#269: Maris the Chojo (1986)

 

Studio: Pierrot

Director: Motosuke Takahashi

Screenplay: Tomoko Konparu and Hideo Takayashiki

Based on a manga by Rumiko Takahashi

Voice Cast:

Japanese: Mami Koyama as Maris, Jouji Yanami as Murphy, Junpei Takiguchi as Colonel, Sumi Shimamoto as Zombie Sue, Toshio Furukawa as Koganemaru Matsushita

English Dub: Sharon Holm as Maris, Dominic Taylor as Rogane, Harry Ditson as General, Kerry Shale as Murphy, Stacey Jefferson as Sue

Viewed in English Dub

 

Rumiko Takahashi is one of those huge names in Japanese pop culture, a huge author in manga since her beginnings from 1975 under the guide of Kazuo Koike and 1978 professionally, and like so many like Go Nagai to Koike himself, there are the titles which became her calling cards and other obscurer ones which also managed to get animated adaptations due to the status Takahashi gained. For Takahashi, obvious bigger hitters include the Ranma ½ and Urusei Yatsura franchises, whilst Maris the Chojo, also known as Maris the Wonder Girl or Supergirl, was a one-shot manga from 1980, part of titles which would be collected under the Rumic World reprinted sets of short stories years later. A beautiful looking opening in outer space introduces the titular Maris, causing one to presume this is a serious action sci-fi story in which this figure, a space bikini wearing space cop who has to stop crimes across the galaxy in this well animated eighties production. What it also turns out to be is a comedy as Maris has the worst of luck despite her talent for terrorizing evil doers.

Maris does have a tragic back story, a riff on Superman to befit an alternative title for the Central Park Media release when they sold this on VHS, where her surviving species were forced to become intergalactic refugees when their planet imploded, but mostly this follows a trope that works exceptionally in anime when it succeeds, that of the hero/heroine who is hopeless and out of luck we sympathize with. With the strength of more than six humans, as all her species, the choice of bikini is less of note than the bindings she has to remove to be able to use her full strength, allowing her to kick alien goons to the other side of the room and causing villains to literally urinate themselves in fear, but also leading her to accidentally break her entire ship when she forgets to put the restraints back on. With a talking seven tailed fox helper named Murphy at her side, able to transform into anything if in sevens only, and amusingly given a broad Irish accent in the English dub, this is clearly more playful in tone when the story proper begins, and I find it sad this was never expanded beyond its one-shot nature originally, as these characters immediately have a lot to work with.

Including two extended music video sequences, the first on an intergalactic beach resort with a Jaws parody and a bandaged mummy enjoying their sunbathing, this is a farcical action comedy where our space cop Maris is sent after a kidnapped son of a billionaire. It is more of a character piece as this is a trope as old as time in anime, that of the hapless hero constantly in debt, her family all having restraints which they forget to keep on, leading to property damage their daughter has to pay off alongside her mother’s shopping sprees, whilst her diminutive (i.e. pixie sized) boss has debts from every spaceship they have lent her she keeps breaking or letting get destroyed. Maris is sympathetic, even if her fantasies of marrying the kidnap victim are less romantic but for all the money he has. She is someone forced to take other jobs on vacation because she is constantly broke, even tricking horny male customers with her good looks to actually pay for a human taxi service where she just carries them, and even in her imperfect form, she is the kind of lead you get so much sympathy from as a lovable goof. This is added to by both being ahead of her time as an ultra strong female character and also because, metaphorically, characters like this in anime even in fantasy settings cannot help but suggest their real life counterparts. More so this as the daughter and sole breadwinner to a family constantly being hassled by phone calls from her parents needing money, Maris is s single woman having to put up with debts, even with the equipment for her job that gets damaged by pure accident, and finding it sucks like if for anyone else in a less fantastic job who could have read the first ever one-shot manga.

She is of that time as well as, visibly, another influence on this story was female (joshi) professional wrestling, which was a previous job for Maris alongside the villainess making the reference explicit; stuck with a broad southern accent in the English dub like too many did, this figure of Sue is noentheless another sympathetic figure from the same planet as Maris, who for her scheming just wants to buy her own elaborate lair, a former in-ring rival to Maris who also like to get payback from previous loses likely involved in their history. This has aged like fine wine as a joke, as the legacy of women's wrestling in Japan has gained more recognition and burns brightly still decades later, but it also plays to the fact that, as another eighties franchise Dirty Pair was explicitly inspired by female wrestling too, when coming up with two female space mercenaries, Maris also shows when this spectacle in Japan was a huge pop cultural phenomenon too that was influencing other mediums too. There is a rematch in the squared circle in the climax between the two female figures central to this story, and what little we get here from Studio Pierrot is clearly them having fun. A studio with a long history in the medium, the creators were indulging here in the positive way like so many of these one-shot productions, getting in references like to Star Wars characters in the background you would not be allowed to get away with in later decades, due to the stricter copyright practices that would come in, to the end credits having faked outtakes, all of Maris and other characters tripping, getting injured or even blown up. As a one-off OVA, sadly, you cannot go further than this in speculating where this could go with the central character, and in this case, there is also the knowledge Rumiko Takahashi only wrote and drew one single manga story for this, not a vast volume of chapters. As with so many of these titles we could have gotten a longer OVA series if not a TV series, only with the knowledge that the material this adapts was not as long either to consider, there is enough to admire, but it leads to feeling like a taster to a work you can only imagine the vaster adventures of.