#264: Demon Prince Enma (2006-7)

 

Studio: Brain's Base

Director: Mamoru Kanbe

Screenplay: Takao Yoshioka

Based on the manga by Go Nagai

Voice Cast: Yukitoshi Tokumoto as Enma; Saeko Chiba as Yukihime; Setsuji Satoh as Kapaeru; Yūichi Nagashima as Grandpa Chapeauji

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

There have been a few different versions of Demon Prince Enma, a Go Nagai creation first from a 1973 manga called Dororon Enma-kun, which has appeared in a variety of different forms over the decades - animated television series for kids from 1973, very child unfriendly manga from Nagai with a gender swapped Enma, Dororon Enbi-chan (2000-1), which would cross over with a version of Enma in animated form in 2011, for a more wacky and lewd comedy series, and this, based on another Nagai reinterpretation, a 2006 manga, followed by this 2006 Bandai produced work. Four straight to video episodes, it is a significantly more adult and serious take which unfortunately feels too swift in concluding it when, truthfully, playing as just four episodic stories of its leads dealing with demons in a Nagai-approved misanthropy would have been better. As with its source manga, Enma is a prince of the underworld sent to deal with yokai and demons running amok in the human world, with this the more horror leaning interpretation as he either drags back the demons and monsters who have already killed, or jus destroy them as here, accompanied by Kapaeru, a kappa of Japanese legend, and Yukihime, taken from the Japanese legend of the Yuki-onna ("snow woman"), beautiful women in legend who exist in snow covered environments and in some stories take victims, here instead a figure whose metaphorical coldness to Enma is however contrasted by the crush she has for him. There is also Enma's talking hat Grandpa Chapeauji, who is a grumbling entity that usually is asleep, all them finding themselves in modern Japan and in a work directed by Mamoru Kanbe, someone I have grown admiration for in contributing a lot to horror anime through the late 1990s to the next few decades. They are a director who has worked in a variety of genres but also had a streak of titles from the late nineties OVAs to Elfen Lied (2004) to The Promised Neverland (2019–2021) in the horror genre, adding titles to a genre which for a while had fewer entries than you would presume for the medium

There is a lot to this premise, especially as there is still some corpse humour. A bit of the humour has not aged well, from the source of Enma being a pervert, something Yukihime will reprimand him for, but other aspects when the serious tone shift to goofiness thankfully have. Despite being the Prince of the Underworld, Enma like Yukihime is oblivious to modern human society, in one of the running gags which is however aged like fine wine, where it is the kappa who is keeping up to date with mobile phones and modern ways of sourcing information, like off the internet, for connections of ghost stories and rumours they can chase up. Setting up a supernatural detective agency to catch the enemies, there is a great premise here in a trope found in a lot of anime, where horror and supernatural tales are interpreted as episodic morality tales where the one-off characters can suffer the consequences and these supernatural entities are there to clean the mess up. Add to this the two leads being clueless of human terms whilst Kapaeru struggles with the practicalities, and having to take jobs where he can pretend he is in a kappa disguise, and you have a throwback to the old era of horror anime - the gore and the moments of salacious nudity - with the nod to a humour where these entities have to adapt to the modern day.

The first two episodes, forty plus episodes each, present this well, introducing the leads chasing a woman only to banish a baby-like monstrosity from her mouth before burning it up. Episode one proper deals with a vampire-like entity killing people and creating gristly crime scenes, dragging mortal characters into the arching narrative like a detective who, hearing of a young man in a strange witch hat, naturally finds himself as a potential antagonist. The lurid nature of the anime, as alluded to, only really comes with Enma's less than tactful attitude especially to Yukihime, content which becomes more problematic in terms of sex comedy in the medium, whilst a lot of the narrative context, until you get into something just over-the-top in the last two episodes, is in contexts like a hostess bar which becomes the central location of episode 2, or a character who is a sex worker in the first episode, or a scene in a bathtub for episode one, dealing with a Japanese-German woman who is finding herself slowly disconnecting around reality, where of more concern is reality literally bleeding into the bathtub than explicit nudity.

The gore is strong, but even next to its forefathers, which had lovingly hand drawn intestines spilling out in low budget efforts, this is not even as extreme as Elfen Lied, Mamoru Kanbe's television series, with the same screenwriter Takao Yoshioka, which is arguably more shocking both in gore and its sexual content. What this does stray into, whilst episodic, is its stories having a reason behind their violence, where the first episode deals with the suffocating (and uncomfortable incestuous) protective bond of a father over his daughter, especially with the mother passed, whilst episode 2 introduces a killer doll in connection to a young woman, a bar hostess, who is treated as dirt by many. Starting to enter a downward spiral when she barges in on her boyfriend cheating on her, the doll targeting those who did her wrong, even if it gets into her possessing the other women in the hostess club with the doll, it becomes about her sense of meaningless and lashing out in the middle of this. Aesthetically this has a different mood from its eighties to nineties forbearers too, emphasising real modern metropolis with the more overt phantasmagorical content the cast and the monstrocities they are after themselves, rather than a trope I love in those older works of characters entering dreamt realities and stylised uses of colours. An obvious exception to this, which is greatly appreciated in the final episode despite my issues with the final plot line, does lead Enma himself into a nightmare reality, where you also see that even as far back as Psycho Diver: Soul Siren (1995), one of his first directorial efforts in the straight-to-video format, Mamoru Kanbe has a very good eye for horrific and surreal imagery through his career in the genre. There is obvious computer CGI here, but it itself is used with careful choice, such as the killer doll of episode two, which is obvious but working as an eerie killer item in this look and not feeling as obsolete in terms of animation.

Where this production lost me was that part three to four, tiding the production up, abruptly closes the story, with key characters killed off despite the fact, for a work longer than most theatrical films, it still feels abrupt for something which is set up to be a longer story and should have stayed episodic for its four episodes even if no more were created. Part three involves strange entities possessing people and Yukihime eventually being one such victim of this, alongside the twisted image of a mother turned to try to kill her daughter (and having killed the husband), but it feels strange to completely sideline the leads of the story. Even if they should not be the central figures of each episode, they really become sidelined in favour for a haunted house slasher film set up where a group of characters, some we have seen and others not, are picked off by traumas from their lives, who have not really had any context for their lives when the story begins. It is interesting as an idea for a two parter, dealing with ideas such as one guilty over their ex-boyfriend in school actually throwing himself out of a window when she dismisses him, but  it does however feel like these characters have barely existed for this grand conclusion. Even if one, prominent in the four episodes before, does have the epilogue for a bleak conclusion, stuck as a ghost in the aftermath, they have not had enough time before a surprising amount of back story does get thrown in about her. Even more so than episodes before, this does end up with a slasher chase scene with a further lurid edge as it involves a female character in a contrived state of undress, which does feel abrupt, being pursued.

It feels weird, and in general, even OVAs which have a lot of time in just a few forty minute episodes do not feel like they can escalate as this does in such short time, to one key character dying, and the slate being entirely cleared, without it feeling too short to reach that point. Even twelve episode anime for me can feel like it is abrupt in ending, so this does feel out of place. Even here, when there is still some distinct horror aesthetic, including the really gross sight of someone birthing a baby creature through their mouth, Demon Prince Enma does end on a disappointment. Enma was released in a time when the original video anime finding itself becoming less prominent than television anime, which could be allowed to be more adult (even if censored) with the likes of cable channels, and Enma as a release was part of Bandai Visual, an ill-advised attempt to bring the pricing style for limited edition DVD releases from their home country, presenting titles like this and Yukikaze (2002-5) to little fanfare.  They lasted from 2005 to 2008, and in terms of obscurer titles from Mamoru Kanbe at the time, Denpa teki na Kanojo (2009) (a.k.a. Electromagnetic Girlfriend), which did not even get a Western release, feel like more successful attempts at dealing with idiosyncratic horror tales within very little time. Demon Prince Enma is still fascinating to watch, definitely with an entertainment value, but to be approached in knowledge it is slighter among Go Nagai adaptations.