Tomoko Kawakami as Elnie Tachibana; Yuuna Inamura as Akao Hiiragi; Ai Nonaka as Satsuki Kawamoto; Junko Minagawa as Mel J Vanette; Rokurō Naya as Genta Ogawara; Satsuki Yukino as Shizuka Tsuzaki; Yoshino Takamori as Minami Kōsaka; Yukari Tamura as Rui Kōsaka

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

[Contains Major Plot Spoilers]

When I was getting into anime in the early 2000s, there were a spate of mecha shows from this time, usually from the defunct ADV Films, that we got on DVD in the United Kingdom, and with its front of the first cover of the first volume of two girls, one with black hair and the other with blonde hair, there is a telling sense that this one was trying to appeal more on these characters then the robots, something which became apparent with the titles I have finally reached only nowadays. These two are important to have on the cover however as they are central to this show's plot. The first scene of the first episode presents these two, without anyone batting an eye at teenagers piloting sophisticated robots, fighting each other in "Jinki" war robots in the centre of Tokyo. With the likes of the Roppongi district already destroyed in the conflict, the blonde girl, drawn as a more "moe" cute figure, is the villain of the conflict if clearly brainwashed, with one of the virtues of anime and manga being how they can with ease depict a character losing their sanity or moral compass with just the eyes, rather than trying to emote it as an actor in live action with a varying quality per actor. The other is the heroine, who is completely outmatched, with the series starting in media res with the intention of skipping back to before this conflict transpired. One would presume it would be when they are together in the same training camp as friends if you had no prior knowledge to this series, maybe with the pair as close as sisters, maybe with a tragic back-story involved between them. 

This is not what you will get, and the structure of Jinki: Extend is complicated, trying to adapt the manga in only thirteen episodes, and in mind that it covers two different parts of the franchise in one tale. The figure with black hair, Aoba, comes from the first of Sirou Tunasima's manga Jinki (2000-1), of her story within the country of Venezuela that opens this series, whilst the blonde girl named Akao was the central figure of Jinki: Extend (2002-6), the sequel manga, which covers the segments for this TV series with her within Japan later on in the timeline. Jinki:Extend, barring some questionable attempts at edginess, is a generic mecha show which has virtues but whose greatest issue is that it did not have the time, nor the pacing, to tell its story, an attempt to cram two parts of the manga, with its two leads, into one series with new plot changes and the issue that Aoba wil be missing for episodes, which is significant for a thirteen part series.

Jinki:Extend's  biggest issue right from the gate is that thirteen episodes are deceptively long; this length should be long enough to tell tales like the one in this series, but like other anime I have seen, this barely has enough time in reality to tell the version it wants properly. It has, because of its source material, to attempt a juggle game of two different time periods at once, but with an instant issue that you will not get context for when this series is set even if eventually reached, not giving you the scale of the world and the conflict. I have mentioned Aoba's tale is set within Venezuela, but unless you recognise the locations replicated, you get no context for this initially, nor that this is actually set in 1988 when she is introduced, with Aoba shipped off from Japan to a Jinki defence base against her will. Without the context fully established of what they are against, this show has to struggle with making its narrative, a basic one of an evil group of Jinki pilots attacking around the world, work or that this is also an alternative history narrative, where this is going into the early nineties by its end with giant robots as destructive military forces.

It has a plot in this early act to work on, even if it kept the history and context vague, that Aoba finds herself in a scenario with an almost all-male team at the defence base she comes to befriend, but a huge emotional strife with Shizuka, her mother who she does not even call "mother" and she has no emotional connection, with Shizuka herself showing none back either and with the desire instead to turn her daughter into a killing machine. Nonetheless, Aoba shows a superhuman ability, and enthusiasm, to pilot one of the Jinki, and one of the best moments of this entire series is that it takes the time to deal with this, as it needs to be honed out of the un-athletic girl who was more interested in plastic model kits before.

The lack of context, barring a few huge exposition dumps, does not help Jinki:Extend at all though, and considering the thirteenth episode was never released until OVA, this does feel like a troubled production or one which struggled to work out its world. The blonde haired girl, Akao, is introduced in the Venezuela plotline, but exists as a primary character more in the part set three years later back in Japan. A more advanced version of the Jinki defence force exists by this point, with a whole group of girls and women piloting multiple Jinki, who were introduced in Venezuela. With no memories from before those three years previous, Akao also has superhuman powers of her own which are of interest to an evil group, one behind a series of "Lost Life Scenarios" where they indiscriminately attack major locations globally. This is where the show also does show some more adult flecks to its plumage, as whilst the main villain is a rather bland masked man, his back-story of an emotionally damaged person whose goals are for pure nihilistic destruction, interested in perverting Akao from a girl with an emotional block to even pilot a robot into one who will destroy whole cities, is definitely interesting as a character touch. The plot gets into clones, with Akao connected to a woman whose decision to love another turned this villain into something desiring from then on to destroy everything with a band of even more nastier customers.

There is not a lot of time to really get into this cast with a two timeline narrative to consider, especially as the other female dominated crew of Jinki pilots do not get a lot to work with. Akao is pretty bland in truth, but considering her narrative as a figure literally created from the death of another, she could have grown. The lack of Aoba throughout halfway through is even more an issue, as she starts off as a likable figure, one who literally has to get physically competent enough to pilot a mech, and grow as a person with her own emotional barriers with her biological mother something the show tries to close out fully by the final episode. The episode entirely about Aoba trying to improve her stamina, of everyone at the Venezuelan base helping her covertly train to improve her health, in the food they make her to even a special robot training machine powered by exercise bicycle, is the best episode of the series because it is entirely about giving a character some growth. It also feels the one distinct moment for this show as a mech narrative as the one time this aspect of this genre has been examined. Her lack of involvement for a key chunk of the Japanese narrative, especially when she is aware of the machinations of the villains in one brazenly monologuing about it to her, even breaks logic let alone causes a huge issue of the most well invested into character not being available.

There are far too many characters and plot points to cram into this series, the story finished on the twelfth episode quickly whilst episode thirteen, an epilogue for the DVD/OVA era, is an epilogue for the characters themselves. Even then as well, whilst I have softened to this program considerably from my first hostile reactions a time ago, Jinki:Extend has other disadvantages. It does not get a chance to stick out as a mech show. It is a show that has Masami Obari, a well known director and a highly well regarded mech animator, as a collaborator, and has Kenji Kawai, Mamoru Oshii's regular composer, of all people scoring the series, but only little pieces of the drama stick out. Also despite a large female cast dominating the show, this has a few moments which cross a line, its attempt to be adult not working or a work being split into also trying to sell for horny male viewers, which comes off as really problematic for a show that, aside from those moments, barely makes sense for the tone.

One henchmen is explicitly a molester, with chameleonic shape shifting abilities, with a thing for little sister fantasies brought in, who targets one pilot by posing as her older brother, and Shizuka, as in the manga but in a very different context, is a rape victim, with her relationship to Aoba as the child of this complicated as a result. Hers is a really dicey plot, as she until episode twelve, when her humanity and conflict is brought in, is unredeemable, which as a rape victim, when that abruptly is introduced into her back-story, makes it really problematic. The scene, abruptly transpiring, involves the main villain, an act in his despair over not being with the woman he loved, which is far more problematic in how that just happens as a scene, even if thankfully off-screen, and in how she is, despite being the villain, clearly for a character a mentally damaged person alienated from her own child and with Stockholm Syndrome in terms of why she even stays with the perpetrator on his side. It gets weirder when a clone named Lady Shiva is brought in, a pure id of evil and Aoba's chirpy but sadistic doppelganger, with this plot back story one of the attempts at being mature which undercuts Jinki:Extend so badly, especially when this wants to riff in the era of mecha show after Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995), especially in Aoba and her mother's distance as a dynamic evoking the lead Shinji and his father (and villain) Gendo from the famous series.

Fan service creeps in slowly, for a show where it feels tonally abrupt to include in. Aoba is caught with her pants down a couple of times. Eyes roll. There is how Lady Shiva, a psychopathic clone who references Stendhal's The Red and the Black at one point, kisses even her own technical daughter, which feels like cheap and questionable fan service, and part of a dubious aspect alongside having her kiss any girl in her vicinity, among a group with that pervert Jinki pilot with a little sister interest, or the abrupt moment one briefly seen is dunking Akao into strange liquid which partially dissolves her pilot's suit. This content is the part of Jinki:Extend which I do hate, in a show which is okay and has its moments. It feels so at odds with the show it is part of, one which wants to be serious but really does not have the time to try at this, and compensating with content which has not aged well at all.

It is a show which feels at a point of trying to sell this genre to a different audience, how Godannar (2003-4) and Gravion (2002-4) have a lot of fan service in terms of titillation. You can see this, in a less creepy way, when discrete under the sheets, two female character have horseplay between themselves admiring how much they have "changed", but for the most part, this is a show with a muted tone, where the Jinki for their unnatural laser cannons and "Phantom" abilities are military machines in a grounded context. It is a series where the show redeems itself in that, when allowed to breath, the character when they are not in combat situation and bonding are a likable bunch, if really at odds to the fan service and the more problematic content.

A lot of the show does suffer in having little time to establish these figures, a series which could have benefitted from twenty six episodes. Something as simple as Aoba being a plastic robot model enthusiast, clearly for the viewers, is still a character trait that could have still found its way throughout the series, but only comes up in the bonus thirteenth episode. The character of Mel J Vanette, who is fascinating as a British character from Nottingham in England of all places, does feel like another figure of a cast that is excessively large yet takes up a whole episode for a subplot that was unnecessary. Again a character designed for fan service, who has a huge chest and a costume design that would need strategic use of tape, she is again another character who would have been interesting if fleshed out, beyond the adult loner who wears shades, in how she is a rouge, out for revenge in a Jinki she managed to steal, who joins the heroes out of her own morality.  

If this is quite a negative review at times, only the problematic content which cannot be ignored is truly bad. Jinki:Extend when it can breathe does have moments I liked, mostly all the character interaction rather than the actual narrative with the giant robots. When it works - when Aoba has her training episode, when the characters are allowed to stand out, even that the plot is centred on someone having his heart broken to the point he will massacre hundreds - it does work. The twelfth episode, with the huge hurdles to navigate in a story that was not fully covered, does well with what it can, even managing a hard turn, considering how the character of Shizuka is deeply problematic in what you learn of her, in having her have a layer brought out of complexity even if the show has clearly oversimplified and botched material it could not properly tackle without being problematic. The bonus thirteenth episode is also good, actually good  - everyone, even briefly, gets a moment, and this even has world building in how one, to her disappointment, desiring to turn the Jinki into civilian tools will have the understandable hurdle of the populous just viewing them as killing machines. It is sweet in having Aoba develop back-story from photos and unprocessed photo film found in her old home, memories once lost rediscovered. It is legitimately funny when one girl, too young to drink, still pretends to be drunk for fun with the two adults who are, one of the later fixated on old technology is firing off twenty year old fireworks that still work in a back garden. The productions' flaws do not help the show, including the attempts at plotting which add obscurity to the show, and also the tasteless moments in what the production attempted to include, but this bonus episode, despite that being what it is, manages to be a good epilogue for what is in all truth merely average to okay with deep flaws.

Studio Feel's first television show was this, so that probably explains the show's many flaws. With exceptions, they have focused more on fan service shows like Bikini Warriors (2015), or comedies like Please Tell Me! Galko-chan (2016). The Jinki franchise would continue in various forms even decades later, though it is telling to its flaws that, rebooted with visual novels from Jinki: EXTEND Re:VISION (2010), they were adult visual novels with sexual content, the PS4 and Nintendo Switch releases of the PC game Jinki Resurrection (2020) removing this content. Maybe you could have attempted a version of this world with erotic content, but in mind Jinki:Extend had issues just telling a mech drama in pacing, and that a lot of its edgier content was woefully out-of-place, there is the uncomfortable sense, alongside most of the female cast being teenagers, that this franchise has gone the wrong direction with its potential unless they really managed something of note.

 In the 2000s titles I have seen, it was clear the mecha genre was trying to find audiences in a variety of ways, including the bluntest in sex selling. The strange thing is that, from its tone to its anthemic end song Mirai to yuu na no kotae by angela, Jinki:Extend among them was a more conventional mecha narrative which was more serious in tone among those I have seen. It feels a work that was pulled in directions which made no sense, where its moments of being silly should have stuck to one other memorable sequence, robot pilot training involving dribbling a soccer ball away from another robot, than some of the stuff which, viewed now, does require a trigger warning or a lot of sighs to deal with. Those moments are abrupt in a show, for most its length, alien to them, which is strange as well, for a mech narrative set in the late eighties into the nineties, with an alternative history back-story left abandoned on the table alongside its character dramas which would have been compelling. The more I have learnt of what Jinki:Extend came from, the more the virtues stand out as much as clearly the wrong priorities were focused from even from the beginning, resulting in the mess onscreen. I once reacted negatively to this show, in terms of being average, and whilst the flaws are more striking now with new eyes, the virtues in their pieces are there too.