Bonus #3 & #4: The Guyver/Guyver: Dark Hero (1991/1994)

Director(s): Steve Wang and Screaming Mad George (The Guyver)

Steve Wang (Guyver: Dark Hero)

Screenplay: Jon Purdy (The Guyver)

Nathan Long and Steve Wang (Guyver: Dark Hero)

Based on the manga by Yoshiki Takaya

Cast: 

(The Guyver): Jack Armstrong (as Sean Barker/The Guyver); Vivian Wu (as Mizky Segawa); Mark Hamill (as Max Reed); David Gale (as Fulton Balcus); Michael Berryman (as Lisker); Jimmie Walker (as Striker)

(Guyver: Dark Hero): David Hayter (as Sean Barker); Kathy Christopherson (as Cori); Bruno Patrick (as Crane); Christopher Michael (as Atkins); Stuart Weiss (as Marcus)

Note: The version of The Guyver (1991) I watched was the director's cut. The flashy editing technique added to cut between scenes, involving a lightning bolt symbol and a musical motif, isn't actually that bad and adds to the comic book style. The visibly removed scenes of violence however do detract, and add further emphasis to one of the film's biggest problems I'll talk about in the review.

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Yoshiki Takaya's manga The Guyver was at one point one of the first Japanese manga and anime franchises to transition over to the West well, and was exceptionally popular. In fact one of my earliest memories as a child was seeing a small news article about The Guyver (1991), probably the first introduction as a child of the idea of "manga" or "anime" I had, which had the exceptionally deceiving poster of one half of co-star Mark Hamill's face against one-half of the iconic Guyver helmet. In terms of adaptations, there were two anime adaptations straight-to-video, 1986 and 1989, which I still need to see. Between 2005 and 2006, there was an attempt to rejuvenate the franchise by way of a TV series, an admirable attempt but one undermined by sanitising the violence that made the reputations of the previous anime, worse when the late anime distributor ADV Films sold the series off that infamy, and having no actual ending or a second season. Then there were the two live action adaptations, one produced by Brian Yuzna with special effect designers Steve Wang and Screaming Mad George making their directorial debuts, the sequel three years later with Steve Wang on his own in the director's chair and taking a drastically different direction in tone.

Unfortunately The Guyver (1991) is dreadful barring the practical effects. Inexplicably, despite the franchise being an ultraviolent mix of tokusatsu storytelling (like the Power Rangers) with body horror nods, Yuzna's Japan-US co-production decided not to follow his wheelhouse of gore and elaborate special effects in films like Society (1989) or Bride of Re-Animator (1990), but only have the special effects and make the film more family friendly. The result is one of the many bizarre attempts Hollywood and the American film industry attempted to adapt comics and videogames, usually from Japan, throughout the nineties but for every one that's perversely entertaining (Super Mario Bros (1993) for example for the weirdest), The Guyver drags itself along until dying on-screen. The strange alien bio-armour called the Guyver is transposed to American soil, Sean Barker (Jack Armstrong) finding it and becoming the Guyver with the evil Chronos Corporation, led by leader Fulton Balcus (David Gale), wanting it back, sending Zoanoids, humans who can turn into humanoid monsters, after him.

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The one success, the only success, is the practical effects. Screaming Mad George is legendary and notorious for his work, from the human cockroach sequence from A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988) to the "Shunting" scene from Society, visceral body horror which even if you can see the seams is so nightmarish and gooey that it borders surrealism. Moments show this in this film, seeing him and everyone in the practical effect department having a field day with the premise, Michael Berryman and various actors turning into various humanoid beasts or the spectacular Guyver armour itself, a warrior with cyberpunk and insect-like traits, which are all applaudable. Tragically these enough cannot redeem the film they're in, even when the effects go full out in detail like a graphic full body melt to weird test tube creations as background props, trying their hardest to create quality work but unable to overcome to mountain of terrible production decisions in their way.

First the cast is incredibly weak. Mark Hamill, playing a cop on the edge trying to get the scope on the Chronos Corporation, at least has a sense of grandeur to his appearance, and the late David Gale steals scenes with his bizarre intonations and wall chewing, even enraged by burning toast as he is by the incompetence of his minion, but Jack Armstrong as the hero is an absolute charisma vacuum even by the standards of a pulp story that emphasises practical effects first. Vivian Wu, as the female love interest, is visibly struggling with her dialogue and not helped in the slightest by a wet, one dimensional female character who's main existence is the exclaim words from other characters' exposition or look distressed; thankfully five years later in Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book (1996) she'd stand out more in a central role, but here it's like a deer caught in the headlights particularly in a film sandwiched between a Bernardo Bertolucci film and Greenaway.

Despite Steve Wang's later work such as with the Guyver sequel and Drive (1997), with fight choreography from the tokusatsu school and of an incredibly high quality in terms of fighting and stunt work, the fights here look stilted and suffocated by the presentation, lacking what the sequel did in sacrificing some of the practical effects in terms of beast designs in favour of men in rubber monster suits likely injuring themselves in painful stunts but bringing an exhilarating air of chaos to the proceedings. The result before these films is as stiff as in a lot of (if not all) American martial arts films, without the fluidness of Asian productions even when participants are in elaborate costume. More surprising is the lack of scale even by the standards of a small budget genre film, feeling like only a couple of rooms and some exterior shots were used, lacking of interest, and the script as swift in getting to its end without any sense of dramatic conflict being found.

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The final issue, ultimately the horrible creative decision which maims the film fatally, is deciding to play most of the film as a comedy. It worked in other Brian Yuzna productions like Re-Animator (1985) which had incredibly grim senses of humour, but this is a broad slapstick that is utterly ghastly to sit through, not taking itself seriously and jarring against the more visceral moments of the film. Famously [Spoiler Warning] this is where Luke Skywalker gets painfully turned, with Hamill submerged in practical effects latex, into a cockroach, a moment that if it had been in another production would've been up there in Yuzna and Screaming Mad George's filmographies as being iconic; here, its suffocate in a film so painfully bad in its humour that it both makes little sense tonally but loses its power in context. It's worse as, with such dumb joke ideas as a multi-ethnic gang of clumsy hoodlums, most of the humour is at the expense of Michael Berryman, a man who should be imposing, only really acceptable and actually funny when its David Gale chewing him out as his leader, but not with comic buffoons as his own sub minions especially Striker (Jimmie Walker), a terrible and obnoxious performance that imagines Flavour Flav from Public Enemy as a politically dubious portrait of a black character who's also like a walking set of nails on a chalk board. Ultimately it's this humour, against the paltry production, which makes The Guyver insufferable; after the first viewing should've been enough for me, but at a risk of wasting money on the Arrow Video release¹, I found that on the second viewing I had indeed wasted money on the film.

+++++++++

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Guyver: Dark Hero is vast contrast is thankfully a better case, always having the reputation of being the superior film. Having watched it multiple times over the years, long before even seeing the first one as the 1991 adaptation never had a UK DVD release, it's still a step-up in quality on a revisit, and more so after watching the first in a double bill for this review on the same night. It's got a lot of b-movie qualities you can't ignore - wooden acting, an erratic tone - but as a curious attempt to meld an older American monster movie with Japanese tokusatsu action sequences, I can't help but still love it for just ambition.

It's still sadly attached to the prequel, like the other's an evil twin, but baring little nods in exposition and the opening monologue, it completely severs itself from the first film eventually and feels like a drastically different creation. David Hayter (future Solid Snake and scriptwriter) is now the Guyver, finding himself dragged subconsciously through the alien armour into flaying criminal in the introduction before going on a journey to Utah, where an archaeological excavation has found symbols on the wall similar to those found in his notebooks recording his dreams. The result is far more a no-nonsense sci-fi plot, ditching most of the comedy as the archaeologists are working for a deeply suspicious company and something in the woods is killing any locals bumbling near the excavation site.

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Baring badly dated computer effects, a compromise for losing Screaming Mad George and the higher practical effects budget, there's however such a bizarre irony to be found in how Dark Hero was probably a lower budget production next to the prequel but has such a drastically improved sense of production value and ambition in its scale. Noticeable Steve Wang's collaboration with Koichi Sakamoto and his Alpha Stunt Team, the Power Rangers reference apt as Sakamoto worked on many of the TV series, ups the scale drastically to the fight scenes to something utterly exhilarating. You can argue the plot's a little flimsy, but seeing a man, even with the padding of a giant rubber monster costume, get propelled into metal scaffolding is still painful and striking to witness, rough but efficient fight scenes that replace the grace of Hong Kong martial arts for a more visceral nature of Japanese combat movies.

The result, mentioning that cross between the American monster movie and a martial arts film, does stand out more from its forest setting and exterior cave sets too, a sense of atmosphere in general the original adaptation of Guyver never had. For every line reading slightly under the mark or the clichéd plotting sticking out, I can't help but admire the clear love put on display to make a great film, more so as the woodlands have a significant positive effect on the mood and that, even if the transformations are cut down and simplified, the production value is actually superior everywhere else in the film against the prequel. It's also a significantly more serious film, even with a few moments of weird humour, the gore there in its nastiest form whilst also having the zeal in its imagination. The plot becomes the back-story of the Guyver's origins, leading to the film going as far as an elaborate, living interior of a spaceship for a set with multiple rooms and even an elaborate flashback to primitive times with stage bound sets, model work and almost psychedelic colours as cavemen dance around a bonfire and turn into monsters.

In the perfect world, the Screaming Mad George effects and David Gale would've been used in a film like Dark Hero rather than the 1991 Guyver film, making one better film, but in the real world it's a case of a sequel far, far superior to the prequel, almost completely suffocating the original until it was recently made available again on Blu-Ray and has been unfairly made more easy to access. Like a lot of the American adaptations of pop culture from the nineties, they're peculiar to their times and in their looseness in adapting the original material. The first film should probably be lost in the early nineties but the sequel was not only great, but should've had the HD transfer instead.

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¹ Unfortunately even the 2016 Arrow Video release, from a company on the pinnacle of quality physical releases, is just as disappointing from an organisation known for moving the earth in their releases' quality. With only the Director's Cut and a sole ten minute interview with Brian Yuzna on it, one that's a little bias to the film's favour without great depth, honestly without coming off as cruel , it's a lowly release from a company known for stacked discs whose extras could have actually helped me warm over lesser films and even soften my grudges with them. Only the shiny slipcase and the written booklet from the ever reliable anime and manga expert Helen McCarthy stand out, but not enough for shelf space.

#41. Yurikuma Arashi (2015)

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Director: Kunihiko Ikuhara

Screenplay: Kunihiko Ikuhara and Takayo Ikami

Voice Cast: Miho Arakawa (as Ginko Yurishiro); Nozomi Yamane (as Kureha Tsubaki); Yoshiko Ikuta (as Ruru Yurigazaki); Ami Koshimizu (as Konomi Yurikawa); Aoi Yūki (as Mitsuko Yurizono); Aya Endo (as Reia Tsubaki); Junichi Suwabe (as Life Sexy); Kazutomi Yamamoto (as Life Beauty); Kikuko Inoue (as Yuri-Ka Hakonaka); Mariya Ise (as Eriko Oniyama); Mitsuki Saiga (as Life Cool);

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

Ironically my love of Kunihiko Ikuhara as an anime director who can qualify as an auteur Ironically, this love is entirely just from Mawaru Penguindrum (2011)  and now Yurikama Arashi, Revolutionary Girl Utena (1997) and his contributions to the Sailor Moon franchise, which he is the most beloved for in general, difficult to access in the United Kingdom. Without the weight of his work in either, the former his own fully formed break out including the series and 1999 feature film, it's a love of his work growing naturally through how he pushes the bar higher in television anime higher than many.

It's blatantly pro-homophile in theme, a moral fairytale where Ikuhara is openly explicit in wanting to tackle negative portraits of lesbianism in Japanese culture within a fairytale where bears have become sentient and eat human beings, causing a wall to have to be erected between the two species. The catch is that, unlike other fairytales, there are no male princes or that many men either, every human onscreen female set within an all female school, and almost every bear female too. (Even with the few male bear characters as well, only two of than are actually voiced by male actors as well). This is also a world very much like Beauty and the Beast where, with protagonist Kureha in the middle, most of the human girls around her are part of a mob mentality called the Invisible Storm, a group who ostracise and punish "non-invisible" girls who have individuality out of the herd. The bears themselves, even those wanting to merely devour Kureha, are far more complicated, disguised as humans and having their own emotion strifes to deal with. Two of them, Ginko and Ruru, are in fact at the school for more moral and meaningful reason, Ginko connected to Kureha with Ruru there to help her whilst openly admitting her love for her fellow bear.

Its exceptionally obvious in message, a fairytale that the creator openly indulges in the tropes of including fairytales within fairytales, but how this message is shown is done with so much open imaginative and metaphorical tropes to a stunning extent that it gets away with the obviousness easily. Bizarrely, the other tale that Yurikama evokes the most for me is Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, her 1979 short story compilation, and especially Neil Jordan's 1984 film adaptation The Company of Wolves, imaging the beast people (werewolves and here girl bears) being representations of people freed from the puritanical confines of society and sexuality. They at least  are far more complex and fascinating against the faceless normals, their plot strands having more emotional affect when Ikuhara plays a scene fully seriously. How Ikuhara adapts this idea is completely his own, a cute and fluffy tone even when he's dealing with serious subject matter, managing to even make the scenes of bears eating characters completely gore-less and still perversely cute. Considering he managed to tackled even more serious subject in Mawaru Penguindrum, (affectively a metaphor on the long lasting effect of  the 1995 Sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subways a decade and more after), with success, so he's fully able here in this intentional small scale narrative to play up the cuteness and eccentric humour without any problems in the tone and still playing the drama seriously when vitally necessary.

Openly drawing on obvious symbolism (fairytale castles, bear princesses, the sexual and cultural symbolism of lilies etc.) and a director with a knack for combining it with the modern with incredible ease (as is seen in how, even next to other current day anime, he's so good at using technology like mobile phones here to drive the narrative along), he's able to make the story work because the style takes the blatant and gives it a sumptuous beauty. Not only is the show beautiful to look at but he has no qualms with the show taking on a fully dream-like tone for scenes. Even if the characters stay on template in animation, the bear girls in beast form are literal anthropomorphic bears with more cartoonish movements, compared to the penguins in Mawaru who can play out slapstick and absurity whilst still, miraculously, fitting into tragic scenes too. The world around them is just as capable of distorting instead to represent psychological and fantastical states, of stairways into jury courts between worlds and goals to happiness, not to mention the creator's penchant for just openly weird humour - thus never imagining a scene such as a snowy war terrain covered in the bodies of cute bears on the ground with rifles, but having such a scene on display. That he repeats symbols and motifs constantly helps in this, allowing it to all start to interconnect. This animated playfulness goes to the music as well, standard J-pop for this type of anime show but actually good music, legitimately affecting for scenes but also, with its frank Sapphic and beast imagery in the lyrics, having a subversive side to its candy coated electronic beats.

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The subversive side is very much also why Yurikama Arashi succeeds. Even if its moral point of tolerance is as subtle as a sledgehammer, the really progressive aspect of the series is its completely relaxed attitude to sexuality and how upfront it is in depicting it. Without explicitly drawing characters in appearance, it gets away with artistic but explicit nudity without qualm, and the sexuality is so prominent, including gratuitous symbolism involving flowers and honey, that its even in the opening credit animation for the first episode. Its constant and gladly viewed through both humour, fantasies played for laughs that the characters themselves have for others, to seriously in romantic moments. The frankness is startling, whilst not "explicit" or even ecchi softcore, celebrating lesbianism the depiction of lesbianism casual to a form that's beyond progressive but amazing. Even within the Invisible Storm, relationships between women, between friends, between classmates, even between teacher and student, are numerous, in terms of romance, jealousy, power play and entire spectrums of drama.

The almost entire lack of men in the cast turns the world shown into an almost all-matriarchal one, going as far with cheeky humour to have a "yuri" supermarket with magazines with two women cuddling on the cover with the tagline of how to win a lover over through her stomach, in the type of feminine reality where the cops and even the soldiers in the war that took place between bears and humans being all female. Even in terms of the bears, while there is a boy bear character important to Ruru's back-story, the only ones with real prominence (and only two of them audibly voiced by male actors) are the trio of bear judges, those who live within the wall who judge the humans and bears alike, allowing them to eat girls, to become human, to be judged for their desires and grant their wishes. Even they however, as a Greek chorus, have to step aside in the end of the series and let the female characters conclude their tales.

After a long wait from Mawaru Penguindrum, waiting for a new Kunihiko Ikuhara project is an event for me as much as it is waiting for either Hiroyuki Imaishi or Masaaki Yuasa, which shows how he's stood out so much from the crowd as a one-off auteur whose work has mainly consisted, like the other two mentioned, in television. It's one thing to be like a Mamoru Oshii or the late Satoshi Kon, careers mainly been built from theatrical films, but having an auteurist style mainly from anime television is a unique cap to wear in itself. In all three cases, the execution and tangents they add to well worn stories is why they succeed as they do, all three idiosyncratic in their styles even when other directors and writers create individual episodes within the projects. All three naturally as well appeal to my love for the surreal and openly fantastical out of animation even when they tackle serious subject matter. If Imaishi is hyperactive, and Yuasa is eccentric and philosophical, Ikuhara is a flamboyant pop surrealist who's sincere even when proudly camp at points, Yurikama a pretty story whose theme is aptly described in its English title translation as 'Lily Bear Storm', a blast of eroticism and fairytale whose ending is both sad but also triumphant, carrying you alongside fully. 

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#40: Dark Myth (1990)

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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)

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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.