#230: Hell Teacher Nube: Summer Holiday of Fear! Legend of the Sea of Suspicion (1997)

 

Studio: Toei Animation

Director: Junji Shimizu

Screenplay: Yoshiyuki Suga

Based on the manga by Shō Makura and illustrated by Takeshi Okano

Voice Cast: Emi Uwagawa as Shizuka; Kazunari Tanaka as Katsuya; Machiko Toyoshima as Noriko; Masaya Takahashi as Kisaki; Maya Okamoto as Nagisa; Megumi Urawa as Makoto; Michiko Neya as Ritsuko-sensei; Miina Tominaga as Miki Hosokawa; Rumi Kasahara as Kyoko Inaba; Ryotaro Okiayu as Nube; Takayuki Inoue as Kiyoshi Horie; Toshiko Fujita as Hiroshi Tachino; Yoshiyuki Kouno as Kainanhoushi; Yuri Shiratori as Yukime

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

Hell Teacher Nube is a franchise I had never heard of, yet it has a full thirty one volume manga, penned between 1993 to 1999, has a forty nine episode animated series, an OVA series and three films, including this one, though this is a short film, closer to a “special” in only being forty minutes long. It is though a Weekly Shōnen Jump title, which argues why it managed to be adapted as much as it was, one from the nineties which clearly did not cross over into the West or missed the chance to. By the late nineties, Weekly Shōnen Jump, arguably the biggest of the publications for manga if at least one of them, would get Yu-Gi-Oh!, One Piece (which started in 1997 and was still going into 2022) and Naruto, so it feels that among the titles which became popular hits for the publication, Nube just missed the boat when more Shonen titles, including Shonen Jump itself, were commodities into the West as big selling titles to promote.

This special, produced by Toei, is not an inherently great work, a forty minute “special” in the sense that it has the main characters are in a scenario, for a big spoiler, where they are not going to be in trouble, and the character specifically for this special, who never returns, is the one with the emotional trajectory. The special is a concept which is especially common for Shonen Jump titles, including full length theatrical films, but they are a type of adaptation which can still succeed. This one, even as likely a minor piece of the Hell Teacher Nube franchise, was a great way to be introduced to these characters.

The titular Nube, one of a group of teachers who, when the series started, was a fifth grade teacher for Dōmori Elementary, teaching students normally but with a demon left hand kept gloved and having to fight demonic forces to protect his students. It is a premise in itself, just as someone who likes “occult detective” stories, or narratives about supernatural figures having to deal with supernatural entities each episode, which appeals just to imagine instead “occult teacher” in this case. The opening song to this special was as much a win for the show catching my attention, the female vocal song that is jaunty yet have double kick drum percussion, which is awesome and feels like a thrash metal song, a symphonic rock song, choral backing vocals and J-pop ended up in a blender. Perfect for a tale where, going on summer vacation as a class, the class make the ill-advised decision to go where there is a nearby island shaped like a spider nearby which is cursed, one of the male students spotting what he swears is a nude girl on the rock who will become important, the special’s character of importance connected to the curse of the spider island. Considering that spider island is said by a local to have spiders with human faces that turn into demons after 200 and eat flesh, this was a bad vacation choice for everyone.

The cast of main characters, barely glimpsed include a few archetypes. Ritsuko the female teacher Nube is smitten with, the trope (if here amusing) of the lame male teacher who is horny but will be reliable in the end; Yukime, a yuki-onna who became attracted to Nūbē and followed him; and a motley crew of students, the two who immediately stood out of note being Kyoko, the “tsundere” of the class who punches any male who is a pervert (and has access to hammer space in finding mallets) and Miki, who immediately won me over in her tiny little part in the special as, for her introduction, she breaks the fourth wall, aware of the audience and flirting with them out of jealously that one of the other girls in her class is cuter than her. As a result of this, yes, there is a bit of cheesy fan service here, but the few jokes here managed to land, even the fact that Yukime, alongside sunbathing on a block of ice, is in danger of having the sun melt her figure off.

There is not a lot to the special beyond this, except that this mysterious girl is tragically connected to those aforementioned demon spiders. Again, this is a slight story, though it is to the credit to this production, and tantalizing to explore the other animated adaptations of the franchise, this has a creepy and compelling aesthetic to it - hands coming out the sea on mass; a variety of demons in gristly forms; and another in a lone of animating a person turning into a giant spider. Even when it switches to comedy, this is played to such as the unfortunate moment of someone turning their head giant and swallowing the hero up. The people involved on this production would cut their teeth on such Shonen productions, so this feels like a continuation of a type of anime they would feel comfortable with and creating over the decades before and after, used to working with these big titles with big expectations to their animated adaptation – Toei Animation were knee deep in Dragonball titles alone; director Junji Shimizu would move onto One Piece animation, and screenwriter Yoshiyuki Suga was a veteran to penning for these ultra popular franchises with Captain Tsubasa, Hunter X Hunter, Saint Seiya, Slam Dunk and One Piece titles in his career.

Junji Shimizu and Yoshiyuki Suga worked on other Hell Teacher Nube anime, and so they would have gotten these characters over multi adaptations. Again, I suspect this is a minor inclusion in this franchise, but it was a perfect introduction for me, so it worked fully.