#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.

#274: The Big O (1999–2003)

 

Studio: Sunrise

Director: Kazuyoshi Katayama

Screenplay: Chiaki J. Konaka, Keiichi Hasegawa, Masanao Akahoshi and Shin Yoshida

Voice Cast: Mitsuru Miyamoto as Roger Smith, Akiko Yajima as R. Dorothy Wayneright, Motomu Kiyokawa as Norman Burg, Tesshō Genda as Dan Dastun, Unshō Ishizuka as Alex Rosewater, Emi Shinohara as Angel, Gorō Naya as Gordon Rosewater, Hōchū Ohtsuka as Beck Gold, Katsunosuke Hori as Michael Seebach / Schwarzwald, Issei Futamata as Alan Gabriel (Season Two)

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

The Big O begins with Batman. The animation studio Sunrise was commissioned to help on the legendary Batman: The Animated Series (1992-5), and in the creation of The Big O, you have a work paying tribute to this and Western popular culture like film noir films. They were also clearly inspired by older manga and anime such as Mitsuteru Yokoyama's Giant Robo, which is important as director Kazuyoshi Katayama and others on this series worked on Giant Robo: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1992-8), an straight-to-video production which adapted the source manga but also a tribute to Yokoyama's other manga, including characters from even period tales being placed into this sci-fi narrative. The final show inspired from these two sides of influence in The Big O however could have ended up a different way though. It was also a series which managed the near impossible, of how it was not actually a success in its first season in Japanese broadcast, to the point it was cancelled, but was able to continue and finish the narrative for a second series because of its importation to the West and success on Cartoon Network’s Toonami slot on television, commissioning the second series when it did well and the abrupt end the first season came to be.

The Big O is set in Paradigm City, where forty years earlier a cataclysm left it seemingly the last city, part protected in domes and everyone forgetting memories of the past. Enough survived for a proper urban civilization to still function, and latent memories still allow figures to operate even giant robots. One such figure is the Bruce Wayne of this world, Roger Smith a former member of the military police who is now a “negotiator”, a cross between what you would expect for the title and a detective. Good at his job but with eccentricities, like everyone working for him having to wear black and refusing to use a gun on the job, he also has latent memories that gave him access to the titular O, a member of multiple “megadeus“, a giant robot clearly inspired by the comic character Popeye in the piston arms as much as a tribute to the likes of Giant Robo and Tetsujin 28, especially as like those robots, Smith uses a wristwatch communicator to bring him when needed to his location.

His Alfred the butler is Norman, who is also a cool butler, with a clear military history, and calm enough to be cooking dinner whenever Roger is on the job knowing his boss will return at the right time for a fight to enjoy it. The best side character though has to be Dorothy Wainwright, and that is in mind this is one of the strongest casts in general for an anime series, so that is a high bar. Her full name is R. Dorothy Wainwright, and that is explicitly referencing how Isaac Asimov, the legendary sci-fi author, had androids name themselves, as she is one of the few androids in the cast, though explicitly the one who looks entirely human and seemingly is. The show, among tropes it explores, includes how these figures are so close in seemingly having freewill, such as her deadpan rebuttals of Roger’s moments of heroics, that they bleed the lines of what consciousness. She is also just an awesome female character to have, with the amount of times she is threatened with being hacked or destroyed in the series meaning a lot more because she is a perfect foil to a great lead, introduced over the two part first episodes for the show. The English dub for this series is as well regarded as the Japanese one, but I have to confess as much the virtue for this character is Akiko Yajima's robotic yet almost human sense of bluntness, making the fact her most prolific voice acting role funny in a great way, being Shinnosuke "Shin-chan" Nohara, the lead of the hugely popular Crayon Shin-chan franchise. Whilst bowing out as the lead voice for the character eventually, the fact this is the same actress who played a sarcastic and scatological obsessed five year old boy from the first anime adaptations in 1992 to 2018 is evidence of the talent of a lot of voice actors and actresses in their diverseness.

That cast is one of the best aspects of the show, even when I will admit there are some visible pacing issues in the plot that will be addressed later in this review. Office Dastun, who knew Roger Smith in the military police force and stayed friends, is a great side character who has a lot of angst to also work with, as the military police he is part of, the closest to enforcement, is under the pocket of the shady group who run Paradigm City, and are powerless when they need to constantly bring in Smith and The Big O to deal with threats they cannot even with tanks and military weaponry.  Antagonists are the same: Alex Rosewater is perfect as the sinister head of Paradigm City, given more by the second series as he collects fallen foes of Smith’s, resurrecting the robots and unlocking their memories for nefarious means. Beck Gold, who looks like a parody of Lupin the 3^rd, is a lovable git even if his constant crimes and smugness definitely makes him a villain, and thankfully he gets a few episodes for himself, including a parody of Japanese super robots, and even stays by the end of series two when you would presume he would stay merely a tertiary figure. Then there are the more ambiguous figures. One, the femme fatale for Roger Smith named Angel, will become a much more complex character, seemingly a “foreigner” in a world without other countries, by the end an integral part to the complicated twists that key screenwriter Chiaki J. Konaka set up. The other is the one character who should have had more time devoted to him, though thankfully in a form he gets to the ending of his goals: that will be a former journalist who became Schwarzwald, seemingly a villain in his mission to cause mayhem but, standing out for his bandaged visage, he is a figure who will use any means to learn the truth of Paradigm City and open the public’s eyes to the reality of the world. He emphasizes how, from the get-go for all the episodic stories, the huge concern in the series' narrative is how this amnesiac city came to be and what is the truth of its origins, which Schwarzwald is obsessed with learning.

Schwarzwald‘s smaller role does present the issues with The Big O, that whilst it leads to a proper conclusion, and that I already view this as a gem from the era it was made, it suffered in terms of pacing itself out and telling said story. When I first saw the series, it was only season one I had access to, which has episodic stories I now enjoy more but were clearly the backdrop for a larger story already being drip fed. Infamously, when cancelled and seemingly gone for good, the first series ended on an abrupt “To Be Continue” moment without any chance for anything to be explained. Sadly when I first saw this, the Bandai DVD releases in the mid-2000s in Britain, through their Beez Entertainment arm in Europe, never released the second series, leaving this with some disappointment. Thankfully we did get that second series in the first place even if it never had a UK physical release, one I have now seen and was able to finally complete the story as supposed to be told, all because of this being one of those cases, in its form getting good ratings on Cartoon Network, where a Western company invested in the franchise seeing potential for more.

Set up in the final episode of season one, where Roger locates Rosewater's father, the founder of the city now going senile on a tomato farm in the countryside, and finds repressed memories are starting to cause him to question his position, it sets up Season Two where Chiaki J. Konaka wrote all the stories, rather than season one where three others contributed stories too. It however also leads to a conclusion itself which did not allow itself to breath, and all of this is entirely due to the final episode feeling rushed. The irony is not lost that, for a series I will praise to the high heavens for so much, the one caveat I have to make is that the final reveal, just the last ten or so minutes of the final episode, is likely to peeve or confuse a few people, and I say this as a person who likes and would normally defend the more unconventional and vague story reveals found in Konaka's other work, where they feel deliberate and not abrupt as here. Some may find the second series too esoteric when a more pulpy narrative twist would make sense, but for me, it is the case that everything works in logic, but that this literally rushed the final moments for what is a very existential story. [Huge Spoiler] That being that this literally all a stage, all an artificial construct but having gained existence and wanting to still exist [Spoilers End]. Thankfully so much works up to the middle of the last episode that means the ending does not ruin the show. So much before is set up well that it thankfully does not become a crushing disappointment for a show with a lot on its mind, merely one you are going to need to stop after finishing the series and digest carefully. Even by those last episodes a lot is already set up to the show's create to expose the real story, this being not a world of amnesia, people being killed for returning memories at one point, but that there is also by the end people who find their memories are being recreated on stages, and that Angel herself becomes far more important as mentioned to how the world works without realizing it. It is really a case that, for someone who even enjoyed Konaka's more vague endings for work like Malice @Doll (2001) that an exposition dump or a more visually explained conclusion for the last episode was really needed.

Thankfully so much did work, and that includes the plot build ups and the one-off stories. Stories of Dorothy adopting a cat in Season One, with its bittersweet end, or the abrupt Christmas episode involving a demon tree now stand out more for when they are connected to a story which, barring that final lack of clarity, get so much right. Even when Konaka took over the scripts for season two fully, he has his moments. to the season, Smith so unconfident his existential crisis literally throws him into an alternative reality of Paradigm City as a homeless man, is inspired as the Japanese robot parody is, the later more so for becoming as a work from a Japanese animation studio a parody of Japanese archetypes. Even plot growth works, between the growing involving of a splinter group of foreigners Angel is connected to, or the ways this can combine the episodic stories with this, such as a threat against all androids with memories like Dorothy which allows a story involving one android detective being brought in as an awkward buddy cop partner with Dastun.

It is a world too with so much rich detail that you do get some proper denouement over the second series, as Rosewater becomes more megalomaniacal and wanting to become God, and the sides clashing over it becoming more prominent, also introducing a season two only character, Alan Gabriel, as a suitably nasty sociopath on his side. It is also helped by the style being incredible through the two series. Inspired by Western works, and very clearly inspired by Batman in the Art Deco style let alone the character designs, it is a sumptuous looking series both visually and audibly, mixing its metropolis location and combining it by a jazz heavy score by Toshihiko Sahashi. Also of note for his own musical compositions is Rui Nagai, though his work sadly had to be re-dubbed over due to how heavily it paid tribute to other music. For the first broadcasts, season two used a piece indebted to British 1970 sci-fi series UFO's own theme, which was replaced quickly. Sadly that even included season one's awesome opening theme, which was on the DVD release I had, a Queen tribute specifically indebted to their song Flash for the 1980s Flash Gordon film, also eventually axed. Thankfully, Rui Nagai composed Big-O! Show Must Go On, as a replacement to both, which is awesome in its own way as a surf riff guitar song with a bad ass solo.

As a giant robot show as well, all this provides a distinct attitude for a title in the genre, especially as the aesthetic style is distinct. Batman and film noir are very distinct touches for a mecha show to have, feeling close to what Tim Burton brought to the Batman franchise with the 1989 film, which influenced the Batman animated series. Even its tribute to its own country's mecha stories is distinct though, as this also a world where these robots feel like giant tanks slowly lunging about, and where alongside its distinct “typewriter-punk” mechanics has details like how the robot punches are literally piston powered. Thankfully The Big O, despite not being a success for the first Japanese broadcasts, had its day in the sun eventually, with tie-ins like an audio drama, inclusion in the Super Robot Wars video game franchise with other cult mecha anime, and a lot of models/figures both for the Big O himself and its cast. It is a franchise I wish was better known in the United Kingdom, as nothing in this barring its final ten minutes rushing too fast would ever be challenged as being divisive. After my initial disappointment with the first series a long time ago, seen in its full form it is with positivity that they could have continued the story a little longer and avoided ever making a bad episode, still getting to the eventual final with everything as good as it was. If anything, this is the kind of show you introduce to someone curious about giant robot anime, and they could be made fans of the genre just from what this does differently whilst paying tribute to the genre's tropes, which is as high praise as I could write for this.

#271: Cromartie High School (2003-4)

 

Studio: Production I.G

Director: Hiroaki Sakurai

Based on a manga by Eiji Nonaka

Voice Cast: Takahiro Sakurai as Takashi Kamiyama, Norihisa Mori as Tabata/Takeshi Hokuto, Ryo Naitou as Yutaka Takenouchi, Takaya Kuroda as Masked Takenouchi, Takuma Suzuki as Shinjiro Hayashida, Tetsu Inada as Akira Maeda, Norio Wakamoto as Shinichi Mechazawa, Youto Kazama as Noboru Yamaguchi, Megumi Hayashibara as Maeda's Mother

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

Cromartie High School was an early series in my interest in anime, one of the many ADV Films licenses brought over the United Kingdom. The origins of Cromartie, even before the first chapters were being published in the year 2000 by its creator Eiji Nonaka, comes from the Japanese "yankii" (juvenile delinquent) manga of the 1970s and 1980s. Cromartie High School, without all the music references and surreal tangents, is a deadpan parody which images these archetypes if they were dense, clueless and/or were hung up on the littlest details even when considering whether to go to a rival school and fight the yankii there.

Our introduction to this titular school is Takashi Kamiyama, who is not someone meant to be there, but with the first episode explicitly telling the audience the reason for ending up in there has to be read in the manga. Suffice to say, he is not the sort of student to end up in Cromartie, a place of ruffians and hooligans. He has at least some intelligence, where in a world of doofuses he will be King, the lamb sleeping among lions (and a gorilla) as Shinjiro Hayashida, a fellow student who befriends him, states. He is the most imposing figure and can become a) the strongest delinquent in the country in a competition, all because of knowing in a quiz yogurt is made with milk, b) will defend his title by hosting a quiz himself to confuse his challengers.

Before you get to the gorilla, Mechazawa the robot student or Freddie Mercury - yes, that Freddie Mercury - the joke is undeniably the idea of the sixteen year old rebel who wins fist fights, or is supposed to if fights ever were to break out in this series, like those Takashi Miike made Crow Zero 1 & 2 about between 2007 and 2009, when they do not live up to these expectations. This is done with both absurd touches but also their own idiosyncratic personalities. Most people may have motion sickness on transport which they live with, but imagining the head of the first years, an imposing figure named Yutaka Takenouchi, having to hide this to keep his toughness status, and looking so even when struggling, is inherently funny. The innocuous undercutting a trope is one of the funnier types of humour throughout anime, and Cromartie provides this in many ways which succeed. This is before the show is also proudly strange, such as providing an entire one-off episode, each less than twelve minutes each with opening and ending credits, about a wise gorilla sushi chef who helps mend the wounds between father and son with a banana sushi. Without highlights like that episode, which goes so hard with the premise that you have messages on the screen reminding viewers this was still Cromartie High School, some of the funnier jokes in a pure matter of fact tone involve adding the banal and ordinary to heightened anime tropes. These weird characters, alongside how magnificently dumb and charming they can be, have to contend with ordinary things a viewer has to put up with, like whether they have gotten off the right stop on a train, only with the bombast of their reactions to these events being these archetypes the combination which adds different layers to the gag.

Kamiyama's friends include Hayashida himself, whose purple Mohawk has a mind of its own and more secrets to it; there is Maeda, who puts up being the one dismissed and also frequently kidnapped by rival schools; Takeshi Hokuto, who is introduced attempting a coup to rule the school with his lackey, only known as Hokuto 's lackey and not able to say his real name aloud, only to realise he transferred to the wrong school; and more characters including a figure, later on, who is an older man in a mask who, attempting to hijack a plane in one episode when introduced, hides among the students whilst wearing the mask still. Gorilla the gorilla is literally a gorilla, and Freddy, literally based on Queen singer Freddie Mercury, based on an iconic concert costume with him shirtless wearing red suspenders, is as close as they could get away with. Freddie in this interpretation is more a big older man with a magnificent moustache, never talking and with even his friends wondering of what transpires in his mind. Then there is Mechazawa, played by Norio Wakamoto, a prolific voice actor who started in the late seventies and has a very distinct voice. Mechazawa is a literal robot, who does not realise he is one as a student, but does get rebooted like a PC, and does end up crashing a motorbike and ends up becoming one afterwards himself, allowing multiple parodies of Kamen Rider heroes if imagining what would happen, rightly, if the police arrested the driver for not having a motorcycle license.

Kamiyama, a lovable goof who yet has more smarts, is our centre but in the twenty six episodes, this show switches to other characters a lot, and this is always a good thing throughout, even when it comes of a pair of actors in a fictional comedy show in the world, Pootan, who are deadpan in the humour whilst wearing giant cuddly bear-like costumes with their faces visible. My favourite character is actually Noboru Yamaguchi, the leader of a rival school with a giant afro, whose real passion is as a connoisseur of comedy who wants to become a comedian. His stuff is hilarious even if you have no real knowledge on the intricacies of Japanese comedy, including the language barrier, whether debating in internal thoughts the structure of a punch line mid-meeting with his underlings, who are misinterpreting his behaviour, or assigning a ventriloquist as his second-in-command, which leads to the issue whether he or the puppet is actually given the position.

The cast is all male, with the one segment about an all-girls' school just redesigning your original cast as "princesses" and the voice actors not changing their vocals, a really good final episode gag especially as it clearly references the music video for Queen's I Want to Break Free even by accident at one point. There are some cameos with female actresses in the cast, but Cromartie, as a story about young male delinquents being goofballs, is an example for me to rediscover, in showing how talented the male voice actors in this series, from Takahiro Sakurai as Takashi Kamiyama to Tetsu Inada as Maeda, are. Surreal comedy anime has been a genre where I have seen how talented a lot of female voice actresses are for the medium, entirely because they have to turn on a dime in terms of the bizarre scenarios the writers and directors provide them, so Cromartie is just as rewarding in the Japanese dub to see this for male actors, the subdued reactions from many in this case adding more to the moments for how they bat off scenarios that, rightly for a viewer, would be ridiculous if they ever transpired. Even this becomes a joke, with some knowledge of voice actors, in that they hired Megumi Hayashibara. By that point she would have been a megastar in anime voice acting, most famous for many in the West for Rei in the Neon Genesis Evangelion franchise, but someone who would have been huge by that point for how many roles in leads and main cast in anime in the nineties, also a prolific singer and musician who would be heard singing the opening and ending themes for many titles she worked on like the Slayers franchise. They cast her, in a cameo, as Medea's mother, who only makes one sound; if you get that they choose such a prolific actress for just making a single noise, and probably how expensive that would have been to cast her, unless she did it as a favour or thought was hilarious, it is funny and one case, for a show which is mostly able to be gotten for its humour without context, able to even add little in-jokes to anime in itself once in a while for an additional layer.

Many moments in this, some of the funniest, are about taking strange and elaborate tangents within an idea. Many times, the joke begins with Kamiyama and the cast debating the logic of a scenario, with layers suddenly being added to jokes that would be funny in another show already, such as Maeda trying to imaging himself as a cat for a week, to the point of wearing cat's eats, when Kamiyama argues no human being really knows how to fully communicate to a cat, even when it comes to petting them. Even with some cultural differences to consider, such as the references and debates to Japanese stand-up comedy tropes, a most of this works without the context needed because it is entirely about characters over thinking scenarios and/or being idiots. Some jokes are just punch lines to pure weirdness, like the only logical reason a train announcer would require a green grocer and a sumo wrestler to help in one of the carts.

It is a series that could have continued, ending without a dramatic climax or a tearful send off, but it manages to be consistent, feeling right when it closed out without any moment it stumbled, with no weak episodes or having petered out. I roared a few times, chuckles or snorted many times, and ultimately the best take to describe why you should watch Cromartie High School is that this fully succeeds as a comedy on a gut level.

#270: Machine Robo - Revenge of Cronos (1986-97)

 

Studio: Ashi Productions

Director: Hiroshi Yoshida (Revenge of Cronos)

Takao Kato, Nobuyoshi Habara and Kiyoshi Murayama (Leina: Wolf Sword Legend)

Kiyoshi Murayama (Lightning Trap - Leina & Laika)

Screenplay: Hideki Sonoda

Cast: Kazuhiko Inoue as Rom Stol, Yuko Mizutani as Leina Stol, Hiroko Takahashi as Diondra, Junichi Kagaya as Kirai Stol, Kōichi Hashimoto as Rod Drill, Minoru Inaba as Grujios, Shigezou Sasaoka as Gades, Shinya Ohtaki as Blue Jet, Sho Hayami as Narration, Toshiharu Sakurai as Triple Jim, Yousuke Akimoto as Gardi

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

According Neil Nadelman, a translator who worked for the defunct anime distributor Central Park Media, Machine Robo may have been licensed by mistake¹. It is hearsay, but an amusing anecdote to sell a series when I heard of this through a podcast Anime World Order. This alongside the premise of this eighties anime was enough, when he talked of this in 2007, to win me over to wanting to see this series, a goal which took a good decade to even get to. Back in the day, when Central Park Media were still a distributor in the United States, they had only gotten up to three DVD volumes with five episodes on each, in a weird time when we thought separating anime series on multiple separate releases was a good idea, before it was clearly given up on. With the company going bankrupt in 2009 and the releases in the early 2000s, this was not a case of the series being caught up in the collapse of its distributor either.

People may have encountered this series in some form back in the eighties through GoBots, a toy line which was imported over to the West during the boom of the original eighties Transformer franchise, which got an animated series and a film, and used designs from Machine Robo. Machine Robo itself was originally a toy line which crossed over into animation, with Revenge of Chronos the first Japanese series for the original country of these toys' origin. This series proved something of an idiosyncratic creation with hindsight, as Ashi Productions' series may also be known if you had never seen it for the characters appearing in Super Robot Wars. Tactical strategy games which act like officially sanctioned crossover fan fiction, these games even if only starting to be licensed officially in the West have been translated and made available to mecha fans, the genre in its centre, allowing one to see the menagerie in this series cross paths with characters even from mainstream crossover franchises. Case in point, Super Robot Wars MX (2004), for the Playstation 2, allowed these characters to run amok in one of the bleakest stories in anime, Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion (1997), which just raises questions of how they cross. One can imagine, if you have seen that film, the last stand by the character Asuka by herself against a group of manufactured biomechs, one of its more traumatising scenes of the franchise, is suddenly interrupted by Rom Stol, the male lead of Machine Robot, this goofy eighties show, making an elaborate speech about good conquering evil and telling the villains they do not deserve to hear his name.

Over forty seven episodes long, this is set on the titular planet of robots, Cronos, invaded by an evil force called Gyandlar. Led by Gades, they are marauding in search for the Hyribead, an ancient tool allowing one to live forever, even if it means killing the father of Rom Stol. After this, set up in the first couple of episodes, Rom takes the family heirloom of the Wolf Sword, and goes with his sister Leina and comrades out to find the Hyribead. It is a show, just to get this out of the way, where Vikung-fu exists, combining Vikings with kung fu to make the most powerful martial arts possible for Rom and his friends to take on the forces of Gyandla. Gyandlar, when not having a ranking system for minions who fail and get knocked down three ranks, have their scumbags but a surprising amount of members who disagree with the lack of honour they show, one such figure a male samurai-like figure Garudi, who will gain greater importance as more of his secret past comes out. This is, openly, a very absurd show. Production wise, there is some great designs for this robotic cast, but you also have a production which is clearly having to produce episodes each week for over a year. The repetition of villainous grunt designs that eventually happens has to be addressed in the final episodes after a while, and the size discrepancies between the cast in particular stick out. Rom, when he uses Vikung-fu's ultimate abilities, gains two levels of robotic armour, the last turning him into a giant with a lack of a practical size guide for characters in general between hulking behemoths and normal humanoid sized ones. There are also things no one cared about the logic for, such as one of Rom's comrades Triple Jim, a Transformers-like robot humanoid who, able to transform into a car, is the friend of Leina's who is only slightly bigger than her, but when he turns into a car is able to be used by her as an actual vehicle with comfortable leg room. The logic of Cronos as a world does raise questions anyway, but that needs a large part of the review to elaborate and the set up of actually watching the show needs to be addressed first.

For starters, Machine Robo itself is very episodic, which is not necessarily something you may have not experienced if, like me, you tended to avoid the huge franchised through your youth getting into anime, the ones which lasted forever, or even the fifty plus episode series. This not that far past when Fist of the North Star's animated television adaptation was started in 1984, important in mind to how much the original manga for that franchise really codified tropes, and how this originates from a toy line which would have benefitted from adding new toys for the audience, as more characters are added over time in the show. Depicting the whole story in forty four episodes, the last three were compilations of the series before the next series was started on air, one just letting the narrator describe the characters in detail, and the last two retelling the whole series in digested form. It is telling that you can boil down the pre-Emerald City narrative of this series, a good twenty plus episodes, down to the initial episode setting up the premise, Rom Stol and his allies going through episodic stories which you would have likely seen in anime before and decades after throughout this length of programming. It is incredibly silly, gleefully so as I wished when wanting to see this series. It does completely repeat the same beats over the episodes without fail, in which Rom will suddenly catch villains off guard, making an elaborate speech and then saying they do not deserve to know his name, a trademark the show eventually starts to make jokes about, and then beat the enemies eventually for that episode. Blue Dragon, his first armour upgrade, is useless and needs to give way to the Vikung-fu set, which gets the job done. His allies include the jet plane humanoid samurai named Blue Jet, who is mostly red, Triple Jim, who has a crush on Leina but is the noble putz in their relationship, and Rod Drill, the goofball. Leina sadly suffers through a casual streak of sexism here as, since she is a girl, there are numerous jokes about her being a girl wanting to enter the battles and being constantly kidnapped/under peril, with her jealously about the many women who are attracted to her brother raising questions about their relationship. Thankfully, she does get good moments to counter this, and these characters do become the real reason to enjoy Machine Robo, alongside its goofiness. Attempting to binge this in large amounts is detrimental to really enjoying it, whilst having taking a few months to even finish this, I was able to soak the world and story in that I became fond of over the time committed.

Machine Robo is helped, unintentionally and intentionally, by being an odd duck in its world, which feels like was being fleshed out mid-production. A place of "Romtro" apples and the "Master Laster", cat people predating the Beast Wars: Transformers franchise in the West, who are never seen again, and a character named "Trim Sponsor", even an episode about a multicolour desert where the blue sand has giant sand mantra rays, it goes through a lot of changes as the production goes. Despite Gyandlar coming from outer space, Cronos is initially suggested to be closer to period Japan, even with tropes of Japanese chambara tales of noble samurai even in the villains' side, with rural communities and that begin agriculture despite it being once said these robots use battery sources for sustenance. There are also the robots closer to their toy line and Transformers, and those who are very humanoid like Rom and Leina Strol, Leina effectively just a female character in a blue helmet and appropriate costume, her design in appearance and long brown hair not even hiding that she is supposedly robotic. This is before you get into how there are no humans in this world, with these the main species in this world, and these robots going on with discussion of the afterlife, due to how many characters will be killed in episodes, and do return as spirits. As this story goes on, more overt science fiction tropes and fire arms are introduced, such as an episode about a city which became decadent and lazy due to the power it produces from a volcano, and it tries to make sense of the two very different types of character designs only to become more compelling for the strange juxtapositions of its plot and lore details it throws in like multiple kitchen sinks.

It really comes obvious that, because these are meant to be robots, you could have gotten away with some gruesome content the television adaptation of Fist of the North Star had to work over, that you can have robots cut in half, crushed or Rom briefly, never doing this again, pull off a Fist of the North Star technique of causing a steel arm explode with one touch. This may seem tasteless, but it becomes almost a sick joke that, more in the pre-Emerald City episodes, you have characters introduced in that episode only for them to die and the leads to morn them over their improvised graves way too many times to not seem perverse. That one of these characters is a woman who is revealed to be a decoy bomb made into a woman just raises more questions, in a world where these are sentient robotic figures who just exist and non-metallic alikes as well. The female cast in general also however show that, wanting to have their cake and eat it, the production design the character to be as human and feminine in design as possible, hyper-feminized in some cases as well. You do get a cool female villainess in Diondra - imposing in her distinct character design as a sadistic giantess in golden armour, with Hiroko Takahashi's booming voice helping greatly - but there are many others who, still stylish in their designs, still emphasis this. A character in Episode thirteen, a martial artist named Ruri, despite her ball joint design is drawn as a shapely figure in lycra, peculiar with hindsight as her tribe in her flashbacks seemingly are born in lycra shaped to their bodies throughout life as a layer of skin, which is one of the more idiosyncratic examples of this. It is less of a complaint but one of the many contradictions and quirks to this show in general, and if there are any criticisms of it, it is entirely the issue of casual sexism you do need to put up with throughout the series if thankfully not straying into anything actually offensive. It becomes more a curiosity as, eventually, I did find myself trying to imagine an alternative world version of this where they did have a Transformer-like member of the cast who was not male and how that would change the perception of this.

The pre-Emerald City stories arguably have the more absurd moments, or I became fond of these lovable oafs on their journey that I started actually engaging with the story as it was fleshing out. I cannot deny that, when I first learnt of this series, it was through an episode of Anime World Order with the aforementioned Neil Nadelman about "lame anime". A long running anime podcast, that episode was recorded in 2007¹ back at a time when the few DVDs released for the series barely scratched the surface of the whole series, with the podcast lasting for so long that they existed when Discotek Media in the USA released this whole series in 2022 on standard definition on Blu-Ray; back then, the enticing nature of their review was as much the ridiculousness of the premise. It was sold on things that could be seen if you owned those original DVDs, which got over fifteen episodes, such as Vikung-fu, where nothing is remotely about Viking long ships or involving runes, or the rock men, part of an interesting idea this show never leans on that these are not robots truthfully, but humanoids that, unless you are the very humanoid ones like Rom and Leina who cannot transform, have bodies made between a variety of materials. That latter detail shows how this series could have expanded into something really idiosyncratic than it already is as, by the time of the final battle between forces of good and evil, you have characters made of metal, rock like the rock people who can turn into boulders to crush enemies, the fossil tribes who can even combine into a giant dinosaur, and the abruptly introduced "Gem People", three figures who, in an attempt to try to wrap up the plot later on, are the  guardians are sacred items which make up  and actually explain what the Hyribead may be.

The clear sense the logic was improvised on this show helps it in the end, and I admire this is in the context where I had a bias to wanting to see Machine Robo, and went out of my way to get the series when Discotek Media releases are a nightmare to acquire outside the USA. Despite this bias, I was able to accept the absurdities and got on the wavelength. It is not a show to attempt to binge all nineteen hours plus of in a marathon, an ill advised choice simply because, repeating the same plot structures over many episodes, this shows was meant to be seen in snippets like its original broadcast run. Instead it becomes, with its male narrator Sho Hayami being appropriately bombastic, a bolt of energy just to go through a couple of episodes at a time and witness what transpires this time, such as the episode presenting a Transformers' Death Race, which is neat.

The world grows as this goes, even if some details are ignored and never talked of, making this a surreal and fascinating world, from the horrifying Iron Eaters, a giant plant-like entity that digests robots, to electromagnetic jelly fish floating in the air. You do have to accept that the first opening theme tune, the awesome Machine Robo Hono'o by Martin, is replaced by one which is cool, but both not as great and also frankly egotistical in the translated lyrics for heroes to sing. There is also screen flashes, something which the Discotek release warns of, this issue of strobe effects which would stop being acceptable in Japanese animation after the "Polygon" incident of December 1997; whilst the incident has been exaggerated in the West, there was an episode of the first 1997 Pokémon series we never got in the West, Dennō Senshi Porygon, which caused photosensitive epileptic seizures in people and children, and led to TV Tokyo and other broadcasters establishing a series of guidelines for animated programs² which would have prevented the likes of Machine Robo having such strobe effects as readers should be warned of.

Emerald City changes the pace when introduced as, whilst staying episodic, this last half sets the cast in one central location, at first defending it from Gyandlar trying to storm the heavily fortified location, to the final act where their big bad eventually have to step in and the final conflict begins. There does become too many characters, likely reflecting this having links to a toy line where you needed to sell the product through the show, but you start to be introduced to characters named Pro Truck Racer, who remind one for all the deaths in the show these are still characters from a series of toys for children, including a group called the Land Commanders who combining into one giant robot. By this point, where the production is even having jokes suddenly start to appear in a show that was mostly straight faced, there becomes a sense of the show just being an excuse to do whatever the staff wanted as they had to resolve what the conclusion is. This means the Gem People are abruptly introduced, but also the sense that, when Pro Truck Racer decides levelling a whole skyscraper to make a bridge is acceptable logic, that the staff where just creating content they thought would be fun. By this point, it is with the sense that they hoped the viewers who were watching really did not care and enjoyed such a sight for its absurdity, which I can attest to as one viewer. That the show manages to have a proper conclusion, tied up and feeling like a real ending, is a credit, even if it leads to a very esoteric one to continue the franchise.

Machine Robo would continue with Machine Robo: Battle Hackers (1987), which would come soon after the last episodes for this show ended. Lasting thirty one episodes, prominently the leads of Rom and Leina Strol would not join their friends in that tale, and notably, whilst tragically only passing in her early fifties, Leina is a very early role for an actress named Yuko Mizutani who, until her death in 2016, was prolific over numerous eras of anime as a result. It comes obvious that, for the four straight to video OVAs that allowed fans to follow these characters, Leina was deliberately made central to all of them even if not the dynamic lead in these episodes as a fan favourite character, at the same time as, being made between 1988-90, Mizutani was going on to a long and prolific career onwards. I will also mention another OVA that was just an extra, a music video compilation, one of two, worth seeing for new material, a comedic breaking of the forth wall with the cast out of character as actors; seeing the cast goof off, or the villain of Grujios, a slug character in a robot body who eventually ends up as a ghost able to possess the bodies, go gooey-eyed over a pet kitten is legitimately funny in context to seeing the show, and a credit that Discotek included it from the best surviving version for their release.

To explain the OVAs, I will have to spoil the ending of Machine Robo from here on, that the finale has the main characters transported to an alternative dimension after they have resolved the conflict on Cronos, the side characters returning for Battle Hackers but Leina and Rom Stol not returning to that series. The four OVAs, three connected together as Leina: Wolf Sword Legend, and a forth, really do feel like curious loose strands to loftier ideas which never came to fruition, attempts to extend the lifespan of these characters and especially for Leina Stol. Certainly they feel like projects to let staff gain experience, the first OVA explicitly name checking itself as the first directorial project for Takao Kato, future director of Keijo (2016), the one fan service heavy show that sounds so ridiculous it might turn a 180 degree and win people over.

This first episode begins with Leina literally recreating The Terminator (1984), with Arnold Schwarzenegger appearing naked in a metropolis in a new time zone, only here on top of a skyscraper with the Wolf Sword. She is now Leina Haruka, and here I wished this bizarre turn the series went into had managed to gain traction as this is the most compelling of the four we got. She becomes a new transfer student at a school, and gets into the kind of premise I find compelling, unnatural figures dealing with supernatural/ horror adjacent tales of entities targeting human beings, with Leina here immediately told when introduced to her class she will save the world by the student everyone else thinks is weird. It is a sudden switch to high school mystery, as girls are going missing, captured in an Alice in Wonderland time scape to live permanently ageless, and where I did not expect Machine Robo to get existential, in its villain talking about aging and the sense of time being lost in youth. This is one of those fascinating ephemera of the OVA world that let this tangent from an existing source happen, and barring the lack of science fiction pieces, this story of a time eater would even be something I would expect from an episode of Boogiepop Phantom (2000). It also means Leina gets compensated for being kidnapped all the time by getting to rock the Wolf Sword and fight supernatural villains, and the end credits is a cute piece showing it all as a film Leina is an actor in.

Sadly this was not the direction they went with this episodes, as episode two properly reintroduces the male cast properly who transported over, all defeated in the opening on an alien plant by the big bad. Definitely, tragically, episode one was a complete one-off as this is sci-fi fantasy now. Leina still decapitates a dragon in the first few minutes, so she got more than the series, but this properly introduces the male cast, Rom's story again here, and with the decision to turn the more mechanical leads into humans. It is strange, for an example, to see a Bishonen Jet, a character now with a human head on the robot body with shades, which is a bit funny and matches the rest of the cast in Rod Drill and Triple Jet. It was also an excuse to have cast from the series back in new roles, audibly heard as you got used to them over this long TV series as I did. Truthfully, however, these are not as interesting even if still watchable. It would be a spoiler in any other context, a huge one, to admit the third OVA kills off Rom himself, and even undercuts the incestuous undercurrent by revealing Leina was adopted, but honestly, as an abrupt twenty to thirty minute piece, it feels like non-canonical content for what would have been a huge surprise to witness, with all forty episodes, in Machine Robo. In the series, it could have possibly been a big enough surprise it might have caused people to talk of that series with a new layer to it. More so as, for what is an abrupt curveball which loses power just for the slightness of the piece, it lets Leina be the hero, which would have been something that could have made Revenge of Cronos a more iconic series even if one with all its goofy moments.

The forth, its own individual piece, is not at all connected to its source and has wandered off in its own direction to the point it is weird even calling it part of this franchise at all. Called Lightning Trap - Leina & Laika, it is set in the then-modern day, and is about a military weapon named Bible, with a terrorist group named Blue Mary after it. By this point Leina is just a side character, just an ordinary schoolgirl with only one connection to the source, one bizarre touch, when she talks about dreams of her being a warrior fighting monsters. It is Die Hard on a luxury plane, with Bible a biomechanical robot kept in the luggage compartment with innocent bystanders, and emphasis placed as much on a new character named Laika Strange, a special agent figure clearly there to try to put over a new page in the franchise. It never came to be, and this proves a weird end to this version of Machine Robo. The next time, and the last, for this animated franchise came in 2003 with Machine Robo Rescue, a Sunrise production following a world where, with age no longer preventing kids from piloting robots, a group of them have trained to rescue people over fifty plus episode. It is also, helmed by all people, directed by Mamoru Kanbe, the director I know more for his horror work like Elfen Lied, which when this ended in the start of 2004 was the series of his that started in 2004 too, a few months on from, and is absolutely not suitable for kids.

As mentioned, the OVAs notwithstanding as curiosities thankfully preserved, I am biased towards this series, due to the time wanting to see it. As much due to the time to just watch this entire series as someone mostly used to anime where, even when episodic, sticks to twenty four episodes at their longest and reach the plot trajectory quickly. As an older anime viewer nowadays, I was never binging the fifty plus episode big hitters, or anything like One Piece which kept going for a decade, with the concern for the time consumption involved. Eventually the silliness of this particular show won me over, and I can label all the strange quirks and mistakes in this review all with a positive viewpoint as I enjoyed even those, as much because I came to the series wanting to see those too and enjoy them. The legacy of this series really shows in the inclusion in the Super Robot Wars franchise, where giant robot show fans made that series and give respect even to a production like this, something I can myself say in that my love for this, as much for the unintentional, was sincere and well rewarded with the context of knowing what I was wanting to watch after all this time.

====

1) Anime World Order Show # 63a – Totally Lame Anime With Neil Nadelman, podcast episode for Anime World Order, released December 6th 2007.

2) Animated Program Image Effect Production Guidelines, published by TV Tokyo on their website.

#263: Pet Shop of Horrors (1999)

 

Studio: Madhouse

Director: Toshio Hirata

Screenplay: Yasuhiro Imagawa

Based on the manga by Matsuri Akino

Voice Cast: Masaya Onosaka as Leon Orcot; Toshihiko Seki as Count D; Hiroshi Yanaka as Mr. Hayward; Kouji Tsujitani as Robin Hendrix; Miho Yamada as Q-Chan; Miki Itō as Louise; Mitsuaki Madono as Roger Stanford; Mitsuru Miyamoto as Kelly Vincent; Narumi Hidaka as Nancy; Ryūzaburō Ōtomo as the Kirin; Satsuki Yukino as Jill; Sayuri Yoshida as Alice; Sho Hayami as Jason Grey

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

In Joe Dante’s Gremlins (1984), the younger buyer of a Mogwai is given a set of rules of how to take care of it, including the rule to not feed it after midnight, and if it is not followed then the seller is not accountable of the misery the results lead to. It is a perfect Western comparison to Pet Shop of Horrors, a four part anime mini-series adapted from a manga by Matsuri Akino, which follows the same idea but as morality tales.

Mortality tales are a vast part of human storytelling, and it finds itself fitting within the horror/supernatural genre very well regardless of nationality and medium. The old phrase “be careful for what you wish for” applies to many horror tales, especially with ones like Pet Shop of Horrors and its characters who may be far from innocent in the first place. Housed in Chinatown in Los Angeles is a pet store owned by the mysterious Count D, a soft spoken man with a sweet tooth and an elegant demeanour, who sells “dreams” to his customers as well as regular pets. The ‘dreams’ however bizarre creatures that require a strict contract of three rules to be signed to be allowed to own them, that cannot be broken by the client at any point. If the rules are broken, the pet store is blameless for what happens and something exceptionally gristly is bound to happen. Officer Orcot, a homicide detective, believes D is clearly behind the deaths after buying these pets, but the true nature of the customers is far more morally grey than one would immediately presume. Bear in mind that this mini-series is only four episodes long only, single stories that do not get deeper in terms of connecting plot as the manga may do.

Case in point is episode one, which sets up D as an unnatural figure who sells a grieving couple a rabbit which looks exactly as their recently passed daughter. Like many of these types of stories, inevitably, the rules will be broken, here to not feed her anything but vegetables and water, least you would get the least expected horror story with a happy conclusion. They are, however, morality tales about when people slip and make mistakes, or when their worst tendencies slip through and the unfortunate realities are revealed, such as the real Alice dying of a drug overdose and the complicity of the parents. Like some of the horror tales I have seen in anime and in manga, it is full of elaborate explanations after the events to explain them and the morals of the tales, which could be seen as off-putting for being over explanatory, but in mind to its tone as a morality tale, this makes sense. It became quite obvious with this work that this over-elaborate explaining, all from Count D himself and his philosophising, is the main meat of many of these tales alongside the gruesome conclusions involving the mystical creatures in this mini-series something in mind to how the first episode ends with a disturbing use of rabbits and how these ones reproduce.

Count D effectively becomes a one-man Greek Chorus and Crypt Keeper as well as the one who gives them the object (i.e. the pet) that causes the events to happen. The four episodes play off the conflicts of human emotions and their follies, the old chestnuts that are still great themes to tackle, but adds the additional fact that, like in many Japanese stories, the person involved may have willingly let themselves be damned. Why Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998) became such a legendary horror film as it has was probably both its premise of the cursed videotape, but also its theme of the complicity of people, in how the tape came to existent and that a victim, anyone of us viewers in reality too, could let this happen to us even if we knew going in that viewing the tape could kill us after seven day. Pet Shop of Horrors plays with this concept nicely in such short a space of time. Episode two is about a mermaid which looks like the recently deceased fiancée of a man which he becomes obsessed with, whilst episode three is more bittersweet, its lead of an actor trapped by the shadow of his first success, as a beautiful lead in a sci-fi movie, less a tale of a man with sin but tragically a man giving up which involves the tale of Medusa of Greek legend.

There is levity here. Orcot is out of his depth with a man as eloquent and mysterious as Count D, and despite all the strange goings-on never questions why the mysterious pet seller has a strange magical creature, a cute mouse-bat critter, flying around him that would immediately break reality. Count D, even if it means providing the mayor with a cute penguin as a pet, also has powerful connections despite the fact, for all his demonic side, his moral code is more letting people suffer their own failings and merely providing the tools for them. It is also really apparent that there is a streak of platonic romance between the men hinted at, least a flirtation toyed with in the premise of two very different types of masculine beauty, the almost androgynous D against a rough and hard-headed cop. Even if not an ounce of romance was ever hinted at in Matsuri Akino's source manga, it feels subtextually here in their combative chemistry. It is still rich in atmosphere, with its occult leanings and also the score by Kazuhisa Yamaguchi, which is of its era but is a sumptuous mix of drum and bass with jazz. Tragically, he did not continue at all in the anime industry where his style of music would have been great for many works in this genre we would be getting in the Millennium.

If there is an issue with the mini-series in production, it is that, despite being hand drawn animation before the use of computers after the Millennium that became standard in anime production, it is not the best it could have been even for television. Despite the fact this is a Madhouse production, who are kings of great productions like Millennium Actress (2001), this feels like it could have had more flair in appearance than the snippets we do get; even for television, their full series Boogiepop Phantom (2000), whilst working with a budget, was brimming in far more style. The first episode, which I read in some form in a sample catalogue of manga, is naturally going to be superior in most exceptions on page, but the tale could have done with a bit more visual punch to add to the strength of the stories.

Episode four, the last, is the most idiosyncratic, in how it deals with the kirin, a mythological animal in East Asia of great reverence, almost-deities taken from Chinese mythology only owned by figures of great benevolent people and leaders. Here, there is the touch that, in this world, it suggests in a flashback in World War II Harry S. Truman, the 33rd president of the United States, had a kirin, and here the tale is about a young congress man whose male assistant is the one really pulling the strings. This assistant wants to push him to become the great young President in the White House, despite the fact his wife Nancy wants a simpler life and he himself is falling in love with her, and even for a short tale, it stands out with its conclusion for these one tale characters, from how this issue is resolved in its own bittersweet way, a great example of how these moral tales can use horror to their advantage. The obvious disappointment is that this is only four episodes long. The manga, starting in 1995, lasted until 1998, followed by Shin Petshop of Horrors which started in 2005, during the boom of TokyoPop, the American manga distributor who licensed the series, and ended in 2012, which by that time was when the bubble for TokyoPop had long burst from their 2008 restructuring onwards, leaving a huge amount of stories (and the growing back-story of who D is and how Leon Orcot becomes closer to him) on the table. That does not even factor in that the original author returned to the world further times with Pet Shop of Horrors: Passage-Hen (2013-2017) and in 2018 with Pet Shop of Horrors: Ark Adrift. It is a shame, but by itself as a one-shot, Pet Shop of Horrors is a solid ninety minute DVD not allowed to fully form into something special. Considering this was a television broadcast rather than a straight-to-video production as I had presumed it to be makes this lack of a full thirteen episode series, let alone longer, stranger with hindsight and bittersweet as you see here four good episodes for a one-shot which would have made a great beginning to a longer production.