#243: Ninja Gaiden (1991)

 

Studio: Studio Junio

Director: Mamoru Kanbe

Screenplay: Tomofumi Nobe

Based on the video game by Tecmo

Voice Cast: Keiichi Nanba as Ryū Hayabusa; Norio Wakamoto as Robert T. Sturgeon; Yumi Touma as Irene Lew; Daisuke Gouri as Jeffrey Hammond; Saori Suzuki as Katherine Friedman; Shinji Ogawa as Prof. Bucky Wise; Unshō Ishizuka as Dr. Ned Friedman; Yoshiko Sakakibara as Sarah

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

An eighties straight-to-video title at heart, though finding itself published in the early nineties, this is an obscure anime adaptation of a video game. This particular one has a fascinating history, as many may know this video game franchise first through a reboot series from Team Ninja, which were released entirely for Microsoft's consoles, part of their history of attempting to make the Xbox successful in Japan against stiff competition, starting with Ninja Gaiden (2004). This is adapting from the first era, of the Nintendo NES/Famicon era though with the original game a 1988 arcade cabinet. This anime was released at the time between Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos (1990) and Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom (1991), a franchise which had already established Ryū Hayabusa, a figure you may also know from the Dead or Alive beat em up game franchise, as Team Ninja developed those games and brought him from his own franchise to become a key member for that one, which is interesting as a rare case of someone not being a cameo character. It is also in knowledge that game series got a live action adaptation, DOA: Dead or Alive (2006), which means Hayabusa has also been played by Kane Kosugi, son of Japanese martial arts film star Sho Kosugi, a huge figure of the ninja boom of pop culture in the eighties which lead to Ninja Gaiden and Sega's Shinobi video game franchise existing, which is a deliciously intricate web of influences and crossovers.

The story here is very simple off the back of this franchise, good ninja versus an evil group in a forty plus minute anime, connecting to a previous demonic villain being defeated and the aftermath with the threat of their return transpiring. The feeling of this being an eighties anime in tone was a legitimate mistake, not realising until later this was released in the nineties, as it feels from the get-go from the same lineage of eighties straight-to-video titles, even the lower budget ones, which still had a style to them. It begins here with a shot, set in New York City, at night in the fog covered streets where our lead finds him being accosted by two masked assassins in suits and arm hidden blades, which shows there is some creativity that sparkles at times throughout. This is still the era you could get away with recreating the exact poster to Les Misérables, the 1980 musical version of Victor Hugo's novel, in the background to establish the location where Ryu the ninja is drawn closer to the Friedman Corporation, up to no good as with other corporations, with their head Professor Ned Friedman behind diabolic human experiments of a biotechnical kind. The gore in the work as well, and the weird monsters thrown about, regardless of the era it was actually made in feels distinct to at least the time when straight-to-video anime from these decades.

Anime straight-to-video titles were once so prolific that numerous ones like this existed, likely never had a Western release anywhere, and were entirely unknown of once time had passed. It is a generic story with only some drama in Ryu's love for a woman, working in a store with him, who forces him to confront the duality of his life, but this is an action work with a slant into horror first-and-foremost. It does evoke the most curious and enticing video game from this period you wish you could play with this horror slant, inexplicably evoking Castlevania if with ninjas, when you will have freakish white fish men or goons who have skinless faces with just eyes under their masks as antagonists, casually introduced in the character designs for a scene never to be seen again. (Let alone the human headed wolf in a motley crew of them in the final skirmish at the Friedman Corporation). It justifies the idea of how much creativity was burnt up even on a moderately interesting title like this one from the time, let alone one of the future classics of this medium of anime.

Studio Junio is a more obscure studio, one which has collaborated with other studios in areas like in-between animation. Their own work is a curious mix, from Amada Anime Series: Super Mario Brothers (1989), an obscure Mario tie-in in which the Nintendo characters reinterpret fairy tales, to Saber Marionette J (1996-7), likely their biggest title in terms of how it developed sequels and was once a huge title in the nineties. Founded in 1970 by Takao Kozai, their last title in animation was the 1999 film Gundress. Infamously an "unfinished" version had a theatrical premiere in Japan, this work based on the work of Masamune Shirow involved test animation and animatics being used for the ninety minute length in a story¹. It was infamous for how customers were greeted with an apology note from the producers ("This film isn't finished at all") and a form to be sent a free finished VHS copy upon its release². Tragically, this was how Studio Junio finished in the animation industry.

 Ninja Gaiden itself is not something to convert people to, one of the virtues also a flaw to these many OVAs from the past that so many of them were made, to the point that you will encounter ones like this that can have moments of virtue but also may not entirely be the best of its genre. What this is a generic story about guys with the tropes its small plot usually have,  one which eventually becomes macho, with a band of male soldiers who, unfortunately, when their female reporter friend wishes to help in the last raid, tie her at the base on a chair for a joke scene. Admittedly, there is also the moment where one of them named Jeff, mid-gun battle, talks of how military man like men as much as women and alcohol, so I also give credit for unexpected progressiveness in this anime too.

Beautifully as well, this slight work still introduces director Mamoru Kanbe back in my writings, who I knew original for the notorious Elfen Lied (2004), a television series whose flaws cannot undercut, for its lurid and transgressive content, the ideas which did stick out for me. He went on with The Promised Neverland (2019), the first season at least acclaimed at the time, and it is cool to stumble on this early production he directed without realising it; there is nothing here which could suggest a trademark, but when he was not directing comedy like Robonimal Panda-Z: The Robonimation (2004), which is literally about a giant panda robot, Kanbe throughout his career lent into horror and you can see it even here, a genre he would return to or be the right person to bring in for the likes of The Promised Neverland to a Go Nagai adaptation Demon Prince Enma (2006) which took the source into a much more adult version. He is becoming the unsung person I admire the more I find his work, and whilst the screenwriter only has a few credits, and the studio had a tragic ending, this also an obscure title for its animation director and character designer Osamu Horiuchi. Horiuchi would go on with a healthy career from this with the likes of the Full Metal Panic franchise in similar roles, making them a figure of note to pick out too if not a more prominent one. Figures already working in the industry at the time, and those who would be working into the 2000s on, crossed paths on this obscurity in a variety of roles, and yes, the fact that Ninja Gaiden would get a significant reboot in the original video games cannot be ignored either. That franchise would struggle into Ninja Gaiden 3 (2012) which adds its own tale-within-a-tale here too; with the controversial figurehead of Tomonobu Itagaki leaving, those in Team Ninja attempted to take a franchise into a more accessible form, originally designed to be hardcore difficult in gameplay, leading to a divisive inclusion. Alongside the Dead or Alive franchise slipping alone in later sequels, Ryū Hayabusa has found himself in a fascinating number of tales, even when they have been disasters or part of the unfortunate nature of any industry where your next title can fail or be released unfinished in the cinemas. This anime is one of the minor tales from his career, be it commerce or evil demon warriors, but it is an enticing curiosity which, at forty minutes, is too short and with enough within it to not watch.

=====

1) Shirow's Kids, part of The Mike Toole Show series of articles, written by Mike Toole and published for Anime News Network on July 3rd 2011.

2) Do Movies Experience "Production Crunch" Like TV Series Do?, written by Justin Sevakis and published by Anime News Network on June 12th 2019.

#227: Blood Reign: Curse of the Yoma (1989)

 

Studio: J.C. Staff

Director: Takashi Anno

Screenplay: Shou Aikawa

Based on the manga by Kei Kusunoki

Voice Cast: Kenyuu Horiuchi as Hikage; Hiromi Tsuru as Aya #1; Kaneto Shiozawa as Marou; Miina Tominaga as Aya #2; Banjou Ginga as Brawny Koga; Eiji Maruyama as Old Bonze; Hideyuki Tanaka as Kazami; Jūrōta Kosugi as Majuumi no Miko / Shiranui; Kazumi Tanaka as Chain-Wielding Koga; Kōzō Shioya as Shiratsuyu

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

Among many straight-to-video productions made in the eighties, Blood Reign is set in the 16th century, marked by the fact, as in real life, Oda Nobunaga, a legendary figure in Japanese history who would eventually be mythologized and demonised in pulp stories, is alive and trying to unify the country through bloody conflict. Set within this period, Blood Reign stands out with interest for me that its source material, a one shot manga, is penned and illustrated by a female author Kei Kusunoki, someone I am immediately interested in after this adaptation, if sadly with very little of her work translated into English. "Kei Kusunoki" her pen name, born Mayumi Ōhashi, her work varies between drama, comedy and horror, to which, prolific decades on, from Blood Reign's 1985-6 manga, this would not be the last time the later titles were adapted to anime, as Ogre Slayer (1994-5) now stands out with great interest. If this has any of the semblance of her touches in the adaption, than she is an interesting figure I wish was more readily available. As much of this is knowing Shou Aikawa is penning the scripts; unlike his more notorious work from this era, like Urotsukidôji, this whilst a very violence and ghoulish horror tale feels much more melancholic and moody in tone, given flaws in the plotting that will have to be brought up.

In context of its real historical setting, a ninja clan member Hikage has to kill his childhood friend and fellow ninja Marou on behest of the clan. Their master, in the midst of the bloody conflict, is killed and, wishing to hid this knowledge from the outside world for least three years, Marou has to be killed by their seniors, as he has fled and will be able to spread this knowledge if he so wishes. There are far bigger concerns though, as demons were involved with their master's death, and if the rival Iga clan ninja were already a problem for Hikage, worse is to be dealt with in that Marou is connected to monsters and demons lurking. Marou, it turns out, was "born of the ground", not specified if this meant he was born of a mother already buried in the grave, or literally from the underworld and the soil, but his form is of demonic origins, and he is being protected by monsters wishing to help his rebirth into a demon leader to lead an invasion of the human world.

Blood Reign's source manga was for Ribon Original, a shoujo manga magazine, which means it was targeted for adolescent girls and young woman. It very much undercuts any gender stereotyping as, if this anime production faithfully reproduced the source material, that manga was as sombre as this two part OVA was, alongside the fact for this J.C. Staff production, they embraced its phantasmagorical period horror aesthetic. It is insanely violent and morbid when it desires to be, if slanted in a moodiness contrasting other violent anime of any genre from the time period. The first episode sets this up, set around Hikage tracking Marou down to a strange inn, in the middle of nowhere, where lost souls gather to get drunk, a place where Aya will cross Hikage's life, one of two women with the same name he will encounter like fate. A woman with a facial disfigurement he comes close to, this chapter unfortunately comes to a doomed narrative as the place is a location  a spider demon was drawing the suicidal towards the area, those in that state for them suitable candidates, giving a little happiness, to feed on and feed to others.

Episode two escalates the danger as Marou, fully demonic and acquiring demon henchmen, intends to conquer the land. There is also Aya, a female ninja now without clan who starts to fall for Hikage as he now has to stop Marou for greater concerns. Blood Reign, almost feature long, does suffer from the fact the narrative feels slight even if by ten to twenty minutes, a work which could have had an additional episode, if was possible with the source material, and felt fully fleshed out. There is not enough here to stretch into a series, but this feels slighter here than needed to get the most from the content. What helps against it is being a good horror piece, one which contrasts its real nasty violence and body horror, such as a spider monster turning from human form or being able to dismember people with one leg, contrasted with its evocative supernatural aesthetic. This shows the virtue of anime in depicting a variety of genres in its inherently heightened form, horror's unnatural side found fully played even here. There are monstrous butterfly women, giant snake demons, talking tree faces, and processions of the dead wandering abandoned villages in the middle of the night.

There is also a demon thunder horse named Majuni, who rules the sea, talks and laps human blood of those who he tramples on, so Blood Reign also interests, without exoticising the content, as an inherently Japanese work in its setting context and the subjects of its narrative, adding something different. The drama feels the slightest of the work, which is why this could have done with a longer length, such as how the two Aya are slight, the second coming off mostly as a woman in peril, or that Marou and Hikage's relationship, clearly the tragedy it plays up to, should have been allowed to have been fleshed out. (A random female ghost, connected to Marou sacrificing his humanity earlier before the narrative, is so slight as a major plot thread to that is shows Blood Reign needed a little bit longer in terms of narrative to have told itself.) Everything else about the production however, barring that the rock guitar and synth are definitely not period appropriate in action scenes, is eerie even when a ninja action work at times, with a very distinct aesthetic style even in use of colour. It is one of the many fascinating obscurities of this era, released by ADV Films in the VHS and DVD era, but forgotten and lost since then. For its storytelling issues, this is shame considering the many virtues within the time it has.

#71: Black Lion (1992)

From https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNjMx
NWFjNjMtMTNjNy00NjE1LTg2ZjctNzJiZmY5
OTYzNWY4XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMzM4MjM0Nzg@._V1_.jpg

Director: Takashi Watanabe

Screenplay: Ritsuko Hayasaka and Yasunori Takagi

Based on a manga by Go Nagai

Voice Cast: Yasunori Matsumoto/David Stokey as Shishimaru, Yūsaku Yara/Jose Brown as Ginnai Doma, Ai Orikasa/Kathryn Dineen as Hayabusa, Kan Fujimoto/Robert Rudie as Momoji, Kazuyuki Sogabe/Charles Campbell as Oda Nobunaga

Viewed in English Dub

Synopsis: In feudal Japan, the legendary figure Oda Nobunaga has acquired futuristic weaponry like tanks and rifles and is dominating the country as a result. Amongst his allies is Ginnai Doma, a man whose family was killed by ninja and would've have passed on to another life were it not for Nobunaga's intervention, turning him into an unstoppable killer hell bent for revenge on all ninja. One such ninja, Shishimaru, desires revenge Ginnai Doma for the loss of his clan, begrudgingly joining another clan of ninja to stop Doma immediately before he finishes them all off.

Black Lion, a straight-to-video anime, is so ridiculously manly one enthusiastic anime podcaster for the Anime World Order podcast showed his love for the forty minute plus program by punching himself in the testicles mid-recording¹. And considering this is an adaptation of a Go Nagai work, that's not surprising either. Nagai is a legendary manga author, one of the most influential in the medium whose creations - from Cutey Honey to Devilman - are still be adapted to anime today. He even challenged Osamu Tezuka, the "Godfather of Manga", at least being an influence, even if subconscious, on Tezuka going into his more adult and explicit content of the seventies alongside the other bludgeoning manga authors charting that course. Nagai, going through anime adaptations of his work and now able to start on his actual manga, is also an incredible illustrator. Also, he's as mad as a box of frogs.

It's not surprising in lieu of this he created Black Lion - part of an ongoing obsession in Japanese culture of modern technology landing in their past of samurai. Black Lion starts off abruptly with said samurai mowing down ninjas with machine guns, and even a leader of the later having a secret room to his paper wall compound with a super computer, housed behind an iron mechanical door, but it does eventually make sense of this. In this world, the legendary historical figure Oda Nobunaga has ended up encountering evil aliens, who through time travel provide him with future technology, and eventually evoking in this mere fragment of the original manga also good aliens about to take part in this conflict of anachronisms. The spaceship over period Japan that closes the OVA is itself as strange a juxtaposition as it sounds.

From https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-rUbYpEwYAQ8/TW3CixhsiCI/
AAAAAAAAATw/tAzuJZmligk/s1600/vlcsnap-2011-02-23-21h50m16s191.png

This is also a work obsessed with Oda Nobunaga, the real life 16th warrior who was one of the first to unify Japan during a chaotic period of war through the Sengoku Period. He was very culturally minded, had little issue with interacting with Westerners (to the point he is viewed/confused as having been Christian) and took advantage of it, and is also a divisive figure for how ruthless and violent he was in war and as a ruler. In Japanese pop culture, he's been depicted as being a demon or being in the pocket of demons. He's also been gender swapped into a girl twice - The Ambition of Oda Nobuna (2012) and Sengoku Collection (2012) - and tried to control the world with a demonically possessed satellite and time travel against a heroic samurai and Jean Reno in Onimusha 3: Demon Siege (2004). In their vast and weird interpretations, his representations centuries later are so numerous he inexplicably deserves a blog tag himself as his own subgenre, only if he has a cameo here providing the mortally wounded Ginnai Doma the robotic body and murderous urge to be a threat to all ninja.

All of Black Lion is focused on Ginnai Doma being Terminator-like and ninja dying on mass trying to stop him, our cocky lead Shishimaru with his own vendetta against him established at the beginning. A parade of gore and violence takes place for the whole forty minutes which is trashy; something I openly admit is an acquired taste. It has the decency, however, to just make the entire OVA about just trying kill Doma, over that length of time actually compelling as the ninja become more and more exasperated and the maddening attempts to just him finish off lead to more of them dying, usually in horrible ways. Its sickly humorous if you feel that way inclined, but also has more interest to it than if just another ultraviolent OVA from the nineties which juggled multiple plot threads at this running time with no rhyme or meaning behind them, because at least it sticks to one idea and runs it into the ground with all the sense that it couldn't have forgotten anything that would've made it better than it is.    

From https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-o1bcf4ZDhC4/TW2pVF8joWI/AAAAAAAAATY/
yZQKXMDduQA/s1600/vlcsnap-2011-02-24-21h52m07s156.png

Aside from this, you're enjoyment is entirely how absurd this becomes and how much you can appreciate it. Viewing the OVA in English may prove better for some viewers just for David Stokey's constantly shouted and loud performance as lead Shishimaru, as unlikable a ninja as you could get in his attitude, an obnoxious individual who refuses to play ball and gets at least one person killed if not more, adding the tone. The OVA is adequately animated, entirely more about the content itself rather than any elaborate style. Where someone is going to blow up everyone with a nuclear powered battery within himself or herself, lasers are fired from mouths, and the body count is stupidly high. Even illusions with burning marijuana used are involved and the dialogue especially in shouted English is going to add to the absurdity of it all. All of it is silly, but with Go Nagai, I realise soon into my proper introduction to his original work Nagai is both a very talented artist, but in his ability to mix wackiness with the nightmarish, he indulges to his id to conjure his stories. Even if they are potentially problematic or absurd, he writes material like this as with many manga authors to make each page compelling, which is entirely why you get stuff between this or a Mad Bull 34 (1990) which baffle and amuse decades later now we have ironic and non-ironic viewing.

Black Lion is no different, only with the issue that, merely a fragment which completes its small narrative but with an open conclusion, it's entirely about the most outlandish gore, stunts and twists rather than anything more in-depth. Its, frankly, insubstantial even next to other insane action OVAs of the time, and Nagai's work has been adapted into more memorable and batshit forms. Some were even legitimately good. It is however, if you can be enthused by it, providing enough energy to encourage other viewers to punch themselves in the crotch, so be prepared. I wasn't one such person, but I can sympathise with the masochistic energy that would encourage one to.

From https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-ctOGZeTQgz4/TW2_FuRBVII/
AAAAAAAAATk/tuUYYSnIxR8/s1600/vlcsnap-2011-02-24-22h15m19s254.png

====

1) Episode # 54c. Not one of their usual shows, running over ten years plus, so I wouldn't necessarily choose it as your first; it is however memorable just for the Black Lion review.