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Studio: Agent 21
and Toshiba Eizo Soft
Director: Kōichi
Mashimo
Screenplay: Kōichi
Mashimo
Based on the manga by Masamune Shirow
Voice Cast: Hiromi
Tsuru/Toni Barry as Leona Ozaki, Masaaki Ohkura/Steve Graf as Al, Ichirō Nagai
as The Chief/Jesse Vogel, Jouji Yanami/Marc Smith as Buaku, Kōji Totani/John
Bull as Mohican, Michie Tomizawa/Alison Dowling as Unipuma, Yūko Mita/Alison
Dowling as Annapuma, Takkō Ishimori/Peter Whitman as Father (Chaplain), Yūsaku
Yara/Sean Barrett as Brenten
Viewed in English Dub
Most will know Masamune Shirow for Ghost in the Shell, his 1989 manga which gained even further traction when the animation adaptations, in a variety of tones, started from Mamoru Oshii's 1995 theatrical film. Appleseed, his 1984 manga, had a few adaptations over the years as well. Dominion, alongside the fact that the original manga surprisingly only has one single volume in the end, completed over a year from 1985 to 86, and a few additional stories written after that time, may have been sadly become marginalised in his career. This is a shame as for this adaptation, this takes the route of a more overtly humorous but still dystopian science fiction work in his career. It may have not aged well for making jokes about police brutality, as this opens with the tank police comically having a suspect on a chair with a live grenade in his mouth for information and slapstick, but that feels like a deliberately absurd sense of humour which has unfortunately seen the decades after make it less comfortable. What has still stayed timeless, unfortunately but with weightier relevance, is the setting of Newport, Japan, where the environment for the entire world has collapsed, causing the atmosphere to become toxic until civilisation adaptive a natural resistance, and the police have been forced to have an entire division with military tanks to deal with the crime rates.
Despite the tone, including an extended gag (literally) of inflatable phallus being used as a police deterrent, the context for Dominion's setting, the severity against the humour, is one of the most interesting things here out of the gate, which is apt for how Ghost in the Shell, in its own variety of tones, had a lot to work with through its own interpretation of heavy science fiction themes. The atmosphere is decimated, leaving the air outside is toxic, as public service announcements warn of even if everyone has a resistance when the clouds roll in. Even if the first two episodes have a clear sense of humour, that its McGuffin is that a group are trying to steal urine samples from "healthy" people, the context is still salient and meaningful even in a more cartoonish presentation like a good sci-fi story should be able to, especially as the samples were taken from are those without the resistance of the toxic atmosphere but the physical health from a time before.
That your sympathetic heroes are the tank police, who stick said live grenades into suspects' mouths during interrogations, or set up spin the wheel game shows with them with throwing knives, is a sense of dark humour and a sense this is a Japanese production taking a gleeful humour to the trope of on-the-edge police. From director-screenwriter Kōichi Mashimo, it is in a context of depicting a form of police that is deliberately absurd, rather than realising how history would go after 1988 in the West particularly, and that makes this a lot bleaker humoured even if these particular officers are actually likable. Into this is our female protagonist Leona, a former motorbike officer who is transferred over to the group, initially viewed with hostility by their headstrong head Brenten. Another younger male member Al develops a crush on her, and despite the incident that sends their captain's beloved tank to the scrap yard in the sky during training, from its scrap metal comes Bonaparte, a mini-tank who is clearly a predecessor to the Tachikoma tanks from Ghost in the Shell, as cute military weaponry, that Leona can use with greater ease with the advantages of being a squat and faster vehicle in the team that suits her driving skills.
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Whilst this straight-to-video production will get more serious with heftier themes, Dominion is a comedy at heart. It feels like the prologue to what should have been a longer franchise that could stretch this inherently fascinating premise further - New Dominion Tank Police comes in 1993-4, but sadly Tank Police Team TANK S.W.A.T. 01 (2006) by Romanov Higa, a one-off with 3D character designs, faded into obscurity and was clearly not well received, with no other adaptations beyond this let alone actual manga pages written. A shame, as the juggling of heavier themes with humour makes a good change, where despite all the property damage, including legendary pieces of art and historical artefacts in the second half, it is played with a madcap tone exemplified by the sympathetic antagonists, Buaku who is revealed as an artificially created android, and the two women who became the poster cat girls for this entire franchise, literally as they are superhuman anthropomorphic cat girls, Unipuma and Annapuma, who help cause mischief and mayhem. Buaku himself does get a weightier back story involving a portrait which used him as a subject which had more to it than others may know, but they still are part of the humorous tone. Even the English dub, which glibly steers the dialogue into more broad humour, and obsessed with the human urine subplot as an excuse to use the word "piss", is really fun even when it clearly breaks from the script. Whether it is letting the actress Alison Dowling behind the cat girls play with Jane Austin era English accents for a joke parodying Austin era stereotypes, or Peter Whitman as the Christian chaplain officer who talks of Christian forgiveness but is gleeful for mayhem, the British made Manga Entertainment dub, unlike some others which are funny for the wrong reasons, still shines.
The first act really works setting up the tone, dealing with Leona's first days and first encounters with who is being sent to get urine samples, something whose plot is ever fully explained, either as a joke or that there was an ongoing plot with the mafia group wishing them which never came to be. It does not take itself seriously, such as those aforementioned phallic police deterrents, or the complete disregard for property damage even if, in another context, the jokes about severe police tactics and arguing with the female major, clearly inspired from the American action films from the eighties being exaggerated here, would have aged badly now without that context. The last two episodes get more serious, with Buaku's back story and him teaming up with Leona when a suspicious private mercenary force get involved, which allows the world to get new layers. The juxtaposition is helped greater by the aesthetic of the era; we are nearing the end of the eighties and a golden era for hand drawn anime just from the mechanical designs in this production, but also in terms of this being a comedy sci-fi still set within a grungy metropolis which fully embraced the type of sci-fi which lead to cyberpunk. This is a comedy which is still set in a place you would not normally have for a location for this type of story, the rundown nature of the futurescape noticeable in that, for all its luxurious streets, it is barely functioning with its crime rates and poisoned landscape.
Strangely the first Dominion adaptation is split between two production companies, neither with large filmographies at all. Toshiba Eizo Soft was mostly a distributor, only doing production on this or two pieces of a horror anime long forgotten despite the manga being well regarded, called Karura Mau, an enticing one of young female shaman dealing with supernatural forces, beginning with feature length story, and then followed by a six part straight-to-video series. Agent 21, who worked on these titles too, were producing more mostly straight to video work, including hentai, some action, and Dirty Pair: Flight 005 Conspiracy (1990) for that legendary franchise, as well as infamously Dark Cat (1991), a horror anime that is not well regarded. Judging from the time periods of their collecting, tiny filmographies, all their titles come from that golden age of eighties anime and the straight-to-video boom for the medium, with the sense that as time went on they could not last. This is not to mention the end of the eighties Japanese bubble economy expansion that allowed straight-to-video culture to flourish, including live action genre films, collapsed into the early nineties, and whilst studios could survive into the new decades, and straight-to-video work was still alive and healthy up to the Millennium, I suspect these two studios were casualties to the market. Director-writer Kōichi Mashimo however was able to keep going, even founding the studio Bee Train, with his career including a series of television action series with female protagonists capable in gun shootouts like Noir (2001), the first of these. Whilst he had not really directed much into the 2010s, effectively retiring with Bee Train not creating any more productions when he stopped, he had a prolonged career from the seventies over a good few decades that outlasted the studios behind this production.
The set up for a wider world thankfully comes in New Dominion Tank Police, but already I get the sense this franchise could have been expanded further from the premise, which I think is a positive compliment to Dominion. Arguably one of the bigger reasons Dominion is obscurer now, alongside how significant Ghost in the Shell became in the West over other Masamune Shirow titles expect Appleseed, both in its animated adaptations but the original manga being a staple of the manga section of bookstores, is that this animated adaptation has not really being readily available. Lost to the online rips, and the Maiden Japan DVD release of the sequel long out of print in the USA, it is disappointing with the virtues it has that Dominion itself is not as readily available when it is very digestible and memorable.
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