#277: Casshan - Robot Hunter (1993–1994)

Studio: Tatsunoko, Artmic

Director: Hiroyuki Fukushima, Masashi Abe and Takashi Watanabe

Screenplay: Emu Arii, Hideki Kakinuma, Hiroyuki Fukushima and Shō Aikawa

Based on Neo-Human Casshern

Voice Cast: Takeshi Kusao as Tetsuya Azuma / Casshan, Yumi Touma as Luna Kozuki, Hirohiko Kakegawa as Admiral Montgomery Dr. Lester, Ikuya Sawaki as the Narrator, Issei Futamata as Akbone, Isshin Chiba as the Operator, Junichi Sugawara as Barashin, Juurouta Kosugi as Commander Tork, Keaton Yamada as Dr. Kotaro Azuma, Kenichi Ogata as Elder Asari, Kenji Utsumi as Buraiking Boss

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

Tatsunoko, over its decades of existence since Tatsunoko, has been retelling and rebooting its franchises repeatedly, always trying to keep them in consciousness, and to their credit, they take artistic risks to do this. It is not just the nostalgic market or all the video game tie-ins over the years, but how their retellings of their most popular characters over the years can vary from the pretty radical, or in a case like this, at least stepping up to the new decade they were made within. It does not always work - rebooting Speed Racer (1967–1968) in the nineties led to an animated series Mach GoGoGo (1997) which most may not know of, a take which told one giant race for a large portion of its length alongside changed the character dynamics. Some have been really drastic, like Gatchaman Crowds (2013/2015), readapting its tokusatsu team dynamic that some may know from its Westernised Battle of the Planets form, and turning it into something which striped the costumes, changed the tone, and was a superhero series over two seasons about mobile phone and online technology's potential to corrupt but also do good. Casshan himself has had some really idiosyncratic takes, created in 1973 as a superhero of android form defeating the robot empire of Buraiking Boss, who have enslaved humanity as this nineties re-adaptation sets up.  I think if I was to return to it, I would even defend the 2004 live action film, which was done in then-era CGI green screen with more emphasis on philosophical dialogue, for at least trying to be different. The 2008-9 Casshan Sins adaptation is the more radical for being a depressing epilogue to the original story, suggesting Earth is doomed anyway, as there is a rust-like virus even kills robots, and Casshan has to accept he is to blame for it over the series.

Robot Hunter is the least radical of the three, closer to its source premise even if with dashing of more adult content for the straight-to-video market, four half hour episodes released between 1993 and 1994, compiled into a feature length work for the Western Manga Entertainment release. In the world, robots have taken over and enslaved humanity, effectively predating The Terminator in the 1973 source material if with the caveat that, rather than kill us all, the Buraiking Boss realised we could be useful as slave labour in his robot factories. Casshan is spoken in reverence here, before his real introduction, as someone who will save humanity. He is actually Tetsuya Azuma, who in this story was a young man who willingly sacrificed himself to place his consciousness into an android to fight the Buraiking Boss, someone who, as in a lot of Japanese anime in terms of moral complexity, saw the only solution to preserve the Earth's natural resources and save the planet was to take over the planet.

The biggest issue with this adaptation is its length. It is nearly two hours long altogether, but if ever there was an anime that needed more episodes or lengthier ones over the forty minute mark even, Robot Hunter could have done with more elaboration on plot details. His father created Buraiking Boss whilst his mother's soul, literal and not metaphorically, was preserved by Buraiking inside a mechanical swan who without him realising she is passing her son information on his plans. There is enough in that in it, let alone the other plot aspects, to add greater melodrama to the proceedings. There is enough here even in this simple premise to pull form for at least a few more episodes, to elaborate on its science fiction premise, not just Casshan himself, accompanied by his android dog, man's best friend with flamethrower abilities, but also the human resistance. They still have enough forces and resources to fight back around the globe, but having to fight on the back foot. This includes the female lead Luna Kozuki, a love interest from Casshan's past that is yet emphasised as a member of the human resistance who is capable of handling herself.

She does emphasise the few moments of edginess this adaptation has too, not just the fact that, even in the apocalypse, she can dress resplendently in short skirt and immaculate ponytails. More telling alongside the few moments of blood, it is from an era where if even Chung-Li, the Street Fighter 2 video game character, had a gratuitous shower scene in the (uncensored) version of Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie (1994), and there is a blatant one here for Luna. That is crass to have to point out, but whilst she thankfully has enough moments of being a competent heroine herself, Robot Hunter's more curious aspects are these nudges of adult content which stick out more because most of this is not close to the edgier titles Manga Entertainment were realising in the United Kingdom for the "beer and curry anime" image on videotapes. Most of this could be shown to a younger audience than the one it has for a few scenes, rated as suitable for twelve year olds in Britain, and with content in live action that would be fifteen certificate if still tamer than most action films at that rating. Barring the few nude scenes, the grittiness of seeing people shot by the villains, and one revolutionary's unfortunate end, crushed under a bridge girder with lots of raspberry jam around him in one moment in episode three, it really is not a gritty adaptation whatsoever, with the robot enemies effectively allowing one to get away with cartoonish violence. Maybe it is over thinking this when the bar for edginess, even in terms of additional swearing added to the English dubs from Manga Entertainment, but it feels like a concession with some of these scenes for this release. The shower scene especially feels like fan service for the sake of it.

The actual production is solid, though this is a case where three directors and four screenwriters does evoke, even if not necessarily the issue here, of a title which lack a complete voice of one figure. There is Shō Aikawa among the screenwriters, once a notorious screenwriter of ultra-violent work who became a more acclaimed one, but there is also the consistent voice of Yasuomi Umetsu as one of the production's two character designers. Notorious for his work in hentai, and titles like Kite (1998) that could only be created originally under that genre, Umetsu is nonetheless well regarded for his craft and detail, and alongside Tomonori Kogawa as his co-character designer, you get a then-update to the franchise which is good and would have been spectacular to image with an expanded narrative which let the pair take the designs they had further. Even Luna's character design, despite my joke about her immaculate costume jarring against the world, is still memorable, alongside whoever (including other designers on the title) who decided to give the Buraiking Boss a Goth female robot henchwoman, looking like cyber harlequin in black eyeliner. (For obvious reasons as well, with its elaborate action scenes, the mecha designers and animators also deserve their credits for their hard work too). Working with Tatsunoko, the studio Artmic are a product of this era, with their last work in the late nineties. Their catalogue of films and straight-to-video work is a cornucopia of nineties and eighties anime aesthetics and tropes in a filmography, from Bubblegum Crisis (1987-1991) to Genocyber (1994), always collaborating with other studios on their projects.

All my issues are with the plot structure. The plot as it is mapped out makes perfect sense - setting up the world and Casshan, with the final conflict as played here between him and Buraiking Boss as well done as you could hope - but is more the sense we could have done with more story beats. There is teased more androids with the ability to control the ecosystem, living on an isolated island, who sadly never properly appear, and the middle of the production, episodes two and three, could have been have multiplied and increased into more tangents and depth to details like these figures, from episode three, or the main characters themselves. Casshan himself, alongside the limitations of his body, including requiring solar energy to power, has the additional primary crisis of whether he will lose consciousness and become a killing machine, whilst Luna, from the original series, has the conflict of needing to both help save humanity, but naturally concerned for the man she loved and hoping for the likelihood of him becoming Tetsuya Azuma again once the fight is over. There could have, in general, been more elaboration on the scenario, more emphasis on the human rebellion and the Buraiking Boss' forces, including a general sense of the grit and stakes at hand, especially with the uncomfortable idea leant into Buraiking's desire to replace humanity comes from his belief we humans will just destroy our planet, our failure to preserve it causing his existence to be. The slightness of some straight-to-video works has been a problem I have seen in quite a titles, and sadly this is a case, where everything here is perfect and could have been spectacular even as just a fun OVA, but we are just missing enough detail to nag.

#276: Venus Wars (1989)

 

Studio: Kugatsusha

Director: Yoshikazu Yasuhiko

Screenplay: Yoshikazu Yasuhiko and Yūichi Sasamoto

Based on a manga by Yoshikazu Yasuhiko

Voice Cast: Katsuhide Uekusa as Hiroki Senō, Eriko Hara as Susan Sommers, Gorō Naya as Gary, Hōchū Ohtsuka as Will Harris, Kaneto Shiozawa as Gen. Gerhard Donner, Shūichi Ikeda as Lt. Geoffrey Kurtz, Yūko Mizutani as Maggie (Margot Nakamoto), Yūko Sasaki as Miranda Cocker

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

You’re more dangerous than the tank.

Until 2015, director/animator/manga author/character designer Yoshikazu Yasuhiko retired from animation after Venus Wars. For a long time, this was his last directorial work, an acclaimed figure who is important for numerous positions in the seventies and eighties era of anime, including his involvement for the original Mobile Suit Gundam TV series in 1979. Admittedly, weirdly, despite his directorial career being straight-to-video and theatrical films that would have been seen as easier to sell at a time when TV series were not, we in Britain never get his work with great ease beyond Venus Wars itself. I can proudly say, as evidence of this, my first viewing of Venus Wars, despite being truly of the DVD generation of anime fans of the 2000s, was a Manga Entertainment videotape found in a charity shop, viewed on my grandmother old VHS player, with the stickers and catalogue of their titles all intact inside the plastic case.

This is a case of a small narrative within larger science fiction world building, how in the past established in opening narrative, an ice asteroid hit the planet Venus, changing its atmosphere into one which could make the planet habitable by Earthlings. Unfortunately, whilst civilization has developed, and in a funny touch in a background detail, is a far flung future where the musical The Wiz is still popular and performed, the habit of humanity for war is still here, as the story itself is set between a civil war between those for Ishtar and those of Aphrodita. In a world tense enough that Earth reporter Susan Sommers is given a gun alongside her camera by her contact when she reaches the planet, she and a team of battlebike racers, a motley group of punks with our headstrong lead Hiro, will find themselves dragged into total war when the Aprodita city capital of Io is taken over by Ishtarian forces entirely.

The eighties’ last year, including the weight of eighties anime production, is seen in all its splendor here alongside the synth driven J-pop, a film whose view of war really, sadly, is still relevant as the leads are forced into the front line as bystanders, the beauties of the metropolis like the shopping mall not safe from the ravages of war, and gunfights break out in the streets as Ishtar take over Io but loyal civilians are fighting to regain control. There is some humour, even Andrew the cat, the pet of Hiro’s love interest Maggie who is always hungry, especially when she forgets to get him cat food, and tries to give him a raw fish and a slice of bread in his dish, but even that joke is set in the context of her having to get shopping in a place now with curfews by the invading leaders. This is very serious action sci-fi as the battle bike team, when they decide to blow up an Ishtarian tank for revenge for parking on their battle bike stadium, kick off their involvement in the rebellion against the occupying forces as a result of this decision. Barring their one female badass named Miranda, they are guys out of their depth in a real war even if the older mechanic they are helped by is smuggling real firearms in the midst of this, Hiro himself among them a brash hothead who is stuck in the midst of this with no sense of duty until he sees the full issue of his home city being taken over.

Alongside one homophobic bit, which is out of nowhere and leaves a sour taste to a solid film, the real issue many might have is Hiro may be unlikable. He is quite angry and hostile for the sake of it most of the film, an arrogant figure even when he is entirely out of his depth, and when Susan the reporter and the battle bike team step back in the narrative, he is the figure meant to be followed as he will end up in the rebel forces hiding in the desert, forced to serve against his will initially until he realizes the severity of the situation, including Maggie’s life under threat in Io which changes his mind. This is, whilst a film with a potent theme in itself, also a work emphasizing its action scenes, which means that the plot is very simple barring the small details. It does not really even have a true antagonist – one is set up, leading the Ishtar forces, but he is just a grunt in the wider war machine for their side, out of his luck as attempting to keep Io starts to be a struggle. He is close to even being caught entirely were it not for someone not knowing how to fire a handgun, so he is as human as everyone else in the proceedings.

There is one interesting, and very curious experimental touch, a scene of real recorded footage of a vehicle of a desert location, to represent a camera strapped to one of the sci-fi monobikes, which involves animated figures drawn on the images. It is an odd but stand out attempt at experimentation, but for the rest of this theatrical feature, Venus Wars is very solid, very accomplished animation. Considering this was original a manga by Yoshikazu Yasuhiko himself, there is a sense of him really caring for bringing out its story into the other medium fully, especially as this alongside the film Arion (1986) came from writing manga first which worked as pitches for the filmic productions themselves¹. The composer, to really emphasis the production’s scale, is also Joe Hisaishi, who is already at this point working on the likes of My Neighbor Totoro (1988) and Beat Takashi Kitano’s first film when he contributes to this film. Most of the potential issues with Venus Wars is general is Hiro himself, and that feels befitting if you can expect this story idea of even a punk, one who is immature and not always someone you want to hang around with, having to grow up as he will when life is under threat. It is admittedly telling the studio behind the production, Kugatsusha, only made one other production with nothing else – also directed by Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, it was The Poem of Wind and Trees (1987), a yoai straight-to-video drama, adapting a culturally significant Keiko Takemiya manga from the seventies, about a romance between two students at an all-boys boarding school in late 19th-century France. With Venus Wars produced after, there is the telling sense that, whilst an admirable production, it took so much to make the studio stopped existing afterwards.

Yasuhiko is known for being quite self defeating on his work, despite his eighties directorial work being acclaimed in the modern day, with his belief that on Arion, a fantasy epic based on Greek mythology, was made by himself “in a half-dead state”. For a time in Japan, he even kept Venus Wars off from being physically released on the likes of DVD with a very down attitude to the production¹. His retirement, instead focusing on a career as a manga author in the nineties, including works based on both the life of Joan of Arc and Jesus Christ, clearly came from a sense of burn out which looked to end a short directorial career were it not for returning in 2015 with Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin (2015-2016) as chief director. Likely to be his last film will be Mobile Suit Gundam: Cucuruz Doan's Island (2022), but that is idiosyncratic as it is an adaptation of an infamous episode of the original Gundam animated series, one which needed to be outsourced with notorious animation issues, that Yoshikazu Yasuhiko felt had themes and a story worthy of a re-adaptation. That in itself tells a lot of his attitude to his work, and whilst Venus Wars is not perfect, I already see a strong figure in Yasuhiko who has to be admired for his craft.

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1) Interview with Yoshikazu Yasuhiko on Gundam: The Origin (Animage, June 2015/Vol. 444). Originally printed in The June 2015 issue of Animage. Translated into English translated by Hyun Park and published on Wave Motion Cannon on January 31st 2017.

#275: Dominion Tank Police (1988-1989)

Studio: Agent 21 and Toshiba Eizo Soft

Director: Kōichi Mashimo

Screenplay: Kōichi Mashimo

Based on the manga by Masamune Shirow

Voice Cast: Hiromi Tsuru/Toni Barry as Leona Ozaki, Masaaki Ohkura/Steve Graf as Al, Ichirō Nagai as The Chief/Jesse Vogel, Jouji Yanami/Marc Smith as Buaku, Kōji Totani/John Bull as Mohican, Michie Tomizawa/Alison Dowling as Unipuma, Yūko Mita/Alison Dowling as Annapuma, Takkō Ishimori/Peter Whitman as Father (Chaplain), Yūsaku Yara/Sean Barrett as Brenten

Viewed in English Dub

 

Most will know Masamune Shirow for Ghost in the Shell, his 1989 manga which gained even further traction when the animation adaptations, in a variety of tones, started from Mamoru Oshii's 1995 theatrical film. Appleseed, his 1984 manga, had a few adaptations over the years as well. Dominion, alongside the fact that the original manga surprisingly only has one single volume in the end, completed over a year from 1985 to 86, and a few additional stories written after that time, may have been sadly become marginalised in his career. This is a shame as for this adaptation, this takes the route of a more overtly humorous but still dystopian science fiction work in his career. It may have not aged well for making jokes about police brutality, as this opens with the tank police comically having a suspect on a chair with a live grenade in his mouth for information and slapstick, but that feels like a deliberately absurd sense of humour which has unfortunately seen the decades after make it less comfortable. What has still stayed timeless, unfortunately but with weightier relevance, is the setting of Newport, Japan, where the environment for the entire world has collapsed, causing the atmosphere to become toxic until civilisation adaptive a natural resistance, and the police have been forced to have an entire division with military tanks to deal with the crime rates.

Despite the tone, including an extended gag (literally) of inflatable phallus being used as a police deterrent, the context for Dominion's setting, the severity against the humour, is one of the most interesting things here out of the gate, which is apt for how Ghost in the Shell, in its own variety of tones, had a lot to work with through its own interpretation of heavy science fiction themes. The atmosphere is decimated, leaving the air outside is toxic, as public service announcements warn of even if everyone has a resistance when the clouds roll in. Even if the first two episodes have a clear sense of humour, that its McGuffin is that a group are trying to steal urine samples from "healthy" people, the context is still salient and meaningful even in a more cartoonish presentation like a good sci-fi story should be able to, especially as the samples were taken from are those without the resistance of the toxic atmosphere but the physical health from a time before.

That your sympathetic heroes are the tank police, who stick said live grenades into suspects' mouths during interrogations, or set up spin the wheel game shows with them with throwing knives, is a sense of dark humour and a sense this is a Japanese production taking a gleeful humour to the trope of on-the-edge police. From director-screenwriter Kōichi Mashimo, it is in a context of depicting a form of police that is deliberately absurd, rather than realising how history would go after 1988 in the West particularly, and that makes this a lot bleaker humoured even if these particular officers are actually likable. Into this is our female protagonist Leona, a former motorbike officer who is transferred over to the group, initially viewed with hostility by their headstrong head Brenten. Another younger male member Al develops a crush on her, and despite the incident that sends their captain's beloved tank to the scrap yard in the sky during training, from its scrap metal comes Bonaparte, a mini-tank who is clearly a predecessor to the Tachikoma tanks from Ghost in the Shell, as cute military weaponry, that Leona can use with greater ease with the advantages of being a squat and faster vehicle in the team that suits her driving skills.

Whilst this straight-to-video production will get more serious with heftier themes, Dominion is a comedy at heart. It feels like the prologue to what should have been a longer franchise that could stretch this inherently fascinating premise further - New Dominion Tank Police comes in 1993-4, but sadly Tank Police Team TANK S.W.A.T. 01 (2006) by Romanov Higa, a one-off with 3D character designs, faded into obscurity and was clearly not well received, with no other adaptations beyond this let alone actual manga pages written. A shame, as the juggling of heavier themes with humour makes a good change, where despite all the property damage, including legendary pieces of art and historical artefacts in the second half, it is played with a madcap tone exemplified by the sympathetic antagonists, Buaku who is revealed as an artificially created android, and the two women who became the poster cat girls for this entire franchise, literally as they are superhuman anthropomorphic cat girls, Unipuma and Annapuma, who help cause mischief and mayhem. Buaku himself does get a weightier back story involving a portrait which used him as a subject which had more to it than others may know, but they still are part of the humorous tone. Even the English dub, which glibly steers the dialogue into more broad humour, and obsessed with the human urine subplot as an excuse to use the word "piss", is really fun even when it clearly breaks from the script. Whether it is letting the actress Alison Dowling behind the cat girls play with Jane Austin era English accents for a joke parodying Austin era stereotypes, or Peter Whitman as the Christian chaplain officer who talks of Christian forgiveness but is gleeful for mayhem, the British made Manga Entertainment dub, unlike some others which are funny for the wrong reasons, still shines.

The first act really works setting up the tone, dealing with Leona's first days and first encounters with who is being sent to get urine samples, something whose plot is ever fully explained, either as a joke or that there was an ongoing plot with the mafia group wishing them which never came to be. It does not take itself seriously, such as those aforementioned phallic police deterrents, or the complete disregard for property damage even if, in another context, the jokes about severe police tactics and arguing with the female major, clearly inspired from the American action films from the eighties being exaggerated here, would have aged badly now without that context. The last two episodes get more serious, with Buaku's back story and him teaming up with Leona when a suspicious private mercenary force get involved, which allows the world to get new layers. The juxtaposition is helped greater by the aesthetic of the era; we are nearing the end of the eighties and a golden era for hand drawn anime just from the mechanical designs in this production, but also in terms of this being a comedy sci-fi still set within a grungy metropolis which fully embraced the type of sci-fi which lead to cyberpunk. This is a comedy which is still set in a place you would not normally have for a location for this type of story, the rundown nature of the futurescape noticeable in that, for all its luxurious streets, it is barely functioning with its crime rates and poisoned landscape.

Strangely the first Dominion adaptation is split between two production companies, neither with large filmographies at all. Toshiba Eizo Soft was mostly a distributor, only doing production on this or two pieces of a horror anime long forgotten despite the manga being well regarded, called Karura Mau, an enticing one of young female shaman dealing with supernatural forces, beginning with feature length story, and then followed by a six part straight-to-video series. Agent 21, who worked on these titles too, were producing more mostly straight to video work, including hentai, some action, and Dirty Pair: Flight 005 Conspiracy (1990) for that legendary franchise, as well as infamously Dark Cat (1991), a horror anime that is not well regarded. Judging from the time periods of their collecting, tiny filmographies, all their titles come from that golden age of eighties anime and the straight-to-video boom for the medium, with the sense that as time went on they could not last. This is not to mention the end of the eighties Japanese bubble economy expansion that allowed straight-to-video culture to flourish, including live action genre films, collapsed into the early nineties, and whilst studios could survive into the new decades, and straight-to-video work was still alive and healthy up to the Millennium, I suspect these two studios were casualties to the market. Director-writer Kōichi Mashimo however was able to keep going, even founding the studio Bee Train, with his career including a series of television action series with female protagonists capable in gun shootouts like Noir (2001), the first of these. Whilst he had not really directed much into the 2010s, effectively retiring with Bee Train not creating any more productions when he stopped, he had a prolonged career from the seventies over a good few decades that outlasted the studios behind this production.

The set up for a wider world thankfully comes in New Dominion Tank Police, but already I get the sense this franchise could have been expanded further from the premise, which I think is a positive compliment to Dominion. Arguably one of the bigger reasons Dominion is obscurer now, alongside how significant Ghost in the Shell became in the West over other Masamune Shirow titles expect Appleseed, both in its animated adaptations but the original manga being a staple of the manga section of bookstores, is that this animated adaptation has not really being readily available. Lost to the online rips, and the Maiden Japan DVD release of the sequel long out of print in the USA, it is disappointing with the virtues it has that Dominion itself is not as readily available when it is very digestible and memorable.

#274: The Big O (1999–2003)

 

Studio: Sunrise

Director: Kazuyoshi Katayama

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

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

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#273: Cyber City Oedo 808 (1990–1991)

Studio: Madhouse

Director: Yoshiaki Kawajiri

Screenplay: Akinori Endo

Voice Cast: Hiroya Ishimaru as Shunsuke Sengoku, Kaneto Shiozawa as Merrill "Benten" Yanagawa, Tesshō Genda as Rikiya "Goggles" Gabimaru, Emi Shinohara as Remi Masuda, Kyousei Tsukui as Versus, Mitsuko Horie as Kyōko "Okyō" Jōnouchi, Norio Wakamoto as Juzo Hasegawa

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

Madhouse would have success with Wicked City in 1987, one of their more infamous titles which helped when its director Yoshiaki Kawajiri pushed for a theatrical release and it paid dividends for the studio¹. That was however an adaptation, based on the work of author Hideyuki Kikuchi, and with Cyber City Oedo, Madhouse and Kawajiri decided to create their own original intellectual property, one which was meant to be a multimedia one. This came to be true as there was a video game, the 1991 game for the PC-Engine CD-ROM², and a novel¹. Cyber City itself, made for the straight to video format, was only to last for three forty plus minute episodes, never leading to anything further, but still became a cult anime in the decades after, even if by way of alternative dubs and music tracks being created for the images as we will get into.

Oedo is a cyberpunk tale where, with criminal sentences possible to reach longer than the average human lifespan, prisoners are forced to live in the orbit of space, presumably in a way to extend their lives to suffer for their cybercrimes. Three prisoners housed in an orbital prison are offered an alternative by Juzo Hasegawa, a police chief, that they can reduce their life sentences for each criminal they bring in, with each having to ability to return with life on Earth but with explosive neck collars permanently on that, able to be timed, prevents any prisoner to take this offer to flee once they are back in public. This explicitly nods to period chambara tropes places in the future as "Oedo" is likely a reference to "Edo", the original name for Tokyo, whilst in Japanese history, the weapon they are all assigned, jitte, if a science fiction version of a weapon, with sai-like blunt ends, that was used by police in Edo-period Japan. Beyond this, the straight to video series is a hyper-exaggerated world, where in episode one, the main location is a space-scraper, a skyscraper so comically impractical in height, now in orbit at the top, that if the central threat managed to disable the gyroscope fully and cause it to fall, it would have led to a natural disaster of cataclysmic proportions. This has a variety of tropes and clichés of this type of “cyberpunk” of androids, cyborgs with psychic powers, and one of our leads having monomolecular wire, a concept the likes of author William Gibson, a huge figure in cyberpunk fiction, among other writers were obsessed with where you have weaponised wire so sharp on a molecular level that it could cut through anything, even through the neck of a cyber enhanced saber-toothed tiger. The leads, interconnecting as regular characters, however do get the starring role each for the three episodes, Shunsuke Sengoku the lead for episode one in the space-scraper. Sengoku is your typical hothead, who is heroic as an anti-hero figure but also anti-authoritarian, with a love-hate relationship with Juzo and especially against the sentient computer that occupancies them. This computer is arguably the fourth lead and deserving it, as the deadpan retorts in the Japanese dub are very funny, all from the perspective as an AI which cannot understand some of the insults thrown at it, such as when it has to explain how, with an internal geo-map system, it cannot possibly “get lost” on command. For episode one, with Sengoku and his constant argument with this robot, you get a great first episode to begin this work, where the serious tone in spite of how absurd this is in truth works fully.

Rikiya "Goggles" Gabimaru stands out as a character that would rarely get to be a lead in an anime, an older man if with a Mohawk, the more conventional of the noble anti-heroes despite his visual look.  His is the type of macho melodrama, which is secretly sentimental and melancholic if filtered through acion tropes, encountering an old partner of crime who was also his old flame, involved in a conspiracy involving the corrupt military project of psychic robots. The owner of the monomolecular wire, and lead of the third episode, is Merrill "Benten" Yanagawa. Benten inherently stands out of the cast as, among very distinct characters in the history of anime, even minor ones, you have here an ultra androgynous final lead, a really distinct figure who is probably the most iconic for the whole production, bringing up a combination of glam rock feminization, with red lipstick and hyper feminine features, with kabuki aesthetic and a shock white mullet, aged in designed but entirely timeless. His episode also is the most idiosyncratic even in a very stylish and creative production, in that this brings horror tropes into science fiction with artificially created vampires. The result of this brings a gothic and moody sensibility to the proceedings with the first ounces even of tragedy to the production, as it involves a woman cryogenically preserved doomed in this life forced onto her by another, as it ups the gore in imagining an undead individual being driven out an airlock in space. It is this episode particularly where the show's ability to be serious despite also being ridiculous shows the virtue of this tightrope act, intentionally and unintentionally.

It is a ridiculous anime in a good way, where we are dealing with a premise where there is never a moment stopping to question its own logic or feeling contrived in a way that undercuts faith in the material. Cybernetic saber tooth tigers is a high watermark in the absurd, as mentioned earlier in the review, but found in episode three, this takes it further with them kept in a cryogenic hub in tubs among three hundred year old patients, a place in outer space connected to a hospital by a space elevator, and armed with lasers, with the anime managing to add more flourishes to these sort of moments. This is throughout each episode with all these "questionable" moments becoming highlights alongside the tone and style of the work winning you over. The seriousness of the production helps, feeling like the delirium usually found in a video game from this time, and helping this is how this is Madhouse at their highest of quality. Yoshiaki Kawajiri is an insanely talented figure in anime, even when he is in the animation department after his directorial career seemingly ended into the 2010s, but as much of the virtues is the entire staff too, where your mechanical animation director for an example is Takeshi Koike, the future director of Redline (2009), one of the most underrated theatrical anime in need of greater attention and showing where his work here before came from.

The audio is its own curious history for the OVA. I watched this in the original Japanese version, but the history needs to be marked how, whilst Manga Entertainment bought the license with great interest, they took their own decisions which added more to the story beyond a good pulp anime. They were known infamously for "fifteening" their dubs already, where to increase the age rating with the British film classification for all physical home releases, they added swearing into the dialogue alongside adding their own flourishes. This is an idiosyncratic production however in that they went further in changing the music track. I like the moody synth provided by composer Kazz Toyama, but if you are talking of Cyber City Oedo, specifically to its British release as the Central Park Media/U.S. Manga Corps release decided to not go forwards with this choice in the United States, you have to talk about this version as it is part of the legacy in the West. Rory McFarlane's contribution, combining hard rock, thrash metal and synth, even influenced by Mountain's Nantucket Sleighride (to Owen Coffin)¹, is a distinct score to hear, and thus it is worth talking about too as a highlight even heard in snippets. For Kawajiri himself, this is getting into the golden period of his career between the late eighties to the 2000s, one where you see here that, for all his notoriety with certain titles for their transgression, what his trademark was, whether the screenwriter of the story or not as in this case, his trademark where these kinetic stories of larger than life figures, in larger than life scenarios, which never for all their moments of absurdities feel entirely a high quality in grandeur for this era of pulp anime storytelling. Even Ninja Scroll (1993), which shared in the more notorious content of his career, showed this and, in spite of the knowledge Cyber City Oedo was not the biggest hit as Manga Entertainment hoped for¹, that would benefit from the virtues found here, in a period chambara tale, and gain even bigger status in Western anime pop culture among the other titles Kawajiri would helm.

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1) Taken from the documentary Inside Cyber City Oedo (2020), directed by Andy Hanley.

#272: Bio Hunter (1995)

 

Studio: Madhouse

Director: Yūzō Satō

Screenplay: Yoshiaki Kawajiri

Based on a manga by Fujihiko Hosono

Voice Cast: Kazuhiko Inoue as Koshigaya, Toshihiko Seki as Komada, Chikao Ohtsuka as Bokudo Murakami, Tarô Ishida as Seijuro Tabe, Yuko Minaguchi as Sayaka Murakami

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

Recreating Wicked City (1987) in the opening, this feels like a throwback to eighties ultraviolent anime with breast dentata and someone actually getting their hand bitten off. We still got violent anime in the nineties, especially in the straight to video market, but notably, this has a connection to the past that, whilst in a screenwriting role, Wicked City's director Yoshiaki Kawajiri is involved in this production. This does mean this feels like a return to the films he and studio Madhouse made in the eighties, only with another director taking on the reigns in Yūzō Satō, and also the unfortunate sense of this feeling like a weaker Kawajiri work, still worth a rediscovery, but having to be compared to someone who became more interesting when the more controversial aspects of Wicked City were being removed from his own work. There is also the difference here that this is, in context, a very late era OVA. Whilst many would still be made into the 2000s, they changed in mood entirely as different technology was being brought into animation production, changing them even in how they look right down to the use of colour even next to works just from the early nineties.

Molecular scientists and professors Koshigaya and Komada work in an illegal but virtuous side job for the sake of humanity, in which this world has a "Demon Virus" which mutates people into flesh eating monsters. Like the young woman in the opening who becomes host to a few on her form like parasites, faces and mouths appearing on her body, whilst another later on eventually has gone so far he is effectively undead and controlled by the parasite in the centre of his chest, this has the potential to be a huge problem for humanity as a whole, as well as allow some of the most creative aspects of the production, meaning our leads have had to research ways to stop cases and also kill them if need be. One of our leads is infected himself, able to control his condition as far as be able to shape shift back and forth in forms, thankfully at first just needing to eat a ridiculous amount of food to sate an evolutionary take on yokai and monsters. It is certainly a shift for its original author Fujihiko Hosono, who contributed the source to another curious one-off OVA Judge (1991), explicitly a supernatural story about the supernatural judge of sinners, especially in his case those who are practice corrupt business tactics. Touches like this make Hosono's work quite a curious one in how he shifted tones per manga.

The condition our lead Komada has will still become a problem over this one-off story, alongside the angst of his position, especially as control is slipping and a young woman comes into his life named Sayaka, connected to a grandfather and famous fortune teller who has gone missing. Her existence, more of a damsel sadly for most of this, raises the question of whether he could ever in his position fall for someone or end up eating said girlfriend if the control vanishes entirely. A serial killer who chews on intestines and eats the livers of young women is connected to this, unfortunately connected to a powerful politician and his armed goons who are a credible threat to both leads. As an hour OVA, you only have enough time for a short tale, though this is an adaptation for what was actually a very short manga from Fujihiko Hosono himself, and possibly told the entire tale there in animation here.

Revisiting Bio Hunter, it feels like an object from a different time period, one which should be approached with in some caution due to this streak of transgressive sexuality, namely having female victims to these monsters being undressed, which will be understandably uncomfortable for some. Most of this film though is just gore, from the blood to a severed hand moving independently on its own free will on a rescue mission, and a set up to a literal punch line with a heart being ripped out. Truthfully, alongside its weird mishmash of scientific rationalism with occult leanings it still wants to get into, including trying to rationalise fortune telling as a superpower, the leads are the least interesting thing as in many of these, next to the mood and tone. It loses a bit of this due to Kawajiri sticking in the screenwriting position. Whilst Yūzō Satō became a veteran by the modern day, this does miss some of the tonal choices which did make Kawajiri's work his own, such as his trademark for a "Kawajiri Blue" in depicting night-time scenes.

There is enough here which evokes the atmosphere a lot of these anime had. Even without the monster designs - the final villain a host with the creature in his chest, and a discomforting nod to tentacle symbolism of Urotsukidôji and its ilk - it has something of its own that, even as a slight story, does stand out with interest. By this point however, whilst Ninja Scroll (1993) does have some discomforting scenes, it showed that this type of action anime, with tangents into horror, fantasy and/or science fiction, from Yoshiaki Kawajiri was far more than this, whilst Bio Hunter is more of a curiosity in his filmography. It is entertaining for what it is, but just missing out something to make it stand out more than this or its style.

#271: Cromartie High School (2003-4)

 

Studio: Production I.G

Director: Hiroaki Sakurai

Based on a manga by Eiji Nonaka

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

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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