Re-Review: Darkside Blues (1994)

 

Studio: J.C. Staff

Director: Nobuyasu Furukawa

Screenplay: Mayori Sekijima

Based on the manga by Hideyuki Kikuchi and Yuho Ashibe

Voice Cast: Akio Ohtsuka as Kenzou; Hideyuki Hori as Gren; Kotono Mitsuishi as Mai; Kouichi Yamadera as Enji; Masako Katsuki as Tamaki; Maya Okamoto as Selia; Natsuki Sakan as Darkside; Nozomu Sasaki as Katari; Shinichiro Miki as Chris; Yasunori Matsumoto as Tatsuya

Viewed in English Dub

 

In the opening scene, you do get a pretty gruesome set up to Darkside Blues, evoking that this will be another anime adaptation of the work by Hideyuki Kikuchi like the infamous Wicked City (1987), in which a female freedom fighter stripped to the waist about to be tortured by another. It is still nasty what happens, but sets up less a lurid anime shocker from the past, but a really curious hybrid of horror, science fiction dystopia and magic, in which the poor victim is slowly turned into gold whilst alive through a science-meets-alchemy pincher machine that sticks in both sides around her stomach. From that point onwards, nothing is as extreme, and instead these genre combinations take over instead. It is a really idiosyncratic world that we encounter, barely in some ways in less than nineties minutes, in which the villainess is part of the Persona Century Corporation who rules the world, their lair high above the planet Earth on a satellite with its own giant laser. In a world where they have almost bought everything, where science and magic have intermingled, there are finally forces after dethroning them, such as the youthful leader of the anti Persona group Messiah, Mai, and those who stand with her. The titular Darkside, named by where he first appears from a dimension of the darkness is their trump card, initially intermingling as a mere psionic healer but possesses absolute power of darkness and magic. He wishes to renew the world for the better from its bleak situation, and he will start to help those fighting for justice and freedom when asked to.

Set within a world where futuristic sci-fi is intertwined with mysticism, robots against magic welding mutant assassin, and enough horror aspects to really apply for the genre tag even if a tertiary one, it befits novelist and manga author Hideyuki Kikuchi as he has, alongside a prolific career, a habit of bleeding together genres into one work. His most famous franchise Vampire Hunter D, with the vital contributions of legendary illustrator Yoshitaka Amano, was a post apocalyptic sci-fi horror story which has western genre aesthetics least in the animated adaptations. Darkside Blues sadly didn't get an additional animated adaptation, knowing this source material only lasted for two manga, so there is the fact that, sadly, there wouldn't have been much left to adapt, leaving one with enough tantalising what-ifs of how to continue in this world. This is a shame as, throwing the viewer in media res in the midst of the world and not having a resolution that resolves the dystopian world it begins with, I still found so much to this supernaturally tinged sci-fi hybrid I really liked. This is an example where you see the really interesting side to Japanese animation where it allows story tropes and ideas to bleed together in really idiosyncratic ways, more so as this has style to burn against its pulpy story.

What you do get with Darkside Blues thankfully repays the patient viewer with pure atmosphere. This particular one is even different by itself because it is laced in a slow, deliberate mood and emphasises characters, surprising for a film merely eighty minutes long. Immediately made clear is also the sharp contrast between its dystopian story against gothic production design, a fascinating melding which works beautifully, depicting pure urban sprawl and a tale of a corporation in total control which (unfortunately) stays relevant thirty plus years later, all with the one slum that the villains haven't bought the centre of the heroes' activity. In spite of having some actions scenes and gore, this entire story is a deliberately moody work, intercutting moments of contemplation to contrast these pulpier scenes, to a spider in a room with red lace or silent contemplation against those aforementioned action scenes. Even if the characters don't get a lot of time onscreen, we see Mia forced to confront her own memories through dream therapy with Darkside, or see a surviving member of a freedom fighting group, a young man, and a female ex-nurse whose family was wiped out by the Persona satellite laser fall in love as she rediscovers her need to help fight for the cause.

As a theatrical production from J.C. Staff, a prolific animation studio who started in 1986 and thus wasn't that old to even endeavour on this production, they produced a mere snapshot of a larger world, which is depressing as the story has to be hastily wrapped up, but there is enough here to tantalise. The first time I saw this film, the first moment this won me over is when the first showdown between heroes and villains is scored to an honest-to-God blues song in the traditional of American ones with English vocals. With original lyrics evoking the musical genre and the story's own title, whilst fitting the world's themes of repression and rebellion, that was one of the first idiosyncratic touches that came throughout this that really caught interest.

Then there's Darkside himself, who despite being your typical anime trope of the dark and handsome stranger with unnatural powers from the void he came from, is intentionally passive. He feels like he's from the same template as D, Kikuchi's most famous creation in his quiet manner and elegance, but taken to a further extreme that he deliberately inert in his involvements. He will lash back when provoked, but deliberately stays off to the sides, intervening to heal other characters and stop the villains from harming people even by the finale. He spends most of his time throughout the film, in the most intriguing aspect of the world building, within a motel ran by an old woman where characters are pulled by a magic force to the room they want to go, where among his potential abilities (including maybe even extending the life further of the old woman's pet cat) is counselling of clients' memories and dreams, healing them and (even outside the hotel) using this ability to push the protagonists to major decisions, through pulling them into their traumas and memories to stop them from running from them. Literally, he's a counsellor to the real main characters, who just happens to be a quietly spoken man capable of horrifying dark void abilities if anyone was insane to push him.

In another twist, although it's sadly lost when it comes to the English dub which casts Matthew Harrington, is that a female voice actress named Natsuki Sakan voices Darkside rather than a man, which adds a unique dynamic for viewers. It's her sole acting role in the anime industry, which is just as mysterious. She sings the end theme, Paradise Lost, which presents the idea that this production was as meant to promote her, but with her singing voice a deeper and sombre one, it is a compelling idea to see that, to promote her, she voices the main male lead. This is actually more fleshed out when you learn that the character is credited to Ou Natsuki instead on other sites¹, and that she has a history in the Takarazuka Revue. The Revue, based in Takarazuka, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan, started in 1913 and perform to this day elaborate all-female Broadway-style productions with the all-female cast playing both the male and female parts of their productions, Ou Natsuki playing many of the male roles in the shows she was involved with until her retirement^2,3. They have adapted everything from folktales to manga, and they have had a huge influence on anime and manga, be it the legendary Osamu Tezuka being inspired from growing up with their performances, to a legendary J.C. Staff animated production, the series Revolutionary Girl Utena (1997), being inspired by it too. I am not surprised that for one cast, an anime had an inspired idea to hire a former Takarazuka Revue performer to play a major male role when she would have done so in her career beforehand

It's the female characters for the most part too who are the most interesting. That's not to say there's some curious characterisations for the better, most if not all the characters even for the few minutes having unique details, such as the enforcer sent against Darkside having a heroic moment rescuing a woman from a group of men which complicates things, despite the fact he will turn an entire crowd of bystanders into stone which break to pieces (and presumably die if not already), deciding one of the henchmen for Persona, an artificially created hit man with monofilament wire, should look like a middle aged employee from an office in a polo shirt and slacks, wearing glasses and with balding hair, undercutting his menace in a really sick humoured way. But in terms of complex characters, Mai as the leader of the Messiah group, who holds a vaguely told back-story of trauma, is interesting as the strong willed but thoughtful leader, she and her motley crew finding themselves further against Persona especially when a militarised rebel escapes into their midst. Another character, the nurse named Selia I have already nodded to, is even more interesting and is the figure who gets the real ending of the adaptation; with even greater trauma in his life due to her family being victims of the giant space laser Persona own, she keeps her father's rifle as a traumatic memento, her progression from being a mere friend to Mai's cause onwards where the resolution of the film comes from.

Thankfully, this means Darkside Blues, unlike other anime, actually has an ending, unlike too many especially from the straight-to-video format of this time period which ended abruptly, but it's fascinating that this ending is a miniscule character drama set within a huge world left untouched. It is as if a fragment of what could've gone obviously for longer. Again, the slither of virtues is rewarding even if I wished this had lasted onwards to more. Production wise, it's gorgeous. This era of anime gladly lavished even the most lurid of stories with a distinct production design, and generally have a sense of flair both in background and character designs that stood out, details that could easily be ignored especially in some of the worst, less cared for OVAs from this same era. All that would've been as painstaking as everything else to include,  such as having the lead male villain wear a golden mask in public, deliberately designed to look robotic and faceless for ominous. The combination of Goth aesthetic with science fiction does stand out as do the moments where horror are felt, as whilst not really the genre this truly belongs too, it exists in the supernatural melding to the science fiction world, the moments of darkened mood or the lingering fear of one's' traumatic memories, let along the decision to depict Darkside as having a supernatural horse drawn carriage which can even fly, which is one of the coolest forms of transport ever to have whilst completely Gothic in image. It's distinctions stand out so much so that, yes, that it has no large scale resolution and never had any animated sequels or remakes which is disappointing, alongside the fact that original releases of this are now very old DVDs, and were never in the United Kingdom. This also includes the likelihood of finding the ADV Manga translation of the manga adaptation, which will probably only be found by readers through pure luck and an excavation through countless second hand dealer boxes and warehouses of stock for long dissolved companies. One has to gnash their teeth, as I have, when the material is as compelling as this and wish it had a lot more attention drawn to its virtues.

 

=====

1) MyAnimeList page for Ou, Natsuki.

2) Takawiki entry on Ou Natsuki.

3) Weblio page on Natsuki Ou. [Japanese language]

#282: Theatre of Darkness - Yamishibai Season 1 (2013)

a.k.a. Yamishibai: Japanese Ghost Stories

Studio: ILCA

Director: Tomoya Takashima

Screenplay: Hiromu Kumamoto

Voice Cast: Kanji Tsuda as the Story teller

 

Starting here in 2013, ILCA's Yamishibai franchise would continue on until October 2024*. Its name is taken from kamishibai, a form of paper play storytelling and theatre, using drawn illustrations where the narrator would tell a story around them. This became popular during the 1930s, and the Yamishibai series nods to its origins, always opening its episodes for the first series with an older man with his little wooden theatre about to tell the stories to young children, an art form which dwindled against the advent of television. It has found itself being paid tribute to and resurrected in a variety of ways, from revivals of the original art form to works paying tribute to it in influence, like Suehiro Maruo taking influence for his ero guro manga Shōjo Tsubaki (1983-4), translated into the West as Mr. Arashi's Amazing Freak Show, for the main character and plotting.

Yamishibai is probably one of the most successful examples of a "micro-series", those that are usually less than ten minutes long including opening and ending credits, in how it has now had over thirteen series from this original 2013 production. It felt appropriate to start off and review the first series by itself with what could have been a one-and-done, thirteen ten plus minute episodes less than an hour altogether only to lead to this lineage, and the animation studio behind the series, ILCA, have mostly focus on these sorts of short form programmes. They have produced the likes of Onara Goro (2016), the deadpan surreal comedy by Takashi Taniguchi, and whilst they have produced some anime series in length, they have still focused as much on these micro-length productions as much as help out on live action and animated productions in CG production like Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV (2016). Their core focus is clearly on programmes, including the long standing renewal of the Yamishibai franchise, allowing the staff to flex their creativity. Whilst minimalism with the production values certainly helped, with a friendly budget to allow so many seasons to exist - Yamishibai does include more animation than merely illustrated images with dialogue, but it follows the idea of kamishibai of letting the still images with the voice acting convey the horror - I can already see how this was intriguing enough to become a regular event on TV Tokyo and AT-X in its original broadcasts.

As much of it is clearly because the project a nice crossing of modern day pop culture meeting the traditions of the past, especially as just in the first season along, you are seeing crossed together traditional ghost story structures with modern and vintage technology, rural and urban locations, and even Japanese online urban legends. The stories themselves, with little time to work with, tend to be more eccentric than traditionally scary haunting tales, with episode one entirely about a man moving into a new apartment only to be creeped out by the woman on the other side of the street and her paper talismans he keeps finding in the apartment. A lot of them obviously set up twist endings, as this does or episode 2, about a guy who broke his foot and finds his fellow male patients in the hospital creep him out, barring in mind there is not a lot of time to set up stories whatsoever. There is not even enough time for more than a creepy minute of a distorted pop song, sounding like Hatsune Miku if demonically possessed.

Some of the stories even have a slightly misanthropic side to them, like the cursed girl of episode 9 who, trying to be cured by a Shinto temple, ends up with her infliction by the wrath of others on their ancestors not going away. Working with this artistic medium, there is aptly too the crossing of times and culture too. Shinto temples and modern apartments intermingle as mentioned, with a good amount as set in the rural communities as in the urban cities, where horror can come as in episode six where a guy on a crowded train notices a flesh creature in the baggage overhead no one else sees. The last episode is clearly based on a Kunekune, a figure that spread on Japanese websites as an urban legend from 2001, one which drives people insane and into fits of wiggling frantic movement if you directly look at them.

It naturally follows a tradition too that Japanese horror was arguably quicker to consider how ghosts and the supernatural would adapt quickly to technology. It does have some stranger moments around this - episode four is about a female primary teacher working late at night, baffled by hair lines in her photocopying - but that adds to the personality, alongside natural conclusions like a girl getting a phone call in episode 7 from a friend who made the ill advised decision with her boyfriend to enter a deserted hospital, or the riff on the Ring premise in episode 11 where three male middle school students, rather than do homework, make the decision to watch a video with a ghost supposedly on it. Even the toilet is not safe, with episode 10, about a high school baseball team at a training camp lodge, and the one who blanked out falling into a pit toilet when he was younger there and finding himself in a phantom world with a monster in the bog.

It is ridiculous at times, but it is not like The World Yamizukan (2017), a spin-off of a similar structure which was explicitly inspired by American pop culture and had the fingerprints of a future collaborator on the Yamishibai project by season two involved, live action filmmaker Noboru Iguchi, who started in the adult video industry and working on over-the-top films like The Machine Girl (2008) before this interesting growth in his career, working with ILCA on these projects, and Tales of Bliss and Heresy (2023), an anthology romance film I would have never expected from the director when I first learnt of him but feels like his attempt (nobly) to flex his own creativity. One of the other prominent reasons I choose to cover the first Yamishibai by itself is because it was the only one without Iguchi or Takashi Shimizu involved, the later a prolific filmmaker most famous for creating Ju-On/the Grudge franchise, and seeing how before they came onboard the series' first tentative steps for a single season.

From the initial pitch of Yamishibai being a way to flex storytelling ideas from classic ghost and horror story tropes, both presented matter-of-factly or deliberately exaggerated, I get the appeal for this even if this had never sadly gotten all those additional seasons onwards. Some episodes suggest morality plays, like the father who regrets shirking his wife and daughter on the latter's birthday trip to a shopping mall because he needs to go back to work, only to end up in the elevator of the unknown, but a lot of the stories in themselves are there for their pure macabre natures, with the art style itself distinct and relishing the still images for spooky effect. When a lot of these projects exist only up to thirty to an hour long when you binge all the episodes, never to get the change to last any further, it is interesting, tantalising even, to know this will be one which lasted and has to now figure out how to constantly tell stories for the decade it lasted for.

 

* The review acknowledges that, written in October 2024, there could easily be more Yamishibai series to come.

#281: Vampire Princess Miyu (1988-89)

 

Studio: AIC

Director: Toshiki Hirano

Screenplay: Shō Aikawa

Based on the manga by Toshiki Hirano and Narumi Kakinouchi

Voice Cast: Naoko Watanabe/Anne Marie Zola (Manga UK dub)/Pamela Weidner as Miyu; Mami Koyama/Stephanie Griffin as Himiko Se; Kaneto Shiozawa/Zach Hanner as Larva

Viewed in English Dub

 

If one wants a really moody late eighties anime, the original Vampire Princess Miyu stands out as one which neither gets into the gruesome ballpark of some of the more notorious from the straight-to-video era, instead a significantly more melancholic horror story. It is also a personal project for its director Toshiki Hirano, who was also the original manga author with the illustrations done by his wife Narumi Kakinouchi, prolific in both the animation industry, in manga and book illustrations. Credit to Hirano and the teams on both animated adaptations, they made sure to transfer her career designs and style to the moving image, Miyu beginning as a manga in 1988 and concluding in 2002, with additional spin-off titles. This franchise, beginning with four straight-to-video episodes, also marks as much a distinct part of Toshiki Hirano's career, an animation director who was as much one of the names part of that streak of more ghoulish and lurid anime from the eighties into the nineties, especially for the straight-to-video market, as much as for adapting giant robot stories. One adaptation which he had a firm hand in adapting all the entries for Iczer franchise, based on an hentai manga, but as an adapted in the first and most well known entry, Fight! Iczer One (1985-1987), is definitely one to cover at some point as a mecha story with explicit body horror, as a race known as the Cthulhu (in that spelling explicitly nodding to H.P. Lovecraft) are secretly invading Earth by sending down parasites which mutate human beings in horrifying body horror mutations, only for a female alien, teaming with a schoolgirl distraught from her family and friends being victims to synchronize with a giant mecha's ultimate power, to fight back with an explicit all-female yuri romance nodded to.  That is definitely as idiosyncratic as you can get for a title, though the sequels would move in their own directions, as Vampire Princess Miyu is in both forms, and as notorious his adaptation of Apocalypse Zero (1996) also was, which was not able beyond two episodes to really adapt a body horror post-apocalypse super hero with explicitly grotesque and Freudian monster designs. He has also had a remarkable comeback into consciousness with the 2021-2023 adaptation of Baki the Grappler, Keisuke Itagaki's martial arts series which was picked up for the streaming platform on Netflix and Toshiki Hirano has been a large part of the adaptation for.

The Miyu adaptations have their shared familial traits - Miyu herself is a dhampir, half-vampire and half-human, given temporary immortality and the ability to give this gift as a vampire to humans, in servitude to banishing the "Shinma", figures between the Japanese yōkai and general monsters who are terrorising the morals and not in the otherworld where they should be. After that however, there were notable revisions for the 1997-8 television series, felt with the first episode about a possible vampire stalking Kyoto, draining all the blood from female victims and terrorising the area. With the name of Shō Aikawa as the screenwriter as important to bring up, both notorious for many lurid anime straight-to-video titles from this era but also acclaimed for his later works in the decades after, you feel the pessimistic take on human beings throughout these four episodes even if there is a clear flaw to this adaptation, that at only four episodes it feels too short to stretch itself.

There is an exclusive character to this adaptation, a female spiritualist named Himiko who is introduced to a possible real possession of a girl asleep for days. Also noticeable is that, even if the English dub may complicate this, Miyu herself in this version is a very different character to the TV series, even if we learn of her tragic back-story in the last two episodes. She is more glib, happy (even gleeful) to feed off people, and has none of the melancholia of the version of her in the later series, instead a teen girl in attitude, the kind of macabre vampire who would frolic along the streets even if aware of the importance of her job, more so as she has all the advantages of being able to walk in sunlight and holy water being ineffective. The set up of the episode establishes the animosity of Himiko to her, in Himiko's own moral code seeing Miyu's glib attitude to the incidents. It also sets up this as a visually stylish work whilst also a pessimistic one about the Shinma fed by human incidents, Miyu's nonplussed way of disposing of them even if still with human causalities angering Himiko. Another prominent name, and a big get to have even if this was very early in his career, is Kenji Kawai, who would become a huge name in composing especially with his collaborations with director Mamoru Oshii, someone who would return for the 1997 Miyu series when he was a big name with a sense of respect for those involved for this production, one clearly made with love.

Episode two opens with a room of mannequins - some eyeless, some laid about like about like corpses - the result of a female Shinma who looks and dresses like a traditional Japanese doll if made flesh in her human disguise, one who at a high school turns people into said dolls as a literalisation of staying young forever, including the fact they can still bleed and are alive. This was my favourite episode as it plays with the mood and characterisation the adaptation was able to convey, in a work arguably too short to feel fully fleshed out able to have an episode here with the most complexity. Himiko is our assumed consciousness, believing Miyu (as a true anti-heroine here) is after the handsome male student the Shinma is after too just to take all his blood, only to complicate this further in that, as a teen girl, it reveals she was crushing on the mortal. He is entirely falling for a Shinma who does not realise her own love for him until the conflict hits it's fullest, and that one dynamic makes this really interesting especially with how the story ends. It is a really interesting one, [Spoiler] one where the Shinma wins but with the guy, even now as a doll as she is, finding true love dancing in the afterlife with her as sentient dolls [Spoilers End]. With a really distinct surreal style of these uncanny anatomically complex doll creatures involved and a romantic love triangle involved, this is the highlight for this adaptation.

Episode three is the team up story between Himiko and Miyu, if a begrudging one, with greater emphasis on the back story of Miyu and her friend/assistant Larva, who emphasises how, as vampires are not in Japanese folklore, many Japanese stories which have them reference their histories as foreign in origin, Larva a Western vampire part of explaining Miyu's bloodline origins, only to become her servant when she consumed his blood at a younger age, losing his voice and having to wear a mask as a result, details excised from the TV series. The last two episodes intertwine in dealing with Miyu's back-story, this surrounding Larva's brother trying to get to Miyu through a sentient suit of armour possessed by a dead soul, whilst episode four is set in Kamakura, around a story from Himiko's childhood in a strange house that turns out to be Miyu's old family home, explaining the tortured origins of Miyu becoming the Guardian whilst leaving the Himiko character, never to return, with the suggestion she may become like Miyu in a delayed reaction.

Then this version of the story was closed. The sense of this version of Vampire Princess Miyu ended abruptly cannot be ignored, still with a sumptuous mood and bittersweet attitude to humanity, but we would have to wait for the 1997 TV series to be able to try to flesh out this story. That was a reboot of this titular character in tone and details, losing the likes of Himiko as a character and replacing her with others, even a cute demonic Shinma rabbit, and using an episode tone to tell its story. My interest in both is for their ideas and their styles, something made with a distinct tone and attitude that is felt with one of its creators in the director's seat for both. Even in terms of a purely glib enjoyment, as horror anime, this wins me over for its tone, even in the fact that one of my favourite obsessions, a troupe of the straight-to-video and older anime of phantom worlds within reality characters kept ending up in which are surreal, are found in both because Miyu has her own pocket dimension she can enter on whim, which is a win on a petty level as a viewer.

Toshiki Hirano and Narumi Kakinouchi would continue, even after the end of the original manga series, to continue this franchise on in published comics to the 2020s, a beautiful collaborative life as a married couple who adored these characters and moods to these stories to continue them. Annoyingly most of this series in published form never got English translations, which is a shame as, especially with the success of Baki the Grappler under Hirano's directing hands, I would have thought a series he held so dear to him as his own creation would have caught interest. Especially in just this adaptation, its melancholic tone with a female protagonist that is noticeably in power, never sexualised in either of the adaptations in creepy ways, but in a series even known for yuri readings with certain character relationships, and this would be a franchise who would have won so many new fans in the modern era. It is a huge compliment to say that I could imagine a new Vampire Princess Miyu and, if Hirano was allowed to keep control of it, it would do gangbusters in popularity.

#280: Hellsing (2001–2002)

Studio: Gonzo

Director: Umanosuke Iida

Screenplay: Chiaki J. Konaka

Based on the manga by Kouta Hirano

Voice Cast: Crispin Freeman/Jōji Nakata as Alucard, K.T. Gray/Fumiko Orikasa as Seras Victoria, Victoria Harwood/Yoshiko Sakakibara as Sir Integra Wingates Hellsing, Bill Morgan/Unshō Ishizuka as Peter Ferguson, Ralph Lister/Motomu Kiyokawa as Walter, Steven Brand/Nachi Nozawa as Paladin Alexander Anderson, Isaac C. Singleton Jr./Takumi Yamazaki as Incognito

Viewed in English Dub

 

Hellsing, the original TV adaptation, was felt as a big deal in the day with hindsight, running with the Kouta Hirano manga that would gain traction in the West through its initial Dark Horse publication and a premise easy to sell, that set in Britain, vampires exist and the country has a group known as the Hellsing Organisation, lead by Sir Integra Wingates Hellsing, to stop them. This is in mind that, however, she does have one vampire initially on the payroll under her command, Alucard, a true anti-hero if one who has less interest in terrorising humanity, but gleefully waiting to fight powerful vampires whilst hating those who act like damned ghouls than the lineage he comes from. The original series was also part of a big moment for the studio that made it, Gonzo, who were properly founded in 1992 in a previous form working on animated cut scenes for video games, but started animated productions in 2000. This was an important point, as after the initial projects, Hellsing began in October 2001 at a time to prove themselves on not only a title like this, but also a huge franchise crossover with Final Fantasy Unlimited (2001-2002), a tie-in to the legendary RPG video game franchise from Square Enix.

Unlimited was cancelled from its intended fifty plus episode run, to trying to complete itself in twenty five, whilst it is telling Hellsing Ultimate (2006-2012), existing as an ultimate retelling of the source manga, left Hellsing 2001 as an abridged curiosity. Gonzo in its original form would survive up to 2009, before being absorbed into its owning company and be refocused as an animation studio, but even in spite of surviving, that initial version was lost which was a huge name. One which made a music video for Linkin Park, one which had big titles announced over the years in the 2000s, and made crossovers like Afro Samurai (2007), which was a collaboration with the West directly with Samuel L. Jackson in the lead role. Brutally, the flaws which made them also very divisive back in the time when I got into anime in the 2000s, as their titles were prominently released in Britain through the late distributor ADV Films, can be found with revisiting the thirteen episode Hellsing series.

Hellsing when it started was a nostalgic trip when it began, to the point this was a rare case of watching the English dub on purpose. A huge factor for this decision was that, alongside voice actor Crispin Freeman as Alucard, a role he became beloved for among others, this had the inspired idea which continued to Hellsing Ultimate that, since this is set in the United Kingdom, the dub would have British voice actors and regional British accents. Even the "fifteening" done here, infamously what Manga Entertainment did in adding additional swearing to multiple English dubs of theirs to up the age rating, befits the tone. If moments do feel shaky, there is, however, something very appropriate in general for this series and that added a nice additional layer reproaching the first episodes. Some of the actors are British, prominently Victoria Harwood as Sir Integra, who began her career in British television in one-off episodes of the likes of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, whilst you have K.T. Gray as an American actress performing in an accent for another important figure established in episode one. That is the second female lead with Seras Victoria, a police officer who is sent out without realising it with her team to a vampire disguised as a priest rampaging in Cheddar, only to be turned by Alucard in one of his humane moments when he realises, to kill said vampire, he has to shot through her and offers the chance to live as his servant if she wishes not to die.

The series has a distinct style, a mood with interesting use of colour and having shots which feel more abstract for the "cool" tone, an action-horror at heart rather than meant to be scary, and whilst the later adaptation as straight-to-video episodes was ultra-violent, this can still be lurid. The music as well is very idiosyncratic, very good and very distinct, particularly in mixing in more electronic pieces. Sadly, composer Yasushi Ishii's career in animation is not as large as one would hope, considering how striking the score here was that he was brought back for Hellsing Ultimate if just for one episode. The use of Shine by Mr. Big, an odd choice of a US band who got big in Japan, has always stayed with me as actually suiting the tone, almost charmingly ironic for its lyrics and jaunty tone. Probably some of the best moments of this entire production is just the style, in terms of playing to the more overtly abstract images with its characters - be it drenching the screen in pure blood red, or decorating environments in just primary colours and some silhouettes. Alucard is revealed to be so powerful his body deforms to produce dog-like entities from his own body, or to melt and/or reconnect even from severe injuries, and in times when the macabre nature of the supernatural is played with, alongside its score, are some of the strongest scenes in terms of style for its own sake. The sense of freewheeling style is found in the next episode previews which take on a more goofy humour, breaking the fourth wall as Seras is interrupted hosting them, offering where this spin could have had more overt ambitious within its limits in story options.

There is the immediate sense Hellsing should have been twenty plus episodes long. This is not helped by the fact this was being adapted as the manga had not reached far enough major events for Kouta Hirano's story, which is felt in how the original promo video has the real antagonists of the later Ultimate adaptation and the manga, the Millennium group, a group never seen in the 2001 anime series who are literally Nazis with vampires and werewolves among their rank. Personally, however, this would have not necessarily been a problem for this adaptation, even if a blasphemy to fans of the source material, if it had managed to tell a story of its own with some interest. I have always felt Gonzo's true curse was always slipping in the midst of their productions, be it slipping in pace or rushing their finales, something which could not be blamed on a case like Final Fantasy Unlimited where outside circumstances were also involved, and is felt here.

Chiaki J. Konaka is an odd choice for the main screenplay. There are flashes of his career style, a very unconventional storyteller who esoteric plot structures and details, but for me this is arguably one of his weakest works. Even in mind he had been involved with some unconventional work by his standard by this time - namely Futari Ecchi a.k.a. Step Up Love Story (2002-4), four episodes of an erotic romantic comedy about a newly wedded heterosexual couple figuring out their love life. That at least had only four episodes to work with, and was interesting as a real tangent for him, an imperfect work in some gender politics but mostly a wholesome comedy about adults who love each other that, even if for a targeted male audience, was horny in a positive way. Hellsing in contrast is something he could have worked with to interesting areas, as it could involve conspiracies involving the Vatican, who are antagonists to the Hellsing Organsization, and the weird place a vampire or two are within working with vampire hunters, let alone Seras' position as a vampire who refuses to drink blood and feels complicated emotions of her place. This is in mind that, least to stay faithful to the source, it is a violent work, but also one about bombast. The tone of the source can be summed up that, when Seras gets a new weapon from Walter, a butler who is a former (still dangerous) vampire hunter who uses razor sharp wires, the aforementioned Harkonnen is both a direct reference to the version of the character from David Lynch's 1984 adaptation of Dune, and uses depleted Uranium shells, only possible to be carried by a super strong undead officer like her. The tone of the source which would be emphasised for Ultimate - a story which can get really nasty and gory, but is also a story created by a manga author with a thing for fire arms, wacky comedy and vampires with guns being cool - could still have Konaka's voice. There are moments of idiosyncrasy as he is having to create a new story by the midway point, but this is instead a compromise.

He does introduce for this version of the story a microchip turning people into artificial vampires, which is interesting as a concept, or the likes of a snuff film episode, but this is absolutely a case of a work which could not adapt the intended version, because it was not put to page yet, and the issue Gonzo were faced with here of only thirteen episodes to work with, likely with the possibility they could have continued on but not earning a second season. They have to paradoxically adapt as much as they can from the source but not enough time to complete their attempt to close this narrative off cleanly afterwards. This is felt with one of the other prominent details which yet has to be abruptly ditched by the last episodes, that in this world there is a Catholic versus Protestant slant, where the Vatican has their own vampire fighting forces, including their own agent Paladin Alexander Anderson, an artificially superhuman killing machine, and are openly antagonistic of the Hellsing organisation. This as what happened with Chrono Crusade (2003), a work which helped me get into anime but, also having read the manga, was effected by not having the whole work and needing to take liberties, some of which may make revisiting the adaptation be an example of nostalgia failing. That at least had a good twenty plus episodes even if it had to rush in the final episodes a new plot, so Hellsing is in a worse place attempting to compensate with orchestrating a new narrative, but struggling with few episodes to get to this.

It adapts up to the attack by the Valentine brothers, two vampires who storm the Hellsing headquarters, becoming the whole more fleshed out massacre in the second Hellsing Ultimate episode, and afterwards is fully on its own narrative rails after establishing the plot threads beforehand. The set up for a new narrative does promise a lot of interesting details if this had been its own show - a female vampire, permanently a child yet wise beyond her physical years, shows the moral issue of the Hellsing Organisation's goal to eliminate vampires when she lives in peace, a brief flicker of Konaka's style. Then there is the new villain, another vampire in human servitude of actual power named Incognito. He is a cool concept, a figure with idiosyncratic markings, body paint, and a long limbed figure who is a really cool character design. He comes with a huge caveat that he is meant to be a vampire from the African continent, and in the 2000s of all times, there are details in his portrayal which have not aged well at all. Alarm bells ring, alongside tribal music in his introduction, where a term (I apologise for having to quote) is brought up of him coming from the "dark continent", evoking all the problematic stereotypes of African black magic and occultism as depicting by white racist colonialism. It is a shame as, even as a villain, a vampire from a drastically different world to Gothic Carpathian Europe is distinct. With tribal paint that is part of his ability to even distort environments to cut people to ribbons, and as someone who can produce a grenade launcher attached to him by a gold chain that has magically touched spikes in shells as ammo, Incognito is a really fascinating concept to have, appropriate too for the tone of the source. It is a shame he fell into some tasteless nods to old problematic culture and gets little time, either, to be fleshed out.

Hellsing is okay, even if it just eventually ends up with vampires shouting at each other as they use super moves, its many flaws not dissimilar to so many anime before and after. Ultimately, and this is not an intended nod to the Hellsing Ultimate adaptation, this project was always going to struggle with the hindsight. This just belongs to a long list of anime over the years where the production tried, and whilst there are virtues, I can say it does not become iconic. Alongside the fact I like horror anime, so titles like this do stand out more, the knowledge that this kept happening for Gonzo is more tragic. They would have the likes of the Full Metal Panic franchise for the first season in 2002 and titles which are held in good regard, such as Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo (2004-5), held as their best animates series and one of the most distinct of the 2000s even aesthetically, but from the shows I remember growing up with and revisiting, they struggled reaching the finish line for the series they produced. Saikano, known in the West as She, The Ultimate Weapon (2002), which came a year later to Hellsing, is an admirably strange and bleak anti-war story, but that also has a strangely rushed ending, and then there are the likes of Yukikaze (2002-5), their celebration of their own anniversary which spun out of control, taking a long time for a few episodes to be created, and also ended up with a rushed ending despite being a straight-to-video production where a tight schedule for release would have not been an issue.

Gonzo always had a sense of being cursed, the curse for me always that they struggled at some point within productions to be able to finish their narratives and pace them carefully, or simply that in the timeline of 2000s, their titles which got prominent advertising were not the ones people fondly remember as even hidden gems from the decade. I got into anime in the 2000s in my teen/young adult years, so Gonzo as mentioned were a prominent name thanks to ADV Films, and my youthful memories, whilst acceptable to properly critique these series nowadays, is that I found myself viewing a show like Trinity Blood (2005) or a Burst Angel (2004) and finding them not sticking to memory, which is alarming as Gonzo were a company sold as prestigious in terms of the look of their shows and, ultimately to their fall, with a lot of higher budget productions in their schedules. Hellsing itself has virtues but it was clear from the get-go this project's pace to just thirteen episodes was against itself, and considering its premise even without the burden of the source material, there were many times here too for the good moments where this felt like a sedate take of a more wildly over-the-top horror-action story. This version of Hellsing clearly meant enough for me as I owned the old ADV Films collected version back in the day, but watching that exact set for the first time in a good decade, I held no nostalgia in terms of a high bar, always with knowledge this was a flawed production. Revisiting it, I realised this from the first episode.

#279: Giant Robo - The Day the Earth Stood Still (1992-8)

 

Studio: Mu Animation Studio (Episode 1–6)/ Phoenix Entertainment (Episode 7)

Director: Yasuhiro Imagawa

Screenplay: Yasuhiro Imagawa and Eiichi Matsuyama

Based on the work of Mitsuteru Yokoyama

Voice Cast: Kappei Yamaguchi as Daisaku Kusama, Sumi Shimamoto as Ginrei, Akio Ōtsuka as Kaei, Iemasa Kayumi as Chief Shizuo Chūjō, Kazue Komiya as Yōshi, Kazuo Harada as Dr. Shizuma de Montalban III, Kōichi Chiba as Dr. Franken Von Vogler, Masashi Ebara as Professor Go Gakujin (Wu Yong), Norio Wakamoto as Taisō, Rokurō Naya as Kōshin Chin Sanzan, Shinji Ogawa as Genya, Shōzō Iizuka as Tetsugyū, Tadashi Nakamura as Shokatsuryō Kōmei, Takeshi Aono as Issei (Gongsun Sheng), Tarō Ishida as Hanzui the Evil Messiah, Tomokazu Seki as Kaihō, Yasuyoshi Hara as Ivan, Yousuke Akimoto as Shockwave Alberto, Yūji Mikimoto as Inspector Kenji Murasame, Akio Ōtsuka as Professor Shimure, Chikao Ohtsuka as Jūjōji the Bell of Life, Fuyumi Shiraishi as Sanny the Magican, Hiroyuki Satō as Gen Shōgo, Hōchū Ohtsuka as Gen Shōji (Ruan Xiao'er)

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

Giant Robo is not the best mecha anime ever made, but it is one of the best. That may seem a paradox, but I went into The Day the Earth Stood Still, an ambitious straight-to-video series with arguably too much build up as the best anime mecha work in existence. To those who know of this, it is a high bar for the genre, and thankfully by the final episode, it had earned that reputation, all in mind that with a protracted production length and a tragic inability to reach its intended original intentions, this could have easily become a flawed gem which we would have looked back on with a bittersweet "what if". It is more that to call something "the best" is a dangerous choice of wording, forcing a straightjacket which robs the power of the production, something that can be attested to when, to use another example from another medium, people may be put off from watching Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941) because when people called it the best film ever made, that forced it into a form of permanent stasis rather than the fact people love that film for a naturally developed admiration. Also it is impossible to say what the best mecha anime is as, being able to dig into the sub-genre, something as simple as a story involving a giant combat robot or two has been able to have so many idiosyncratic and inspired entries even in terms of flawed gems, let alone the canonical ones, that it seems pointless to compare them to find a superior one. The Visions of Escaflowne, a 1996 television series which finished its twenty six episodes when the final seventh episode was still being waited for from Giant Robo, is a completely different type of story set in an alternative fantasy world, making it ridiculous to compare it to Giant Robo's atompunk morality tale, or other works in their own molds, because they are drastically different to each other despite their genre tag.

Giant Robo could be called a throwback to an older school of mecha stories, but even that is not quite right, and not the same as mecha anime which were openly throwbacks, such as Masami Ōbari's Gravion (2002/4), with their own distinct touches. What I can call Giant Robo is a serious minded action tale at its heart, one that fully and totally succeeds in its conclusion, with a full narrative arch, in spite of the tragic knowledge this was always meant to continue on with more entries we will never get. This was originally meant to the second to last of a giant, ambitious tribute to the work of manga artist Mitsuteru Yokoyama. It adapts as its centre Yokoyama's 1967 manga Giant Robo, but one of the immediate things to point out is some of the idiosyncratic characters here. Set in the future, we have on Earth moved away from fossil or nuclear power to Shizuma Drive, a sustainable power source, whilst there is a war between the heroic International Police Organization and antagonists the BF Group (Big Fire) which involves a machine that can destroy this power source and send the world back into darkness. Part of the work’s idiosyncrasies is that for a modern day tale with giant robots, there are quite a few figures who have seemingly wandered out of an adaption of Chinese period epic. This is because, when the project was being put together, copyright meant side characters were not allowed to be used. Giant Robo had been adapted before, as a live action series screened in 1967 to 1968, and the confounding red tape which prevent most of the cast from the source being available lead to an inspired creative improvisation. This was that, with this a tribute to Yokoyama's work, they got carte blanche to use characters from his entire career, including so from an adaptation of The Water Margin, based on a legendary Chinese novel.

The decision had a drastic effect on the story, when the female lead Ginrei is from two manga, Wolf Constellation and The Name is 101¹, which makes this an even more compelling tale if you knew of this, as this is legitimately a tribute to Mitsuteru Yokoyama‘s career. It is however not interested in pure service, but a serious story where characters do die and the stakes are legitimate in terms of dramatic tension. Even Big Fire is the same, with characters from a Romance of the Three Kingdom manga, and Yokoyama's magical girl Sally the Witch, one of the earliest examples, as the daughter of one of the villains¹. With a story where even their morality becomes more complicated when facing the threat, a character from one of Yokoyama‘s period dramas, Genya¹, is turned into the son of a scientist deemed responsible for destroying an entire country when experimenting with the Shizuma Drive, desiring to blackout the entire world in revenge for the distorted truth of that tragedy. Even characters from Tetsujin 28, Mitsuteru Yokoyama‘s other mecha creation, which is a huge influential entity in its own right, rock in for the story in probably the coolest nod to the show’s ambitious crossovers¹.

The only characters from Giant Robo directly lifted include the main lead Daisaku Kusama, a young teen boy who has inherited the power of the titular Robo, who he can command from a wrist watch communicator. Whilst he has great power in his hands, alongside the fact it is later revealed Giant Robo is nuclear powered, causing concerns on his side of the potential threat if the machine malfunctions, he is a mere boy burdened with the chaos that will transpire. The villain has a justification for his rage, made worse as he is Ginrei’s brother, and the war to initially stop a series of experimental Shizuma Drive canisters getting into BF Group’s hands becomes one of dealing with an ultra powerful floating sphere which robs all energy sources of power in radius. Even among his side, there is the fact that, whilst she can teleport, Ginrei’s power sacrifices her life little by little using it, and that despite having a member who cannot die and is immortal, the International Police Organization throughout are fighting as the underdogs. The ironic tragedy of Genya's goal, what his father actually intended him to do with the power he weaponized, and all the sacrifices that lead up to this reveal makes this more potent. This is a case where, rather than the contrived sense that tragedy happens for upping the stakes, everything here is felt as dramatically powerful and this is where the legacy of this series is felt. It earns its drama, all through telling what a simple action story with giant robots lumbering around, all because it is taking itself seriously with the deftest of touches.

It is with knowledge the production was tumultuous. It started in 1992, and it took three years alone from episode six to get the final seventh one in 1998, enough time for director/co-writer Yasuhiro Imagawa to pen scripts for other work, including the 1997 Berserk adaptation, and direct the unconventional Gundam continuation Mobile Fighter G Gundam (1994-5), a big fifty plus episode production, whilst still helming the sixth episode from 1994. The solace is that these production issues are not seen in the slightest on the work itself. It has a strong aesthetic, arguably a “throwback” to older character designs from the decades before, but without any bias to this for me. By itself, this style is one of its own, based on its influence’s work, which provides its own distinct appearance. There is no sense that the time and budget that would have gone into this production, whilst likely torturous as was visibly a lot of resources, was compromised in the quality of the production. The closest thing to throwback it moving away from the kind of robots Gundam itself has, and whilst some in the story are more over-the-top in form, our titular Giant Robo whilst exaggerated feels like a construction built from pistons where each movement causes the earth beneath it to tremor, which adds to its own personality.

Considering what is on paper, a version of Giant Robo could have been a mess. It is a sci-fi giant mecha series with figures who have legitimate supernatural powers, from the ability to project fireballs to teleport, with the likes of a blue skinned Amazonian warrior from the Water Margins adaptation with a Monkey approved extending staff weapon among the roster, and a large amount of the cast not hidden in having ancient Chinese dress or military combat maneuvers in a story which has guns and air blimps.  Yet, it all gels together in a consistent logic of its own with spectacular set pieces and deep character telling, which is a huge accomplishment. There is of course the musical score, composed by Masamichi Amano with collaboration with the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir. A sweeping, appropriately operatic score to a production, it fits the tone alongside bucking trends, as it neither has any traditional pop songs for the opening and ending credits either that could have been sold off the back of the series. The gravitas of the story and how the production values is used to tell it, even in terms of how the likes of this score was chosen and put together, is why Giant Robo succeeds.

Sadly it was a work that struggled in its time, and only got the recognition it deserved as time went. My initial hesitance about the show, from all its weight of expectation, meant that it was a slow burn having to watch all seven episodes until the ending, where when the landing was fully executed perfectly in the last one. By its bitter sweet post-credits, it was a success entirely. Its pulpy veneer hides a pretty simple moral quandary – the idea of whether sacrifice is actually necessary to accomplish any event – and lets the characters and story run from this. Even if there is a nod to a future story that never came to be, it does not detract from the fact this does have a fully accomplished and told narrative by itself, and that in itself is a huge triumph.

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1) Behind the Night's Illusions - the characters of Giant Robo: the Animation, originally published by Anime Jump in 1999. Archived from the original on 13th July 2003, and retrieved on the 1st January 2001.

#278: Cybervenus FeiFei (2001)

Studio: Blue Moon Studio

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

In my obsession with digging up obscurities, I finally close off the trilogy of three Virtual Idol releases which got DVD releases in the United Kingdom. They exist in an unconventional place in terms of anime, as CGI productions connected to Pony Canyon, a publisher huge in the Japanese music industry with involvement other pop culture industries like anime, but as DVD directed collections of segments which were released in the boom period of British DVD distribution when the format was new. This film in its trailers promised a fourth, which feels like it was falling back into the idea of the sexy virtual female idols of the other titles I have covered, but the three we got were Yuki Terai - Secrets (2000), Virtual Stars (2002), and Cybervenus FeiFei, which focuses on a Chinese woman who was created through motion capturing the movements of real actress. It feels like, from the three we got, this was the most ambitious in terms of ideas and artistic presentation, making the fact this was not the final one somewhat strange. Virtual Stars was really falling back into the idea of sex appeal of their virtual starlets, whilst this feels more like it should be the conclusion, where Blue Moon Studio wanted to figure out where they could go with this production concept they had, as FeiFei becomes significantly more existential in tone than appealing to a cute idol who can appear in music videos.

Like the others, this is a collection of shorts, beginning with Doll, where FeiFei initially is wandering through giant cogs. Ahead of time, I find the computer effects here compelling, beautifully obsolete, especially in mind that there is a clear care to make FeiFei as realistic as possible, as will be seen in the later shorts, even if prioritized over overtly detailed locations. As a result, she is a proto-virtual idol in the truest sense of pushing the realism to a quality you can admire, but aside from actual live action footage being used later on, the journey through mazes in this first short is very abstract in comparison to the person wandering them. Add the ambient techno the scores the segment as she finds feminine robots and a transparent monolith, and it is brain candy for Millennials. RGB takes this further by looking like the cool Dreamcast game we never got, FeiFei cybersurfing a spiral environment in pure white void which wandered out of the videogame Rez (2001). Even the spoken word fuzz rock that scores this segment feels like something Sega would commission whilst she is riding a metallic shark in a green sea of fish. Arguably the best thing about this entire project, as here, is how work like this can have a pretense of a plot but also be purely dreamlogic as FeiFei’s birth, as this short is meant to represent, includes all the following but also requires her gaining colour pigmentation for his body beyond grey.

These shorts all have poetic introductions to them, suggesting Blue Moon Studio were more earnest in their work with this one in terms of meaning. Voice, as FeiFei travels through a room in its own existence and learns to speak, also brings in the touch distinct to this collection of animations, blending live action with FeiFei interacting with the real world. The soundtracks are a smorgasbord of the era – whale sounds, nu jazz, ambient lounge and dub music, sometimes in the same short as with Real, focusing on more live action as FeiFei sees the world through the pieces of recorded footage, and is interacting with a real actress who can talk to her through a laptop. These shorts build a narrative over these segments, unlike the others in the series, where she is slowly growing into a real person fully immersed in our world, which also makes understanding the dialogue more a concern. “Dream and reality are the same” is spoken at one point, and whilst we are seeing the limits of the animation at times, we see something very ambitious in spite of this. By Messenger, we are definitely seeing a more New Age tone to the project too, Messenger emphasizing this as an experiment in a character as a radio host, or waiting in-between her recordings of messages from listeners.  We have moved from random zombies being fought off by a sexy dancer in Virtual Stars or music videos to more perfected movements for speaking dialogue or communicating her messages of love in turntablism.

Labyrinth is the most ambitious of them all for being seventeen minutes long. Splicing our lead into real footage of Rome, they do have to fudge around her presence around real people in the streets, like a ghost no one sees, but even in painstakingly animating her operating a phone booth, the short is trying for a more ambitious short film with emphasis on mood. It begins attempting a plot of FeiFei trying to find a man she cares for living in Italy, only for reality to start to bleed and distort in digital code, all with knowledge eventually he has disappeared. As she travels around Rome, witnessing masks with her face on them in store windows or with the walls closing in on her, it is cool to see Blue Moon Studio suddenly take the project series to this point, feeling like the last thematically in their ambition in spite of the true chronology of the releases. After FeiFei goes to a church the short becomes more abstract, a mood piece where she is transported to a tropical island, eventually to her painting herself on the moon on grassy field. It might be seen as a cop-out, but in mind that this entire product feels like the right mix of old CGI, dream logic and these moments of expanding the production with ambition, I would let Labyrinth have a pass if it was entirely just obsolete CGI being used in imaginative ways by this studio, only to also admire that they were wanting to push their interest in terms of artistry too. Sadly, this entire series of works are as obscure as you could get, and in mind that we even got DVD releases of these in the United Kingdom, I ponder whether any of this, from the films themselves to the making of documentary material also included, are even properly preserved. Finally closing the trilogy off they are a compelling dead end in the history of Japanese animation, though it is clear to see that we would have not gotten a Cybervenus FeiFei even if the project continued into the 2010s. When Virtual Stars was released, the production realized the sex appeal sold more, so even if they were able to prosper, this more esoteric tone would have likely been ditched soon after anyway.

#277: Casshan - Robot Hunter (1993–1994)

Studio: Tatsunoko, Artmic

Director: Hiroyuki Fukushima, Masashi Abe and Takashi Watanabe

Screenplay: Emu Arii, Hideki Kakinuma, Hiroyuki Fukushima and Shō Aikawa

Based on Neo-Human Casshern

Voice Cast: Takeshi Kusao as Tetsuya Azuma / Casshan, Yumi Touma as Luna Kozuki, Hirohiko Kakegawa as Admiral Montgomery Dr. Lester, Ikuya Sawaki as the Narrator, Issei Futamata as Akbone, Isshin Chiba as the Operator, Junichi Sugawara as Barashin, Juurouta Kosugi as Commander Tork, Keaton Yamada as Dr. Kotaro Azuma, Kenichi Ogata as Elder Asari, Kenji Utsumi as Buraiking Boss

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

Tatsunoko, over its decades of existence since Tatsunoko, has been retelling and rebooting its franchises repeatedly, always trying to keep them in consciousness, and to their credit, they take artistic risks to do this. It is not just the nostalgic market or all the video game tie-ins over the years, but how their retellings of their most popular characters over the years can vary from the pretty radical, or in a case like this, at least stepping up to the new decade they were made within. It does not always work - rebooting Speed Racer (1967–1968) in the nineties led to an animated series Mach GoGoGo (1997) which most may not know of, a take which told one giant race for a large portion of its length alongside changed the character dynamics. Some have been really drastic, like Gatchaman Crowds (2013/2015), readapting its tokusatsu team dynamic that some may know from its Westernised Battle of the Planets form, and turning it into something which striped the costumes, changed the tone, and was a superhero series over two seasons about mobile phone and online technology's potential to corrupt but also do good. Casshan himself has had some really idiosyncratic takes, created in 1973 as a superhero of android form defeating the robot empire of Buraiking Boss, who have enslaved humanity as this nineties re-adaptation sets up.  I think if I was to return to it, I would even defend the 2004 live action film, which was done in then-era CGI green screen with more emphasis on philosophical dialogue, for at least trying to be different. The 2008-9 Casshan Sins adaptation is the more radical for being a depressing epilogue to the original story, suggesting Earth is doomed anyway, as there is a rust-like virus even kills robots, and Casshan has to accept he is to blame for it over the series.

Robot Hunter is the least radical of the three, closer to its source premise even if with dashing of more adult content for the straight-to-video market, four half hour episodes released between 1993 and 1994, compiled into a feature length work for the Western Manga Entertainment release. In the world, robots have taken over and enslaved humanity, effectively predating The Terminator in the 1973 source material if with the caveat that, rather than kill us all, the Buraiking Boss realised we could be useful as slave labour in his robot factories. Casshan is spoken in reverence here, before his real introduction, as someone who will save humanity. He is actually Tetsuya Azuma, who in this story was a young man who willingly sacrificed himself to place his consciousness into an android to fight the Buraiking Boss, someone who, as in a lot of Japanese anime in terms of moral complexity, saw the only solution to preserve the Earth's natural resources and save the planet was to take over the planet.

The biggest issue with this adaptation is its length. It is nearly two hours long altogether, but if ever there was an anime that needed more episodes or lengthier ones over the forty minute mark even, Robot Hunter could have done with more elaboration on plot details. His father created Buraiking Boss whilst his mother's soul, literal and not metaphorically, was preserved by Buraiking inside a mechanical swan who without him realising she is passing her son information on his plans. There is enough in that in it, let alone the other plot aspects, to add greater melodrama to the proceedings. There is enough here even in this simple premise to pull form for at least a few more episodes, to elaborate on its science fiction premise, not just Casshan himself, accompanied by his android dog, man's best friend with flamethrower abilities, but also the human resistance. They still have enough forces and resources to fight back around the globe, but having to fight on the back foot. This includes the female lead Luna Kozuki, a love interest from Casshan's past that is yet emphasised as a member of the human resistance who is capable of handling herself.

She does emphasise the few moments of edginess this adaptation has too, not just the fact that, even in the apocalypse, she can dress resplendently in short skirt and immaculate ponytails. More telling alongside the few moments of blood, it is from an era where if even Chung-Li, the Street Fighter 2 video game character, had a gratuitous shower scene in the (uncensored) version of Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie (1994), and there is a blatant one here for Luna. That is crass to have to point out, but whilst she thankfully has enough moments of being a competent heroine herself, Robot Hunter's more curious aspects are these nudges of adult content which stick out more because most of this is not close to the edgier titles Manga Entertainment were realising in the United Kingdom for the "beer and curry anime" image on videotapes. Most of this could be shown to a younger audience than the one it has for a few scenes, rated as suitable for twelve year olds in Britain, and with content in live action that would be fifteen certificate if still tamer than most action films at that rating. Barring the few nude scenes, the grittiness of seeing people shot by the villains, and one revolutionary's unfortunate end, crushed under a bridge girder with lots of raspberry jam around him in one moment in episode three, it really is not a gritty adaptation whatsoever, with the robot enemies effectively allowing one to get away with cartoonish violence. Maybe it is over thinking this when the bar for edginess, even in terms of additional swearing added to the English dubs from Manga Entertainment, but it feels like a concession with some of these scenes for this release. The shower scene especially feels like fan service for the sake of it.

The actual production is solid, though this is a case where three directors and four screenwriters does evoke, even if not necessarily the issue here, of a title which lack a complete voice of one figure. There is Shō Aikawa among the screenwriters, once a notorious screenwriter of ultra-violent work who became a more acclaimed one, but there is also the consistent voice of Yasuomi Umetsu as one of the production's two character designers. Notorious for his work in hentai, and titles like Kite (1998) that could only be created originally under that genre, Umetsu is nonetheless well regarded for his craft and detail, and alongside Tomonori Kogawa as his co-character designer, you get a then-update to the franchise which is good and would have been spectacular to image with an expanded narrative which let the pair take the designs they had further. Even Luna's character design, despite my joke about her immaculate costume jarring against the world, is still memorable, alongside whoever (including other designers on the title) who decided to give the Buraiking Boss a Goth female robot henchwoman, looking like cyber harlequin in black eyeliner. (For obvious reasons as well, with its elaborate action scenes, the mecha designers and animators also deserve their credits for their hard work too). Working with Tatsunoko, the studio Artmic are a product of this era, with their last work in the late nineties. Their catalogue of films and straight-to-video work is a cornucopia of nineties and eighties anime aesthetics and tropes in a filmography, from Bubblegum Crisis (1987-1991) to Genocyber (1994), always collaborating with other studios on their projects.

All my issues are with the plot structure. The plot as it is mapped out makes perfect sense - setting up the world and Casshan, with the final conflict as played here between him and Buraiking Boss as well done as you could hope - but is more the sense we could have done with more story beats. There is teased more androids with the ability to control the ecosystem, living on an isolated island, who sadly never properly appear, and the middle of the production, episodes two and three, could have been have multiplied and increased into more tangents and depth to details like these figures, from episode three, or the main characters themselves. Casshan himself, alongside the limitations of his body, including requiring solar energy to power, has the additional primary crisis of whether he will lose consciousness and become a killing machine, whilst Luna, from the original series, has the conflict of needing to both help save humanity, but naturally concerned for the man she loved and hoping for the likelihood of him becoming Tetsuya Azuma again once the fight is over. There could have, in general, been more elaboration on the scenario, more emphasis on the human rebellion and the Buraiking Boss' forces, including a general sense of the grit and stakes at hand, especially with the uncomfortable idea leant into Buraiking's desire to replace humanity comes from his belief we humans will just destroy our planet, our failure to preserve it causing his existence to be. The slightness of some straight-to-video works has been a problem I have seen in quite a titles, and sadly this is a case, where everything here is perfect and could have been spectacular even as just a fun OVA, but we are just missing enough detail to nag.