#40: Dark Myth (1990)

From http://cdn-2.cinemaparadiso.co.uk/
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Director: Takashi Anno

Screenplay: Takashi Anno and Tomomi Mochizuki

Voice Cast: Alan Myers (as Takeshi); Jay Harper (as Kikuchihiko); Peter Marinker (as Takeuchi); Blair Fairman (as the Narrator); Daniel Flynn (as Brahman); John Baddeley (as Hayato); John Bennet (as Jiku); Larissa Murray (as Miya)

Viewed in English Dub

Covering Dark Myth opens up an odd tangent Manga Entertainment, a British anime distribution company who worked both in the UK and USA, would probably like to forget but also manages to be a time capsule to a type of anime for Western viewers that's drastically changed in only a decade and a bit, involving a sub label only known as The Collection¹ that I caught at its tail end on DVD and was meant to clearly take advantage of VHS era acquisitions they still had the licence to. With a preview burnt into my memory, from constantly viewing it as an extra on the DVDs, a sizzle reel built around The Mad Capsule Market songs, almost all the titles released in this series, English dubs only, are infamously bad or the obscure of the obscure. That most of them were dubbed in 1996 into English onwards informs a history of, after helping to fund Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell (1995), Manga Entertainment having to tighten their belts by scraping the barrel. The term "beer and curry anime" particularly comes to mind with The Collection too, informative a dead breed of Western anime viewing where it was mainly a young male audience who'd watch new releases in the UK on a Friday night with beers and takeaway curry; whether this actually happened or not, its definitely a time stamp to a medium that's (thankfully) changed so drastically in terms of gender balance in the titles released and the audience for the medium being both male and female, the type of stories we see now drastically away from this. Viewing this though, while the generation we have now is for the better, even something as flawed and maligned as this anime reminds me of something admittedly lost, which I barely caught in the early 2000s and was too young for anyway, in how I wish more of these stranger, rawer type of anime from the late eighties and early nineties were still being made but with modern sensibilities.

Like a lot of the Collection, Dark Myth aka Ankoku Shinwa has in inherently interesting premise, combining ancient Japanese folklore with horror, but like most of them is a failed work, as much to blame on the English dub its only available with as it is the flaws inherently in the production. The young protagonist Takeshi finds himself on a journey to become the Atman, the personification of human energy and connected to the Hindu personification of cosmic reality Brahman, the Atman a messiah figure will either bring enlightenment or destruction depending on whether Takeshi who's forced into this position against his will, chooses either side. An elderly man with a surprising amount of knowledge on the subject represents the former choice, whilst the leader of the Kikuchi Clan (descendants of Japans first inhabitants) pushes Takeshi to the later as he hates the fact Takeshi has been chosen and not himself. The issue immediately, and this is as much culpability on the English dub's lack of quality, is that beyond this basic plot, the two part OVA is expanded with such elaborate mythology that, based on real mythology and spirituality or partially made up, the narration and exposition is so vast and constant, with pronunciations in the English dub which vary in utterance and sound, that it gets convoluted and maddening to catch up with. Half the difficulty with Dark Myth, and why it's likely looked down upon if the Manga Entertainment version is the only one available, is just having so much audio information to follow that eventually drowns your grasp of the plotting.

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This denseness causes such a lot of problems as, whilst perfunctory in a lot of places, Dark Myth does pull out moments of real interest. The narrative, if it didn't make such a simple plot so convoluted, has a type of mythology on display that is unique and fascinating in terms of horror and fantasy. Stone eggs as a method for people to preserve themselves over centuries (unless they sleep for too long and fall to pieces like literal dolls). Armless snake headed demons and a horse head god. Or the reoccurring monsters the hungry ghosts, the dead who've escaped hell who're represented as chimp-mammal like hybrids with old man hair, packs of them who lead to a few moments of extreme splatter in how they can shred people to pieces in spite of being the size of a pug dog each. It's a testament to anime as a vastly different cultural item compared to Western horror and fantasy, where it can draw on a rich reservoir of myths and inspirations for even a significantly lesser work like Dark Myth, allowing it to be rewarding even if the plot, leading to a form hanging over Earth as an evil miasma for a convoluted reason, becomes too garbled to follow eventually.

There's also a surprising sense of technical quality for an anime packaged with the likes of Violence Jack (1986-1990) and Psychic Wars (1991) in The Collection, which could be easy to forget. The most blatant is the surprise appearance of composer Kenji Kawai, Mamoru Oshii's regular composer, creating the score, here creating a late eighties synth score that reinterprets traditional Japanese folk music with a nostalgic sheen to it. The other aspect of worthy mention is when the work does take a few risks with its aesthetic and animation, managing to succeed in the few cases. Imagining, while Takeshi is in a trance, wandering between shrines across Japan to get the marks needed to be the Atman being depicted in a genius way where everything is entirely white and not even pencil outline is visible, literal blank whiteness like a cel from an animation sequence, with only sound and monologue around him informing us of where he is.

From https://vintagecoats.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/dark-myth-
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The other are the tripper moments such as eight armed, horse head gods and Brahman 's world being depicted by way of Salvador Dali creating a space rock album cover. It's a shame that such detail and invention is wrapped around such a convoluted narrative, when it could have cut three thirds of the exposition out and still succeeded. If anything the lesson to learn from The Collection in general is that, my fondness for it in its ineptitude aside, that the style of these hand drawn animated works, even the grottier ones, is something that we could still have now, their tones and moods something that would be a breath of fresh air next to the more modern anime of now when it fails, as long as you don't forget that particularly with the likes of Dark Myth, there's a reason why "guilty pleasure" might be a justifiable term to use to describe it.

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¹ For those interested, barring two unofficial entries (Metal Skin Panic MADOX-01 (1987) and Tokyo Revelation (1994)) and two South Korean animations (Red Hawk: Weapon of Death (1995) and Armageddon (1996)), The Collection consisted of: Dark Myth, Vampire Wars (1990), the maligned sequel to Bubblegum Crisis (1987-1991) called Bubblegum Crash (1991), Landlock (1995), Psychic Wars, candidate for many as one of the worst anime ever made, Sword for Truth (1990), one of the great director Osamu Dezaki's less than stellar efforts, Amon Saga (1986), New Gall Force (1989-1990), a sequel in the Gall Force series which is actually a good entry in The Collection, and most infamously Violence Jack, until recently when Discotek in the US decided to traumatise people with the uncut Japanese language version was enough to suffer through badly dubbed in English and butchered.

Bonus #2: Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky (1991)

From http://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/
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Director: Lam Nai-choi

Screenplay: Lam Nai-choi

Based on a manga by Tetsuya Saruwatari

Cast: Fan Siu-Wong (as Ricky Ho); Fan Mei-Sheng (as Assistant Warden Dan/Cyclops); Ho Ka-Kui (as The Warden); Yukari Oshima (as Rogan); Tamba Tetsuro (as Master Zhang); Gloria Yip (as Anne); Kwok Chun-Fung (as Lin Hung/Andrew); Frankie Chin (as Oscar); Koichi Sugisaki (as Tarzan); Wong Kwai-Hung (as Brandon)

My review of the live action adaptation of Tetsuya Saruwatari's manga is going to be drastically effected by having been able to read said manga, an issue that can entirely effect someone's opinion on the adaptation depending on the context, and definitely is the case for me here. Never officially released in English, fans have translated it and quite a few years ago I read the entirety in full. Trained by Kazuo Koike, the legendary manga writer of Crying Freeman, Lone Wolf and Cub, and Lady Snowblood, Saruwatari has developed his own success through series like Tough, Riki-Oh and Dog Soldier. He also learnt from Koike, whilst also the artist of his own work, a frantic style of storytelling that, whilst Koike is critically acclaimed, has made his teacher also notorious for his almost insane plot twists, complete disregard for tastefulness and the sense of having had his work, just seeing some of the anime adaptations like Mad Bull 34 (1990-2), spun out as it was from the hellishly short deadlines of manga publication and the need to constantly keep a reader turning pages constantly. Riki-Oh, a live action Hong Kong film, is exceptionally faithful to this lunacy, even close to panels and details from the original manga, but it's also only the first few chapters following the introduction of the titular character (Fan Siu-Wong), a noble man sent to jail in a privatised prison whose martial arts ability allows him to withstand pain and mutilation that would kill a regular human being, and in turn transform opponents into meat pate with a single blow.

A large part of the weight the film adaptation suffers from is that it only covers the beginning, where the stakes are simply the evil prison warden (Ho Ka-Kui), his underling Cyclops (Fan Mei-Sheng), and the four prisoners that lead each ward - North, South, East, West - with incredible power, such as the beautifully androgynous and dangerous Rogan (legendary Japanese actress/stunt woman/martial artist Yukari Oshima playing a man) to the giant Tarzan (Koichi Sugisaki) whose ability to rush a man's head with a single clap gave the film a clip that could be used in American media to help it live on in infamy. The full manga in comparison however is so mind-bogglingly stranger and mad  after these initial chapters that, not only would this adaptation seen far tamer in comparison, but I was likely permanently effected after reading said manga after all these years. A story where Riki-Oh is actually a Jewish-Japanese superhero whose bullet wounds in his chest, with the bullets still left within them, are actually shaped like a Star of David in the pages, and is fighting on the side of atheist, Japanese-Jewish heroes fighting for goodness and atomic energy against the forces of evil, including Chinese Nazis and a twin brother who became evil after a game of tag as a child, who believe in religion. Against this and such sights as Riki-Oh punching out an elephant, fighting grunts on miniature AT-ATs, a minor villain whose similarity to M. Bison/Vega from the Street Fighter games is so close its likely Capcom tipped their hat to him, another a sadist who uses his ceiling fan death blades just on a servant who gets a hair in his tea, and it's a one-off whose list of events I've barely scratched the surface of. Alongside dialogue so strange it actually starts to make sense in its randomness and the extreme gore, and the live action film has a mountain to scale in comparison.

What I have to admire with the adaptation though is that it does manage to adapt it well, right down to the obsession with the violent splatter being intercut with its naive emotional core, where crying of manly tears is common place from Ricky, lamenting all those who die violently in spite of his own responsibility for knocking half a person's face off or splitting a giant fat man's stomach open like a balloon full of red paint. It's also feels like one of the more off-beat films that came over from Hong Kong cinema, making the decision to adapt a Japanese manga like it with incredible faithfulness a rare case of material so perfectly fitting its new home, fitting the tone of many Hong Kong films as eccentric as it equally. The one difference to a lot of the more lurid martial arts films however is that, whilst there's plenty of actors in the cast who are exceptionally talented in this area, the combat ability depicted in the film is significantly more simplistic, so that rather than the spectacle that is the common benchmark of Hong Kong cinema of exceptional and athletic fight scenes, the result is actually a Herschell Gordon Lewis splatter film on a higher budget with more elaborate production design. A punch doesn't just hit flesh but take a huge chunk off a person, half their hand if they are throwing one back, or the whole jaw. This is the film where, straight from the manga, someone losing a fight cuts open their own stomach and attempts to strangle their opponent with their own exposed intestines. This gore, in elaborate cheery prophetic glory, is ridiculous and without concept of real life physics, possible to heal a severed tendon by tying up again, not how tendons work in real life but part of the crazed logic the manga gained from Kazuo Koike's teachings to the author.

A lot of what you get from the film since the plot is without the usual level of martial arts, baring these gore effects, is the eccentricities particularly in its cast of characters to latch onto. Fan Siu-Wong is playing a cipher with an oddly schizophrenic attitude to morality, blaming another for a prisoner dying when he finds their family photo but only minutes earlier punching half his face off, and a knack for blazers in the flashback explaining his current situation when dealing with the happiness he used to have. Anyone who becomes his character's friend is the same, all of them dying in nasty ways in a way that could become a morbid drinking game. The side characters in terms of the villains are the real interest, from Cyclops, the most valuable thing of the film who has a hook hand, a glass eye he keeps breath mints in, and Mei-Sheng playing him as a bumbling yet sinister figure perfectly, or Ka-Kui as the warden, his chubby man-child nephew already memorable, but by himself in his sadistic glee of what he does or being chosen to run the prison, and all its evil shenanigans, because he's the best at martial arts, one of the most memorable lines of dialogue. It's this broadness which compensates for the simplicity of the story if you can appreciate it. For me it's more difficult in spite of these great aspects. Much of this review is based on the problem of comparing it to the original source material, not only in terms of the madness in the original but Saruwatari's art managing to make such silliness and gore actually artistically awe inspiring in how realistic and detailed it is, the grey and muted palette of the prison setting and style of the film only awakened when someone bursts a blood vessel. Still deserving of its reputation as a one-off gore kung-fu fest, but for me personally it falls behind other films like it especially from the Shaw Brothers which didn't sacrifice the martial arts and elaborate stories for the gore.

From http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wlmdUd9qNEA/UFxr9NGODcI/
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#39. King of Thorn (2009)

From https://shadowofvampire.files.wordpress.com/
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Director: Kazuyoshi Katayama

Screenplay: Hiroshi Yamaguchi and Kazuyoshi Katayama

Based on a manga by Yūji Iwahara

Voice Cast: Kana Hanazawa (as Kasumi Ishiki); Akiko Yajima (as Timothy Laisenbach); Ayako Kawasumi (as Laura Owen); Eri Sendai (as Shizuku Ishiki); Kenji Nomura (as Ron Portman); Kousei Hirota (as Alexandro Pecchino); Sayaka Ohara (as Katherine Turner); Shinichiro Miki (as Peter Stevens); Toshiyuki Morikawa (as Marco Owen); Tsutomu Isobe (as Ivan Coral Vega)

King of Thorn's premise suggested a post-apocalyptic horror narrative when I first heard of it. In an alternative time line, the world is inflicted by the Medusa virus, an incurable disease which when it infects a person eventually turns them to stone, prompting a medical company during the crisis to reveal a secret project to cryogenically freeze a lottery selection of over a hundred people. The test subjects are awoken time later only for a few of them to survive, for when they wake up it's to horrifying monsters living in the facility, isolated on its own island in Scotland, and giant thorns covering everything inside and outside. The remaining individuals - including one half of a pair of female Japanese twins Kasumi Ishiki, a criminal Marco Owens, a female nurse Katherine Turner, an African-American Ron Portman and a young boy Timothy Laisenbach amongst others - are forced to flee and try to survive the monsters rampaging around the facility's many rooms and underground passages, fearing both the Medusa virus still infecting them and the secrets that reveal that not all is what it seems. As a result of this though, what I thought was going to be a post-apocalyptic story isn't that but something else melding sci-fi, horror and fantasy, a gamble but one that could've succeed exceptionally well in terms of creating its own idiosyncratic personality.

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The reality of what the premise is and how it plays out, with direct allusions to Sleeping Beauty to a conspiracy narrative, eventually undermines the film. What happens is that the plot becomes more convoluted as numerous plot twists are introduced right up to the end. An advanced computer named A.L.I.C.E. that is meant to look after the cryogenic subjects. The Medusa Virus. The shadiness and experiments from the medical company itself that has lead to imagination literally becoming real and leading to their facility being covered in giant thorns like the castle in the centre of Sleeping Beauty, told the viewer in narration ongoing as an allusion. That's not even getting to the central characters, their own stories and reveals about their characters thrown at the viewer, the most important plot thread here for the entire film that of Kasumi's, the central character, one of two female twins, whose psychological strife and a mystery surrounding her sister Shizuku becomes the central mystery. However this leads to many of them not getting any character detail for them like Ron or Timothy baring the clichés they meant to start out as. (And even a character with some noticeably grim background detail like Katherine being undercut by prioritising other events even with her onscreen, causing one to realise a lot of downsizing of the original manga's length may have been involved). It becomes difficult to filter through as having to juggle emotional back story and its various plot strands becomes a chore rather than naturally fleshed out.

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This becomes more disappointing as King of Thorns officially counts as a horror anime, that surprisingly rare breed that I wished existed more often. It's various horrifying monstrosities suggest dark fantasy crossed with sci-fi horror - blind T-Rex like creatures with xenomorph jaws, killer bats, a monstrous entity at the bottom of an elevator shaft that swallows anything that falls down to it - but they're merely background objects throughout to trim down the cast and downsized in threat next to the science fiction story the film eventfully becomes. The genre mixing could've easily been compelling, even in terms of how the premise aesthetically mixes both high-tech science laboratories with a Scottish castle with underground sewers and spiral staircases, the sense of melding different tropes found even in the odd but eventually obvious clue of how the young boy Timothy views the monsters, even when people have died, like videogame monsters to an almost clairvoyant-like level. Because of the emphasis on countless plot stands however it never feels fully fleshed out be it as horror, fairytale, viral horror, anything, when even the Medusa Virus never gets a proper conclusion or meaning to it baring an abruptly revealed but never explained revelation of its origins. Worse, it becomes part of a convoluted plot strange only found in anime where it can be a plot Macguffin to allow other fantastical incidents to happen.  Even the most dramatically compelling with Kasumi - an uncomfortable relationship with her sister despite Shizuku loving her, the interesting denouement plot twist set out with a perspective fragmenting structure - is compromised by how ultimately clichéd it is.

Animation wise, while high budgeted, it also suffers from an ill-advised decision to mix three dimensional and two dimensional animation including for the character models for more action intense scenes. As a result, it leads to characters switching mid-scene from crisply drawn figures to a noticeable three dimensions placed on 2D backgrounds, subtle differences in how their facial features and form is altered for a few moments that is an awkward and brutally visible detail. Altogether what could've been an interesting film is one that doesn't find a clear tone for itself, one in King of Thorns which is completely remarkable after the umpteenth plot twist.

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#38: Your Name (2016)

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Director: Makoto Shinkai

Screenplay: Makoto Shinkai

Based on a Novel by Makoto Shinkai

Voice Cast: Ryunosuke Kamiki (as Taki Tachibana), Mone Kamishiraishi (as Mitsuha Miyamizu); Masami Nagasawa (as Miki Okudera); Etsuko Ichihara (as Hitoha Miyamizu); Ryo Narita (as Katsuhiko Teshigawara); Aoi Yūki (as Sayaka Natori)

It's a wonderful feeling how successful Your Name has been, an incredible hit in Japan that's also growing in box office in countries like South Korea and even the US. Knowing Makoto Shinkai was once making waves with a short film he made as an outsider of the anime industry by his own, Voices of a Distant Star (2002), and gained a career as a result of that short's own success and his hard work adds to that wonderful feeling. And brilliantly, a decade on starting with a sci-fi story about time travel and giant robots which was actually about human relationships and communication across an impossible distance, Your Name is tackling the same subject in fantasy and folklore trappings about a young boy and girl communicating over their own vast distance separate from each other, instead Shinkai using this much larger budgeted, longer canvas to flesh out the subject matter further.

It has to be stressed that Your Name is a very mainstream feel-good movie,in which, after a meteor shower, a young high school girl Mitsuha, living in a rural town as the daughter of the late shrine priestess, finds herself randomly switching bodies some days with an urban schoolboy Taki living in Tokyo before the morning after returning to their original places. As they start to exchange notes to each other during the changes, of how not to behave in the other's body and offering diary snippets of what they've done in that time, a relationship at a distance begins. At first Your Name takes on a surprising amount of the tone of television anime in its speediness and snap in pace only brought to a monstrously higher budget with great animation, an opening credit sequence closer to a TV series in its montage of flashy animation and pop rock by Noda Yojiro, the humour juggling near slapstick and light sexual comedy between Mitsuha's thought bubbles or how neither she and Taki are prepared, even after multiple times, to find themselves in the body of someone of the opposite sex let alone in an entirely different environment between urban Tokyo and a rural mountain town. After a while Your Name, to its credit, does start to get more weight to it beyond this light humour.

For starters, it's clear Makoto Shinkai, writing a script based on a novel he wrote himself, has an incredible ear for personalities that feel realistic and an interest in humdrum life that's drastically different from the imaginary, exaggerated fantasy of high school that prevails in a lot of anime stereotypes, a naturalist not only in his realistic character designs and the painstaking detail in all the environments, but how even in a fantasy story with light comedy is grounded with realism that feels more sincere than in other stories, such as Mitsuha's father being disconnected from his shrine heritage after his wife's death playing an incredible part in the friction between father and daughter, or even how the effect of a boy inside a girl's body, and a girl inside a male's body, isn't just played for cheap humour but includes subtle personality changes alongside bouts of inadvertent amnesia and drastic behavioural changes. The contrast between the small town in the county that's difficult to find by train without knowing it's name, and has very little in terms of activity there for the youths baring the yearly cultural festival, and the urban metropolis of Tokyo, with Taki doing part time work in an Italian restaurant and its crowded trains, provides a visible interest between the Japan of tradition and lore against Japanese modernity, never stressed or made clear in a portentous way but a sub current the divide playing the two central characters away from each other takes advantage of. The explicitness of the folklore of Mitsuha's community plays out behind the body swapping is significant too, where the traditional form of sake made from chewed up rice and alcohol kuchikamizake is an important plot point, and a certain time in twilight at dusk allows people from different realities to stand and talk to each other.

The best thing Your Name does is to suddenly plough through the expected comedy for this premise in a giant montage, when it would be savoured over time in other films, and turn into a much more serious story, taking a tragic plot twist involving the initial comet and purposely play with time and reality in a tone that's between a pulp weird tale and romantic drama. It's a little flaw that Taki is the real protagonist, when Mitsuha's own life is fascinating and the side characters around her like her younger sister and the conspiracy obsessed Katsuhiko are the most fun to follow, but thankfully neither side is more important than the other in terms of emphasis, the duo allowed through the metaphysical distortions in the plot able to be on screen in various forms, including as each other, in very unconventional ways. It's still a populist, mainstream film in terms of the ending, but Shinkai has a foot firmly in the metaphysical and folklore which brings a better sense of the fantastical, allowing it to dodge countless clichés that would've made the ending resolution a chore, and a better sense of the drama where the real emotional concern is whether Mitsuha and Taki will ever have any form of romance that's consummated to each other even if just through saying a few words. The growing romantic angle resonates more when the film plays with tropes like destiny and the Japanese notion of the red string of fate against their more prickly, humorous interactions beforehand.

The quality of the production is also vital for it to work as, whilst the music by Noda Yojiro and his band Radwimps is frankly too saccharine for me, it's an incredible visual achievement where the background details - the colours of the sky at morning or night, clouds - are incredibly detailed and colourful, having a sensual impact to the material as well as a dramatic weight, the story especially when it's in Mitsuha's town and its mountain setting having an important emphasise on the local gods which play an important role in her life and the plot. In fact Your Name goes one further, with a scene in motion that may have tipped it's hat to the late anime director Osamu Dezaki's "postcard memories", still images that suddenly intercut into scenes with incredible detail, with witnessing Mitsuha's life from her birth to the present in watercolour that's breathtaking and nearly psychedelic.

Plus, and the factor you sadly don't get in a lot of mainstream cinema, the story is full of life and humour which adds to its emotion, from the running gag of Mitsuha's younger sister being freaked out every time Taki possesses her body and acts in strange ways, or the sweet and emotionally adult subplot about an older female colleague at Taki's Italian restaurant job who Mitsuha helps draw him close to. The later in particular, while not radical as a film on the subject, does give some complexity to how Your Name deals with the gender portrayals, quite brilliantly beyond the obvious jokes, found especially in how this female colleague, university student Miki, find herself bonding with Taki when he's showing more empathy because of Mitsuha being the person behind the eyes. Even though I've barely seen anything by Shinkai, with a large gap between The Place Promised in Our Early Days (2004) to Your Name in my viewing, it's amazing how that even when it's scored to light fluffy J-rock and a mainstream box office smash, he's decided to expand on the same obsessions he had from his first ever work on a much higher budget, still within the confines of genre storytelling, and expand upon his concerns about human interaction and distance in a larger scale without feeling he's compromised at all. 

From http://www.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/styles/full/public/image/
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#37: Samurai X: The Motion Picture (1997)

From http://pics.filmaffinity.com/Rurouni_Kenshin
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Aka. Rurouni Kenshin: Requiem for the Ishin Patriots

Director: Hatsuki Tsuji

Screenplay: Yukiyoshi Ohashi

Based on the manga by Nobuhiro Watsuki

Voice Cast: Mayo Suzukaze (as Kenshin Himura), Miina Tominaga (as Yahiko Myôjin); Miki Fujitani (as Kaoru Kamiya); Takehito Koyasu (as Sadashirô Kajiki); Yuji Ueda (as Sanosuke Sagara); Akihisa Soukuchi (as Ken Ikeuchi); Harî Kaneko (as Aritomo Yamagata)

With any long lasting, exceptionally popular franchise, there's the issue for people who've yet to jump ship onto the franchise when it's gone through many spin-offs, feature length stories, sequels and prequels of where one starts. Naturally most would immediately go to the first piece, the one which gained the popularity in the first place, although there's a problem as can be attested to Rurouni Kenshin where, if not everything is released or in this case has been long out of print in the UK, one is forced into a corner. It's nice to find Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal (1999) second hand, said to be the most rewarding and artistically satisfying of the entire franchise, but having a DVD with only the last two episodes out of four is an utter pain in the arse.¹ Rurouni Kenshin, about the titular samurai Kenshin Himura during the early Meiji era with red hair, red clothes and a distinct x mark scared on his cheek, has had a lot of media built from the character, live action films the most recent and easily available examples, so there's another issue as well that, with so many continuations with the character, whether all the spin-off media is actually any good and worth keeping on one's DVD shelf is an issue. As much as one wishes every sequel for a franchise was great, be it books to moving pictures, there's a constant example of bad or utterly pointless tangents which ultimately aren't worth the time in having seen, marring the series as someone's first experience with the beloved character is such a bad or dull story, more so not worth spending ridiculous amounts on the special edition releases with various bits of tinsel and gloss on them.

From http://cdn.anisearch.com/images/anime/screen/3/3192/full/161545.jpg

Samurai X the Motion Picture follows the franchise mid-way into its existence as a one-off story, already establishing main characters to follow - Kenshin himself, Sagara Sanosuke a martial arts fighter and general lovable lunkhead, Kamiya Kaoru the sole female member and the more diplomatic, and Myōjin Yahiko a young boy established as being an orphan in a few lines of dialogue in the film - but setting them against a feature length long story that can be work by itself in spite of the background you'd need to get the most out of it. On one hand it's an advantage for myself as it means this being my first experience of the franchise isn't marred with being lost by context fans would already know of but meaning, without any risk and all narrative consequences taking place to characters only existing in this film, a story like this is fraught with merely doing the bare essentials.

It's interesting to see another period chambara anime in such a long while on the blog - not since entry #5 Sword of the Stranger (2007) - where in this case Western influence is modernising the nation of Japan that's survived civil war but conflicts are still taking place. The narrative is entirely about the lingering wounds of this and backlash against the western presence, a figure Takimi Shigure (Kazuhiko Inoue) secretly plotting to take drastic action, not knowing of how double crossing is involved or how Kenshin has a significant part in his motives. That and the woman who loves him as well, Toki (Yuko Miyamura), having emotional conflict as she bonds with Kenshin and his friends with a Sword of Damocles hung over her love for Takimi.

From http://images.static-bluray.com/reviews/5141_4.jpg

The problem is entirely about the story being perfunctory. Not wanting to drastically effect the main characters, long form pulp storytelling is fraught with having to either keep coming up with more imaginative stories or keeping the wheels spinning to a dull repetition, an issue which becomes more problematic with the tie-ins for long standard series like feature films which should be more dynamic considering how important a film or a special should be in ideal. It's possible to have one's cake and eat it, especially as this particular story has enough to run with story wise in terms of politics and a character drama between two figures never featured again that can go in any dramatic conclusion, but it feels like mediocre samurai cinema, one which feels shockingly flat too in terms of an animated work one would hope had more flair to it. Part of its cardinal sin is that a lot of its plot is signposted and sanitised, that Kenshin will not use the sharp end of his blade at all and harm anyone, or that there's no dynamic conflict to test his good virtue and show its best, merely what can damningly be argued to be an average episode length story stretched for over ninety minutes. Neither does it help that the most rewarding moment, a pre-credit prologue, when Kenshin was still a cold blooded hired warrior, of a night time fight is constantly repeated over and over again as flashback padding that it loses its impact eventually.

From http://sia1.subirimagenes.net/img/2013/12/26/
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Without any tension for the main characters -  Myōjin flirting with joining the anti-Western rebels but with the script cheating so he doesn't get permanently affected by this decision - nor any real dynamic to the new characters for this film, Takimi reduced to clichés of honour and Toki as a worse cliché of the meek woman who only cries and has no affect on the story around her, no amount of sad music or crying, of manly tears as much as Toki's, can help as neither the corrupt member of the Western military helps add spice or the many things you have here that you find in other anime before it done better. Affectively it's the worse way to get into Rurouni Kenshin, as someone who had never seen any part of the franchise before it, and if I do continue on with entries of it, if they're available, I hope this was one of the unfortunately cases of a pointless cash-in.

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¹Thankfully Trust, while second hand, looks easy to pick up online, so even if the video quality's aged badly there might be a review in the future one day.

#36. Casshern Sins (2008-9)

From http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/voiceacting/images/4/42/
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Director: Shigeyasu Yamauchi

Screenplay: Akatsuki Yamatoya, Natsuko Takahashi, Reiko Yoshida, Takashi Yamada, Tsutomu Kamishiro and Yasuko Kobayashi

Based on the property from Tatsunoko

Voice Cast: Tohru Furuya (as Casshern); Akiko Yajima (as Luna); Cho (as Ohji); Kenji Utsumi (as Braikingboss); Mami Koyama (as Leda); Nami Miyahara (as Lyuze); Toshiyuki Morikawa (as Dio); Yuko Minaguchi (as Ringo); Yuto Nakano (as Dune)

As can be attested to with Western pop culture characters, the longer a franchise lasts, until it becomes an institution, the likelihood is that it'll be reinvented and have multiple variations on the same basic premise over the decades. This is why Batman is both Adam West campiness and Christopher Nolan's gritty realism at the same time. Casshan is a figure which has developed a long lasting existence alongside other famous creations like him from Tatsunoko such as Gatchaman. Ironically Gatchaman years later would have as much of a drastic transformation for a new generation, thought significantly more light hearted, in Gatchaman Crowds (2013), the same to be found here after Casshan, now Casshern in this 2008-9 adaptation, has gone through various forms. Originating as an android superhero who fights robots, he's gone from children's TV, a more adult straight-to-video anime, a divisive as hell live action adaptation, and this melancholic and frankly bleak eulogy about death.

From https://omisyth.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/casshern4-61.jpg?w=500

Casshern, a hero in previous versions, is an amnesic wandering a post-apocalyptic wasteland he is entirely responsible for, having brought about a "Ruin", a decay which afflicts robots with rusting to death eventually, that has infected the whole world after killing Luna, a saintly messiah figure of eternal life whose name still rings out in the ruined world. Utterly immune from the Ruin himself, and able to heal any wounds inflicted on him, Casshern has to be pushed to recognise his own guilt by Lyuze, a robot woman who is out for revenge against him for her older sister's death, until he decides to go about to help what remains of the world when it's rumoured Luna is somehow still alive. Followed by Friender, a robot dog once the canine friend of the original franchise and now a fellow wanderer, and Ringo and Ohji, a plucky young girl and an older, cynical father figure who Casshern constantly bumps into, Casshern must deal with his responsibilities and the fact that robots, good and bad, believe they will gain immortality if they devour him and that there's the prescence of Leda and Dio to worry about, two androids who look very similar to Casshern himself who have intentions of ruling over the landscape themselves.

Particularly grim material, by the end unrepentantly dark in its theme of accepting death. It's exemplified by a distinct art style where, even if the character designs are outlandish and exaggerated from figures to hairstyles, their appearances contrasts the bleached out wasteland environments fully, the later a seventies or eighties hued nightmare of decaying cityscapes and ruins falling to dust than more modern takes on the genre. The "cartoonish" nature of the characters doesn't soften the blow but makes it worse, seeing countless one-off characters, even if they're robots, accepting death as they slowly rust and fall apart, the rare human being as likely to die and fade away with only flayed hoped left between flesh and metal.

From http://blog.seiha.org/images/casshern5/casshern5_3.jpg

However Casshern Sins suffers from significant problems, two different ones as the twenty four episode series is split into two distinct halves. The first half makes one of the biggest mistakes you find in anime TV series of being episodic without being compelling. In practice it makes sense, Casshern the character our eyepiece to how the world is as it dies, from a robot who desires to paint a ruined city to make it beautiful again, or a woman attempting to build a bell with what little resources there are around her, but like a lot of episode anime, the result are mere paragraphs of ideas not fully formed and not as told as well as they can be, Satoshi Kon's Paranoia Agent (2004) and Masaaki Yuasa's Kaiba (2008) examples of how one-off characters can leave lasting impressions if the scripts for individual episodes avoid clichés and take risks. This problem if confounded by the fact that,  while distinct and exceptional in visual style, everything having a blistered haze of sand and rush including the screen itself, the show does limit its fluidity and tone, which mixes drama with action scenes, by having a lot of static and closed-in moments of characters merely talking, problematic here despite it being common in anime in general when themes of accepting death are repeated far too many times without new depths to it. The music is also poor, never a big fan of anime J-pop and J-rock barring a few great exceptions and here evidence of how it a lot of modern examples don't even have the cheesy fun of their forefathers and mothers to appeal to me; an episode, underdeveloped, about a female singer brining hope to the survivors by performing a concert is marred by a bland, Stars in Their Eyes-like soppy ballad that climaxes it which sadly becomes the reoccurring theme for later moments about hope.

From http://blog.seiha.org/images/casshern13/casshern13_4.jpg

When it reaches the second half, Casshern Sins stays with a continuing narrative where the protagonists come to terms with their lot but the resulting attempts at profundity do feel cliché and confused. It doesn't help that the last anime I covered on the blog was Haibane Renmei (2002), a far more profound and level headed series which explicitly dealt with death and grieving, but Casshern Sins has to struggle with a popular superhero figure - Casshern still a white clad Power Rangers-like figure in appearance, a nemsis in the show always named ' Braikingboss' in full in dialogue, a robot dog - and using it properly to deal with very serious subject matter, something it doesn't succeed with in this particular case as, baring the tone and look, it doesn't take the risk far enough. The sole moment when a better show briefly appears, offering what could've been, is only in episode eighteen, where the most interesting character Lyuze has an entire episode devoted to her having all her issues - revenge for her sister at Casshern combating against her growing romance for him, slowly succumbing to the Ruin herself - meshing together into a psychodramatic episode long dream, the inner child combating against her older self, full-on and quite mesmerising dream logic, and a surprisingly adult moment for the show where she indiscriminately, in a graffiti covered urban street, goes to have sex with a random man who talks to her only to decapitate him mid-coitus when she realising what she's doing. In this one episode, Casshern Sins offers what the premise should've been, a beloved cartoon superhero of yore being introduced into a bold new direction with actual risk in the storytelling involved.

The final result however is not this. Leda and Dio, who present a fascinating dynamic of Leda being both Dio's Lady Macbeth but a figure with a personal tragedy, and Dio more noble then the villain he's first painted at only wanting to beat Casshern, get a flubbed ending when more is necessary. The final episode even manages to confuse its own message, starting off on the right foot with tragedy, with liked characters passing away, only for the reaction to it and how a specific figure finally acts through hurting others is illogical to think about, ultimately leading to a vague open ending that's not particularly interesting. What is a brave idea, like with Gatchaman Crowds, of adaptation a staple figure into such a drastically different work sadly fails because the material isn't as strong as it should be.

From http://i409.photobucket.com/albums/pp172/Ryvius_Ongaku/Janice-1.jpg

#35: Haibane Renmei (2002)

From http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/haibanerenmei/images
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Director: Tomokazu Tokoro

Screenplay: Yoshitoshi ABe

Based on the dōjinshi manga by Yoshitoshi ABe

Voice Cast: Junko Noda (as Reki); Ryou Hirohashi (as Rakka); Akiko Yajima (as Kuu); Aya Hisakawa (as Kuramori); Chihiro Suzuki (as Hyouko); Eri Miyajima (as Kana); Fumiko Orikasa (as Hikari); Kazusa Murai (as Nemu)

[THIS REVIEW CONTAINS MAJOR PLOT SPOILERS]

Haibane Renmei is incredible. Openly in the first sentences I'll confess it's an exceptional thirteen episode series, a incredibly fantastical premise but one which tackles exceptionally an adult subject, namely death and the afterlife. After the first scene of the series where she's falling from the sky, our female protagonist is literally reborn as an angel, without memories of her past but aware of this fact, violently growing wings from her back and being presented a freshly cooked halo that permanently hovers over head. Rechristened Rakka, after her dream, she has become a Haibane living amongst a whole home of female Haibane, and male and female children, in an abandoned old mill that's being provided to them as a home. The Haibane - the caring older sister figure for Rakka called Reki, the dozy Nemu who's the oldest of the Haibane, the cocky tomboy Kana, the boyish younger Kuu, the nerdy and kind Hikari - are clearly the dead, living in a form of afterlife that is peaceful but requires them to follow the rules of a council that looks after them, living in harmony with a town of mortals behind a wall neither group can leave from, the kindness and donations of the town keeping the Haibane in comfortable life.

The greatest virtue of Haibane Renmei is that, as thirteen episodes isn't a lot of time for a large scale story and is ill-advised for epics unless a sequel is possible, it's world is deep enough to have gone on longer but there're only two small character based plots in the centre of this series, bookending each other, the first being Rakka adapting to her new life, the later dealing with the emotional strife of the "Day of Flight", where a Haibane leaves gracefully from existence to (clearly) a higher plain of existence, leaving emotional turmoil if their remaining friends aren't able to cope with their departure. This is worse for a person like Reki who, starting off as the edgier, cigarette smoking big sister devoted to Rekka, is revealed to have deep psychological issues about her existence as a Haibani since she was hatched, coming to terms with the possibility of her own "Day of Flight" and how it may never happen to her if she cannot come to turns with her own baggage. As a result, concentrating on this small internal drama both allows the world to grow naturally whilst portraying a story with enough emotional depth to have an immense impact on the viewer.

From https://myanimelist.cdn-dena.com/s/common/uploaded_files/1459280787-e1aaa7882402160c3022781d2898a25c.jpeg

The quietness of the show is understated to an extreme. While it cut quicker than I thought it would to an immensely downbeat drama soon into itself, the world of the Haibane is never presented as sinister or leading to the cliché of a morally dubious force being secrelty behind it, instead a timeless reality which has motorised scooters and a second hand clothing ship but feels like travelling to a rural town or a seaside community which has a sense of being closed, everyone knowing each other or at least with the rules put in place for the mortals and Haibane to interact a sense of public responsibility. Even the masked men who dictate the Haibanes' lives, whilst exceptionally restrictive in their rules, are ultimately out to help the Haibane live happily and being spiritually fulfilled, thankfully avoiding the cliché of them being villains for the protagonist to rebel against.

Instead of the clichés of fantasy, i.e. crow barring unnecessary action into a fairytale, the conflict is entirely personal drama, how Rakka has to adapt to her new life with questions but also the emotions of those amongst struggle with the baggage of lives they can no longer remember. Technically the show can be added to the "Slice of Life" anime and manga sub-genre which is exactly as it sounds, the ordinary lives of the Haibane who, whilst treated by the mortals in a way that could accidentally come off as patronising, as in one scene which leads to Rakka snapping in the midst of immense emotional pain, are just like everyone else in their community baring their unique social structure, working at the libraries or the clock makers and paying for their goods with notebook pages in place of regular money. Anything more than this is cryptic, the most blatant a book Nemu tries to complete as a gift for a colleague going on pregnancy leave which is explicitly the Christian mythology of how God created the world, thanks to Rakka adding how He rested at the end.

From https://myanimelist.cdn-dena.com/s/common/uploaded_files/1449730777-ead8100a94796ef5216641a0d5c65c19.jpeg

The religious content is so un-highlighted its ultimately more powerful for the subtle hints to it, imagining purgatory as actually a pleasant and wonderful place ifone has no emotions anxieties from the previous life, with friendship and idyllic countryside around them, but the travel to either heaven or reincarnation through the Day of Flight causing as much pain for the Haibane left behind as the death of a loved one would. Explicitly Reki is cursed with being sin bound, black wings when she birthed from her egg, caused by a sin that isn't necessarily a transgression but depending on your views as a viewer the result of how the person died, like suicide, or how they left their mortal life with a grave error committed. (Such as Rakka, also sin bound, realising she rejected someone in her previous life there for her, believing she was entirely alone, only to take a couple of episodes on a small journey of symbolic existentialism to cleanse herself of this error). Unable to learn why she is sin bound, and unable to remember her whole dream in the egg, trying to paint it to existence constantly, Reki's agony is played out as a literal dark night of the soul, Rakka trying to help but the emotions devastating in the final episode, literalising the agony in physical form for the pair, before closure is felt. As a result, Haibane Renmei becomes an exceptional take on grief and acceptance on a spiritual level but ironically at a more realistic level than a lot of anime melodrama, which is more fantastic than this despite Haibane Renmei having its central character possessing wings and halos.

It terms of the style and structure of the show, its helped by the original creator Yoshitoshi ABe having a pronounced role of the adaptations of his original work, the show a mellow and quietly told story with a light touch in terms of aesthetic, naturally timeless in terms of setting and colour palette. The music as well, particularly when it gets closer to the end and emotional devastation being restrained by characters, is impeccable from Kō Ōtani, electronic and folk influence felt throughout. Altogether it's now surprisingly how much of a sleeper hit Haibane Renmei was, still enjoyed and admired today, as within only a small baker's dozen of episodes it manages to tackle its theme with immense grace and subtlety, hints at a great fantastical tone which are greater because it's used to tackle realistic issues. 

From http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-bRJNHc3dhrw/UBc5zbyU39I/
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