Tag: anime

Burst Angel

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★★★
“Jo…just Jo. Forget about the rest!”

A couple of years ago when I wanted to rekindle my interest in anime, I stumbled over this series. Having been spoiled by the high quality of the GWG-anime Black Lagoon, I watched a couple of episodes of Burst Angel online, then left it and later couldn’t find it anymore. But also I didn’t bother, as the Youtube reviews I found painted a very dismal picture. According to one reviewer the series would later become stale, and always repeat the plot twist of the character of Meg being kidnapped and rescued by action girl Jo. Another – female – reviewer complained about the characters being sexually fetishized and getting bigger breasts in the inevitable “beach episode” (a standard in anime series which always gives a reason for some good-natured laughter).

Flash forward to today when – after having consumed around 40-50 more anime shows – I rediscovered the show on the German amazon.prime. I have now seen the entire 24 episode run and can definitely revise my ill-informed opinion.

The story so far. Time: The future. Young student and upcoming cook Kyohei (Ueda) starts a new job, becoming cook to four girls of different ages. They all live in a very comfortable and large-sized  mega-mobile home and also command a giant mecha. Financed by the mysterious organization “Bailan”, the four are always getting into action, after they get a (paid?) mission to fight monsters, giant robots or other strange creatures that suddenly appear.

Usually that means that tough grey-haired red-eyed Jo (Watanabe) gets into the mecha-armour and beats the opponent, until it stops moving. Who is behind these action usually stays unresolved. The other girls are Amy, a very young computer nerd; useless but obviously absolutely possessive Megan; and the older, leader of the team, Chinese girl Sei. Named after the characters in Little Woman (no, really!), they all assist and support Jo. And of course there’s Kyohei who is… just there. Which is strange, as it seemed in the beginning, he would be the main character – or that the story would at least be told from his perspective. But the series quickly all but forgets about him.

But to be honest, most of the characters don’t serve much purpose. The action usually centers almost all around Jo. Jo is a tough cooky from the street. As told in a short manga series, she and Megan originally formed a duo that would take on any job, before they formed a team with the other two girls. As a matter of fact, one episode even depicts how Jo meets Meg and her gang for the first time. Strangely, Meg appears in this episode much more grown-up and tougher than the rather infantile cry-baby she is depicted as, throughout most of the series.

The series is certainly not so uninspired or repetitive as one of the Youtube reviewers claimed it would be. It tells a range of stores stories, and also brings new elements into its narrative over its course. Every girl gets an episode where she can shine. So we see young Amy fight against robots in the Cyberworld, or Sei being confronted with a renegade faction within Bailan who wants to take over the organization by getting in possession of a powerful seal.

But the most interesting character is naturally the super-cool, calm Jo. Originally, my interest in the series grew because I thought she would be similar to Revy from “Black Lagoon”. Well, that might be a bit toi much of a compliment. While Revy is a three-dimensional character, Jo appears one-dimensional, almost a cliche, in comparison. The series gets its act together in the last few episodes when we discover Jo is one of two survivors from a biological weapon program run by an evil organization, who lost her memory. The show ends with her having to win her final fight, against the other, superior combatant spawned by the program.

This means lots of tears for Meg, as she clearly has to grow up now! ;-) In any way, while the series had a clear (and satisfying) ending, I amn’t so sure that things are quite as they seem, or that the dissolved team will never come together again. Though I hope the friendly Kyohei – whom I really wanted to see get a girl-friend – will find a better, or at least, more peaceful workplace in the future!

My personal judgement: Burst Angel is a good, solid and entertaining girls with guns show. There might be some improvements that could/should have been made but overall it’s good entertainment. Yes: stupid, sometimes downright silly Meg gets kidnapped more than once, though it didn’t bother me too much, and it’s not as apparent as you might think. I have much more an issue with the general uselessness of the character, though even she had an arc where she could do something, going undercover in a girl’s boarding school.

Concerning “sexually fetishization”… yeah, right. This is an anime show, what do you expect? But honestly, in comparison to other series – now I’ve got the experience to make a balanced judgement – the teasing is very limited. You want sexually fetishization? Watch “High School of the Dead” and then come back to the discussion. I’ve no problems with that, at least not in Burst Angel. You also don’t complain about Superman having a large chest or Batman wearing black latex and leather, do you?

Overall: A good show, though in the genre segment covering science fiction/fantasy action girls with guns, there are better shows with more developed characters. But as I said: I had a lot of mindless fun.

Dir: Koichi Ohata
Star: Akeno Watanabe, Megumi Toyoguchi, Rie Tanaka, Yūji Ueda 

Riddle Story of Devil

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★★★
“This class is a killer…”

Another example which illustrates the difference between Western and Japanese approaches to education. For here we have “Class Black”, a group containing a baker’s dozen of female pupils, eleven of whom have been tasked by a mysterious group to assassinate the twelfth, with the person who does it being given absolutely anything they want by the organizers. Yeah, it’s not quite Beverley Hills 90210, is it? Of course, nor is it quite that simple. One of the candidates, Tokaku Azuma (Suwa), is the daughter of a legendary and long-standing family of assassins, but has had enough of her enforced role. Inspired by her mother, she has decided to rebel, and so switches sides. Instead of targeting the intended victim, Haru Ichinose (Kanemoto), she vows to protect her from the other students.

Of course, it is a ridiculously contrived scenario, even given the rules which are laid down at an early “orientation”. The series (twelve x 25-minute eps, plus a bonus one) seems occasionally to be aware of this. It shows up in elements such as the class’s teacher (Sakurai), who is depicted as barely noticing three-quarters of his class has “transferred out” in about a week. But these are strictly assassins who act as necessary to the plot. For example, one attempt consists of strapping a bomb around Haru’s neck… but then giving Tokaku 24 hours to find the four-digit code necessary to disarm it. If I had the promise of whatever I wished, I’d not be as generous. I’m just sayin’…

Admittedly, when the truth is finally revealed over the final couple of episodes, it turns out things aren’t quite as they initially appeared. There are clearly far larger forces at play, pulling the strings from behind the scenes, which help explain some (though not all) of the machinations. I also like the slow reveal of information over the course of the series. We gradually learn about both Tokaku’s own background, and those of her ‘competitors’, which range from professionals to your average or garden psycho killers. Their styles of attack are equally varied: as well as the explosive devices mentioned above, there’s poison and even scissors attempted as methods of dispatch.

I was, frankly, a bit uncomfortable with the depictions of these fifteen-year-old girls. While there’s no actual nudity, the makers seem intent on coming as close as possible. That’s especially true of the bonus episode, in which the class is stranded on a desert island for a Battle Royale-style (though non-lethal) contest. Swimsuits-a-go-go. I’m on happier ground with the action – there’s some of that in just about every episode after the first – and the lack of romance (in part no doubt related to the lack of male characters) is also a plus. In the end, it’s a light enough entry to merit viewing, though I’m less sure about repeat value. It’s perhaps telling that I only finished watching it yesterday, and I already had to look up the heroine’s name.

Dir: Keizō Kusakawa
Star (voice): Ayaka Suwa, Hisako Kanemoto, Yoshino Nanjō, Takahiro Sakurai

Dragon Age: Dawn of the Seeker

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★★★
“A polit-thriller in Fantasy-land”

I have to start off with an important confession: I am not a gamer. I’ve never really been one. I might have played… two computer games in my entire life: “Tomb Raider 2” and “No-one Lives Forever 2”. That very special thing computer gamers experience when in front of the consoles? I’ve never felt it, it never got me. But then, I was born in the mid-70s, and this could be the territory of another generation. So maybe I’m not even qualified to evaluate a movie which was based on a computer game. On the other hand, I’m not reviewing a game here, but a film – and I think I know a fair bit about them! Hopefully, I get the details right.

Dragon Age: Dawn of the Seeker is based on the fantasy computer game franchise by Canadian computer game label BioWare. The series started in 2009. In 2012 – to probably the surprise of everyone – it received a movie version. Released in the West and co-produced by American anime label Funimation, it tells a separate story that ties in with the second released game “Dragon Age 2” (2011).

The story takes place in a land called Ferelden, where knights secure the freedom and which is governed by a religious organisation known as “the Chantry”. This is similar to a medieval church with, for want of a better description, a female Pope called “the Divine” at the top. Among the knights are the Seekers; they seem to be the superiors of the knights and hold a special place, reporting directly to the Chantry. There are tensions between the knights and blood magicians who seem to follow (as far as I understand this universe!) their own agenda.

When one of the knights, Byron, leaves the castle with a girl that the Seekers had just rescued from mages, his young colleague Cassandra (Kuriyama) gets in his way, demanding an explanation. Byron is her mentor and a father figure to her, but shortly after he gets killed in an attack. Before dying, he is able to tell Cassandra there is intrigue brewing in the Chantry, and that this was the reason he wanted to secure the girl, who obviously has magical abilities (she looks very much like an elf to me).

Regalyan D’Marcall (Tanihara), a mage whom Cassandra finds on the scene, turns out to be an ally of Byron who wanted to help him expose the intrigue. But having previously lost her brother to mages (there was a decapitation incident), Cassandra is suspicious of him. Still, together, the unlikely duo search out who’s behind all of what’s going on, and in the nick of time, also prevent an assassination attempt (with a dragon!) on the Divine at a jubilee celebration.

First off, the story moves quite quickly and never gets boring, coming in at a viewer-friendly runtime of 90 minutes. Personally, I am really happy to see, once in a while, a fantasy movie that sticks to the length I had been used to in the 80s, before all these Lord of the Rings, Hobbit and Harry Potter movies with their 2½-hour running times. The visual style is something the viewer will have to make up their own mind about. You will either like it or you won’t. It’s not total CGI. It looks as if people were acting, then motion-captured into the computer and their image re-worked. It looks similar to the science fiction movie Vexille that the same director had made earlier. For my personal tastes, I didn’t really embrace this style. Also, I thought for much of the time the movie looked too dark with regard to its colour palette.  But then, fantasy seems to be going through a “dark phase” right now, so maybe it’s unfair to count this as a real negative.

The story was smarter than I thought it would be, having ordered the used DVD to a low price, and knowing virtually nothing about the “Dragon Age” universe. To be honest, I still don’t know much about it – but you don’t need to be Albert Einstein to figure out the basics. Interestingly, I believe the character of Cassandra Pentaghast was a side character in the second computer game but was such a well-received badass, the developers decided to make her the main character in the first movie. (Also in 2011, there was another, live-action movie put together from a series of webisodes with the title Dragon Age: Redemption, about an Elvish assassin Tallis, starring Felicia Day. I haven’t seen it, as it’s too difficult/expensive to get here in Germany.)

Some changes in the game character were made to make Cassandra look a bit more feminine, e. g. she gets longer hair here. They also give her a backstory about why she hates mages so much, explaining why she treats the mage Regalyan with strong suspicion. He has to earn her trust: while that underlying subplot doesn’t make the story Shakespeare, it gives the characters enough emotional layers to come across as more than just one-dimensional. That doesn’t lead to a big love story, as would typically have been the cast. but lightens what could otherwise have been a very bare storyline, and leads to a satisfying end. At least he gets a little kiss on the cheek for helping her. Obviously, she is becoming soft, considering how quickly she has been drawing her sword over the entire movie! 😉

There are some surprises along the way, though I wouldn’t call them earth-shattering. There are steady, regularly appearing action sequences, between escape and investigation scenes and a grand finale showing that, while a female knight may not alone be able to prevent an assassination, she can at least deal with a gigantic dragon. But we all need a little help from our friends, right? There are some gory scenes, so this is not for kids, though nothing really shocked me. Admittedly, 8 seasons of Game of Thrones may have desensitized me in regard to the depiction of bloody fantasy violence. If you need them, they’re in here; if you don’t like gore, there aren’t too many to distract you from an otherwise entertaining enough, and comparatively short, fantasy movie.

The end seems to indicate another story will follow. But if that happened, it was probably in the form of another computer game, as the movie didn’t get a sequel. Overall, I think it’s safe to say that the movie can serve as a quick fantasy fix, if there is nothing else for you out there right now. Entertaining enough without being extraordinary, it has some nice developments and the main character is layered enough so that she doesn’t bore you. I give it 3 stars for acceptable, though hardly ground-breaking, solid fantasy entertainment. A fan of the franchise may value it higher or lower; as I’m not in the know about an extended universe that also features several books and comics, I will not presume to decide that for them!

Dir: Fumihiko Sori
Star (voice): Chiaki Kuriyama, Shōsuke Tanihara, Hiroshi Iwasaki, Kaya Matsutani 

Black Lagoon: Roberta’s Blood Trail

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★★★½
“When you go on a journey of revenge, dig two, uh, MULTIPLE graves…”

Almost four years after Black Lagoon, this five-episode mini-sequel was released, re-uniting us with Revy (Toyoguchi), Rock (Namikawa) and the other members of the Lagoon Company. They remain, as before, a somewhat shady outfit, operating out of the South-East Asian wretched hive of scum and villainy, which is the entirely shady city of Roanapur. This arc is also a reunion of sorts with Roberta (Tomizawa, who has been doing voice work since back when I was a “real” anime fan, in the days of Bubblegum Crisis!) She’s the lethal Colombian maid who guards the Lovelace family, with whom Revy and crew crossed swords in one of the Black Lagoon arcs, before Roberta returned to South America.

A politically-motivate bomb explosion there took out her master, and set Roberta off on a trans-continental mission of vengeance, beginning in her country, before crossing the globe to Roanapur. That’s because the people responsible are a black ops group affiliated with one wing of the US government. They are now in town, preparing to go up into the Golden Triangle on their next mission, capturing a Laotian drug-lord. Following her are the Lovelace heir, Garcia (Ikura) and back-up killer maid Fabiola. But quite a few others are also interested in the outcome, including another wing of the US government (CIA vs. NSA), and the various factions of organized crime who run the city.

If there’s an overall theme here, it’s perhaps “redemption for past sins.” Rock, in particular, is seeking to atone for his failure to save a young girl, in the events that ended Black Lagoon. But it sometimes seems that everyone has history, of one kind or another, which has left them carrying baggage: even the NSA assassins have issues. Rock may be the central character here and, disappointingly, Revy spends much of the show on the disabled list. But despite her being sidelined, there are no shortage of strong female characters who take no crap from anyone: Roberta, Fabiola, Miss Balalaika, Eda. Say what you like, Roanapur is clearly an equal-opportunity hive of scum and villainy.

If anything, this is perhaps even more hyper-violent than its predecessor; going from cable TV to video seems to have taken off some of the restraints. Parts #3 and #4 in particular seem almost like an extended exercise in carnage around the streets of the city – amusingly, neither the authorities nor the other inhabitants appear too fazed by these happenings! It’s all a little confusing, with so many players in the game, but things settle down a bit for a solid finale, upstream in the jungles of Laos. All told, if you liked Black Lagoon, then this is almost certainly going to be appreciated in the same way. One review called this a cross between the works of John Woo and Takashi Miike, and it’s hard to argue with that an an overall assessment.

Dir: Sunao Katabuchi et al.
Star (voice): Megumi Toyoguchi, Daisuke Namikawa, Michie Tomizawa, Kazue Ikura

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

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★★★★½
“The wind rises.”

After the enormous critical, if not commercial, success of Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro, Miyazaki was commissioned to create a manga series for Animage magazine, with a potential film adaptation attached. Publication began in early 1982, but it would take a dozen years, albeit of intermittent publication, before that story was complete. When the series’s popularity among Animage readers was established, work began on the film adaptation, covering the early portion of the manga. Since this was before Miyazaki’s own Studio Ghibli was founded, an external company, Topcraft, were commissioned to create the animation. The budget was only $1 million, with a mere nine-month production schedule leading up to its release in March 1984.

It takes place on a post-apocalyptic world, a thousand years after the near-mythical “Seven Days of Fire”, pushed humanity to the edge of extinction. Since then, nature has taken over much of the planet, covering it in an expanding toxic jungle where the very air is poisonous in a few minutes. It is populated by equally lethal creatures, at the top being the “ohmu”, gigantic insectoids capable of destroying anything in its path. The human race is reduced to clinging on to the fringes, such as the small kingdom of the Valley of the Wind, in which a never-ending breeze keeps the toxins at bay. There, the king’s daughter, Nausicaä (Shimamoto), is one of the few brave enough to enter and explore the jungle, and has developed a mutually respectful relationship with its strange inhabitants.

The balance is destroyed when a plane from the kingdom of Tolmekia crashes. In its cargo is an enormous “God Warrior” – one of those which carried out the Seven Days of Fire – recently dug out from where it had been buried. Tolmekia and their rivals, Pejite, are wrestling for control of the warrior and the power it wields, and the crash drags the Valley of the Wind into their conflict. In particular, Princess Kushana of Tolmekia (Sakakibara) intends to use the warrior to destroy the jungle and restore mankind’s dominion over the planet. Nausicaä is ferociously opposed to this scheme, especially after discovering that the jungle is actually purifying the atmosphere and soil, absorbing the toxins from the apocalypse. She’ll do anything to stop Kushana, including being willing to sacrifice her own life if necessary.

There’s a lot going on here, as you can see. It’s somewhat understandable why, when initially shown in the West (one of the first examples of anime to receive a theatrical release), 22 minutes was cut out, in order to market it as a children’s film, retitled Warriors of the Wind. The problem is, like almost all of the director’s work, it is not a children’s film. This is not a uncommon mistake – presumably based on them having a child as the central characters, and because they’re animated, which still largely equates to Disney in many people’s minds. But they’re more about that age capturing an innocent and idealistic mentality. This is undeniably mature and thoughtful cinema. In just his second feature, and first original film, Nausicaä establishes several themes which would run through almost all of Miyazaki’s future work, in varying degrees: the joy of flight, concern for the environment, and a strong female presence.

Miyazaki’s father ran an airplane parts company in World War II, and even his film company, Studio Ghibli, was named after an Italian plane. Almost every one of his movies includes a flying sequence, and Nausicaä certainly has plenty of them, whether its the heroine skimming across the desert on her one-person glider, or gigantic warships looming, threateningly, in the sky. Despite the imperfect animation, a result of the limited resources, the sense of wonder and awe is undeniable. If you don’t want to take to the skies after seeing these scenes, you might want to check for a pulse. Similarly, there’s no denying Miyazaki is firmly on the side of nature, with his heroine believing all life to be sacred, and humanity deserving no special place above any other species. If mankind can’t live in harmony with the world, the movie suggests, it’s mankind which needs to change. Bending nature to our will is always going to backfire.

But it’s with the depiction of womankind that the film truly succeeds. In Nausicaä and Kushana, you have two fully-formed characters that are not just among the best in animated film, they could stand beside the protagonist and antagonist of most live-action movies. The latter, in particular, demonstrates Miyazaki’s skill at depicting those who would be flat-out villains in less nuanced films, instead being given motivation and depth. While you may not agree with Kushana resurrecting the God Warrior, you can understand what she is trying to accomplish. Her actions stem from a genuine belief that what she is doing is best for the future of mankind. She just has a military-industrial approach to that, in sharp contrast to the one emphasizing ecological science and harmony, preferred by Nausicaä. Interesting to note that, in the 2005 Disney English-language dub, Kushana was voiced by Uma Thurman.

The story here builds to a stellar climax, in which a massive herd of ohmu are lured into a stampede towards the valley, while simultaneously the God Warrior is unleashed by Kushana, to horrific effect. [The animation for the latter was done by a young Hideki Anno, who’d go on to become a master of the genre himself, best known for Neon Genesis Evangelion. In a 2006 Japanese poll, Evangelion was the only anime ranked ahead of Nausicaä as an all-time favourite] Our heroine puts herself in harm’s way in an effort to stop the carnage, and… Well, I won’t spoil it in detail; Miyazaki manages to pull off an ending which could easily have come off as contrived or ridiculous, and is instead emotionally satisfying. With even the Tolmekians forces humbled by nature, as environmental messages delivered by teenagers go, it’s certainly a great deal more effective than an angry Scandinavian shrieking “HOW DARE YOU!” at the audience.

Dir: Hayao Miyazaki
Star (voice): Sumi Shimamoto, Gorō Naya, Yōji Matsuda, Yoshiko Sakakibara

Princess Mononoke

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★★★½
“Princess Die”

To some extent, this was the film which “broke” Miyazaki in the West, being his first feature to receive an unedited theatrical release in America. It wasn’t a huge commercial success, taking only about $2.4 million in North America. But it was very well-received, Roger Ebert listing it among his top ten films of 1999. It likely opened the door for the success of Spirited Away, which would win Miyazaki the Oscar for Best Animated Feature at the 75th Academy Awards. But if I’m being honest, I don’t like it as much as many of his movies. While there’s no denying the imagination and enormous technical skill here, it doesn’t resonate emotionally with me in the same way. I think it’s probably the central character, who is relatively bland and uninteresting, even compared to other characters in the movie.

Firstly though: no, there’s no-one called “Mononoke” in this. It’s not a name, but a Japanese term describing a supernatural shape-shifting creature. Though even this seems ripe to cause confusion, because there are no shape-shifting princesses to be found either. And despite the title, the protagonist is Ashitaka (Matsuda), a prince of the Emishi tribe in medieval Japan, whose arm becomes infected after an encounter with a demon-possessed wild boar. As happens… Seeking a cure before the rest of his body follows suite, despite the superhuman strength it gives him, Ashitaka heads into the Western lands, and straight into the middle of an ongoing battle.

On one side is Lady Eboshi (Tanaka), the ruler of Irontown, a progressive and industrial settlement, in need of the resources which can be found in and under the nearby forest. On the other is San (Ishida), a young woman raised by wolves, who has vowed to protect the woods and their inhabitants, including the Great Forest Spirit. It’s their conflict which is really the core of the film, with Ashitaka’s quest to get his demonic arm fixed, taking a back-seat for most of the (lengthy, at 133 minutes) running-time here. Probably for the best, since he is, as mentioned, perhaps the least charismatic or engaging protagonist in the entire Miyazaki canon. His arm is easily the most interesting thing about him – and that keeps wanting to strike out on its own. When your own limb wants to go solo, you might be the problem… To quote Lady Eboshi, “I’m getting a little bored of this curse of yours, Ashitaka. Let me just cut the damn thing off.” #ImWithTeamEboshi

But enough of him. Let’s focus on what works here, which would be San and Eboshi. The first time we see San, her face is smeared in blood which she has sucked up and spat out, from a wound in the side of a gigantic white wolf. [This is certainly the most hardcore of Miyazaki’s films, with decapitations and limbs being lost at a rate closer to an entry in the Lone Wolf & Cub franchise.] She’s relentlessly aggressive in attitude, going so far as to stage a one-woman assault on Irontown in an attempt to assassinate her enemy. She tells Ashitaka, “I’m not afraid to die. I’d do anything to get you humans out of my forest.” That said, she’s still considerably less creepy than the forest apes who want to eat him.

Eboshi, on the other hand, is a complete contrast to the near-feral San, and remarkably progressive, especially considering the era and location. Her town is a haven for the disenfranchised and those society considers “untouchables”, including both lepers and prostitutes, the latter whose contracts she bought out and who now work in her iron mill. Her citizens and their welfare are what she cares about, above all, and she’s completely fearless about who she has to go through for that purpose. “She’s not even afraid of the gods, that woman,” says one of Irontown’s residents about their ruler, admiringly. They aren’t wrong, for she subsquently tells her warriors, “I’m going to show you how to kill a god, a god of life and death. The trick is not to fear him.” It’s remarkably easy to envisage a version where the roles are reversed, and she is the heroine. The fact she’s a gun enthusiast, is just a bonus!

Ashitaka’s role is largely to act as a middleman between the two worlds: somewhat more than human, yet less than divine. That remains the case even at the end, as he agrees to spent part of his time in the forest with San, and part of it working alongside Lady Eboshi in Irontown. It’s potentially an awkward and unsatisfying compromise, storywise, yet Miyazaki makes it work better than you feel it should.  But there are a couple of perplexing missteps too. For one, when the animals of the forest are talking, there’s zero effort to make their lips synch up. It’s bizarre and distracting. And in the Japanese version, the voice of San’s wolf mother, Moro is a man. Someone known in Japan as a drag queen, admittedly – but a man none the less, a weird choice which confused the heck out of me [score one for the dub, at least, which had Gillian Anderson as the character]

The overall result is undeniably beautifully animated, and epic in its scope and invention. As ever, Miyazaki excels at creating a world which is like our own, yet simultaneously completely alien. However, it all gets rather wearing, especially at the length depicted here. My attention simply ran dry during the second half, as the multiple different factions began hacking or gnawing away on each other, with the personal and intense quality of the Eboshi/San conflict getting lost in the bigger picture. It’s in putting over the intensely personal elements of large stories, that Miyazaki is unsurpassed – never mind just in animation, among film-makers as a whole. This isn’t the best demonstration of his talents in that area.

Dir: Hayao Miyazaki
Star: Yōji Matsuda, Yuriko Ishida, Yūko Tanaka, Kaoru Kobayashi

The World of Battle Angel Alita

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With the release of Robert Rodriguez’s Alita: Battle Angel scheduled for February next year, I figured now would be a good time to take a look at the origins of the character. Where did she come from? What is the world she inhabits like? And what might we expect from the film?

The character was created by Japanese manga artist Yukito Kishiro, with the first installment appearing in Business Jump magazine, late in 1990. The 52 episodes plus an epilogue were then collected into nine volumes, and the story is available in that format, both in Japan and translated into English for a Western audience. There have been some changes made, beginning with the title: in its homeland, the series was known as Gunnm, which translates as “gun dream” [something hinted at by the heroine, who at one point says “I was probably a gun or something in my previous life”]. Alita is known as “Gally” in the original version, and the city hovering over her home town was originally Salem, rather than Tiphares. I’ll be using the English language names.

It takes part in a post-apocalyptic version of North America; later installments have said the timeframe is the 26th centure, beginning in the year 2533. The elite have left the surface of the planet, and live in the flying city of Tiphares. Everyone else is still on the ground, supplying the city with all its needs. One of those is Ido, a cyberdoctor exiled from above, who finds a cyborg head in the scrapyard lying beneath Tiphares. He gives it a body, and calls her Alita. Her memories are all but gone; what she does remember, however, is how to fight, being skilled in ‘Panzer Kunst’, a legendary form of martial arts. This stands her in good stead, as she becomes a bounty hunter, tracking down and killing criminals in and around the scrapyard.

There have been two (or perhaps three) subsequent comic-book incarnations. First was Battle Angel Alita: Last Order, originally published from 2001-14 in Japan. Then came Battle Angel Alita: Holy Night and Other Stories, though this was a collection of four side-stories – hence the “perhaps three”! Most recently, we had Battle Angel Alita: Mars Chronicle (2015-17). Two of the volumes from the first incarnation were adapted into a pair of 30-minute OVAs (Original Video Animation), released in June 1993. Rumblings of a live-action version have been around almost as long, with James Cameron securing the rights to the comic in 1999, having been introduced to the property by Guillermo Del Toro. By the mid-2000’s, a script had been created, but after developing the project in parallel with Avatar, Cameron decided to devote his efforts to that instead, and Alita went on the back-burner.

The massive success of Avatar led to Cameron committing to not one, two or three but four sequels, with releases dates planned out as far ahead as December 2025. Needless to say, that meant he would not be working on Alita any time soon. In 2015, he gave Rodriguez the script to rework, and was reportedly impressed enough by the result, then to hand over directorial control as well. The results are likely to be somewhat different from Rodriguez’s other works, where he typically does the cinematography and editing as well as his directorial duties. Here, those tasks have been delegated, a nod to the scale of the production. At a reported figure of $200 million, it’s not far off the budget of every other Robert Rodriguez movie combined.

It does not appear to have been a trouble-free journey to the big screen. When the first trailer appeared in December 2017, it came under heavy criticism for the enlarged size of the heroine’s eyes. While a standard feature in much of anime, seeing it in a “live-action” production was clearly unsettling to many people. It was notable that, by the time the second trailer arrived in July, adjustments had been made, and the reaction was considerably better. However, by that point the film had already undergone its first change in release date. Originally scheduled to come out on July 20, in February, it was pushed back to December 21.

But in September, Fox moved the release date again, this time to Valentine’s Day, 2019. This seems to have been a decision to back out of a crowded December market, including Aquaman and new movies from the Spiderman and Transformers universes. Moving it lessens the competition, giving it a couple of weeks before Captain Marvel is released. It’ll also become the first foreign movie after Chinese New Year, which may help its prospects there. That’s now almost eight months it has been pushed back, so you can understand some nervousness among fans. Especially given how much is riding on this.

For Alita: Battle Angel will be the most expensive action heroine film of all time, easily surpassing the $160 million cost of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2. [I exclude The Force Awakens, as more a Star Wars film with a female lead, than a “true” action heroine film] That, of course, was the final entry in a series which had already proven its worth at the box-office. The market for live-action adaptations of anime out of Hollywood has also been shown to be precariously soft, most recently and obviously by Ghost in the Shell. If Alita reproduced that movie’s performance worldwide, it would not even cover its production costs.

If it flops, this would be a serious setback to future entries: we would potentially be back at the days of Catwoman where received wisdom was that actresses couldn’t carry an action flick. Right now, all we can do is keep our fingers crossed, for to this point, there have apparently been no test screenings of the full movie by which it can be judged. 18 minutes of various scenes was screened at Comic-Con International in July, and reports at that time said “the movie is going to be a combination of the manga and the OVA with elements of the ‘motorball’ storyline.” Let’s take a look at both of those incarnations, and see whether we might be able to learn what the film may contain.

Battle Angel Alita, by Yukito Kishiro

By Jim McLennan

Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆½

I used to read a lot of comics and graphic novels. But when I moved from London to Arizona in 2000, I all but stopped. There are still boxes in our basement, unopened since then, filled with my comic collection. Rare have been the forays into that culture since, beyond the occasional volume of Dirty Pair, for review purposes. Certainly, nothing as extended as deciding to re-read this in advance of the anticipated release of Robert Rodriguez’s live-action movie. Initially, I feared I had bitten off more than I could chew, when I realized the nine-volume series was a total of over two thousand pages of content. Maybe I should have started reading it before mid-October?

In the end, the release date for the movie got pushed into next year, and I blitzed through the comics at about a volume per day, in virtually my usual reading time. I’d forgotten how pacy comic reading can be: if there’s no dialogue, you scan the panels quickly. It’s not as if you stop and admire them, or worry about what exactly is being portrayed. The intent is almost for the visual aspect to go from the page into your subconscious, so you get a visceral “feel” for what’s happening. That’s especially true for something as heavily action-oriented as this, and Kishiro has an amazing flair for it (not least in the area of sound effects!). If you look at an individual frame, you might not know what’s happening; yet put them together, and almost magically, it becomes a coherent flow.

However, there’s still an amazing amount going on in terms of story-line and universe-building. You can easily see how the feature film will only be able to cover perhaps one-quarter of the series. I presume it will begin with the origin story, in which Ido finds the head of Alita in the scrapyard beneath the floating city of Tiphares, and gives it a cybernetic body. He’s a part-time bounty hunter, only to find out quickly, the combat abilities of his new charge far surpass his own. Unfortunately, she has little or no memory of her prior life; where she got these skills and how she ended up in the scrapyard is only revealed well into the series.

The second volume has her both falling in love, and discovering the pain which love can bring. She is smitten by Hugo, another young orphan of the scrapyard, who is working hard – albeit in some very dubious ways – to raise enough funds to buy a ticket up to Tiphares. When he discovers the truth about his situation, he cracks – and a bounty is placed on his head. The end result is romantic tragedy of a high order, and also drives Alita away from Ido. That brings her into the middle arc: motorball, a superviolent pastime popular among the scrapyard inhabitants. This occupies the third and fourth volumes: Alita climbs the sport’s ladder towards the elite players, and ends up facing off against its brutal champion, Jashugan. It appears this is roughly the arcs which will be covered in the film version, though I’m not sure how far they’ll get into the motorball thread.

The second half sees Alita head into the wastelands, in search of Desty Nova, like Ido another Tipharen exile. She has become an agent working on behalf of the floating city, and against the rebel group of Barjack, which is intent on (literally) taking down Tiphares. While this gives her access to help from above, the flow of data goes both ways: if one Alita is good, wouldn’t a dozen of them be better? Through Nova, she discovers the gruesome truth about the citizens of Tiphares, and her convenient amnesia is also cured, with Alita remembering where she came from, as well as finding out the history which led to the current situation on Earth. She’s left to make the ultimate choice: whether to destroy Tiphares or save it.

It having been more than two decades since I last read this, I’d forgotten almost all the details, so the twists and turns proved highly effective once more. There were several moments where I had to put the book down and just absorb what I’d been told, and Kishiro is good at telling the reader the essential information efficiently. However, it’s the action sequences throughout where he really shines, whether it’s the motorball contests, or the escalating series of battles in which Alita finds herself involved. For no matter how powerful she may become, there’s always someone bigger and badder – likely culminating in Den, leader of the Barjack rebels. Imagine a pissed-off half-horse, half-Transformer. Yeah, he’s like that.

While they certainly would not be cheap, there’s enough material here for a whole franchise of live-action movies, if the first one is a success (fingers crossed, though I’m not optimistic it’ll take in the half-billion or more needed for it to turn a profit). I’m really looking forward to seeing what Robert Rodriguez can do with the adaptation, on the largest cinema screen I can find. Hopefully his vision of Tiphares, the scrapyard and Alita is able to live up to the impressive world created by Kishiro.

Author: Yukito Kishiro
Publisher: VIZ Media LLC, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book

Battle Angel Alita, Volume 1
Battle Angel Alita, Volume 2
Battle Angel Alita, Volume 3
Battle Angel Alita, Volume 4
Battle Angel Alita, Volume 5
Battle Angel Alita, Volume 6
Battle Angel Alita, Volume 7
Battle Angel Alita, Volume 8
Battle Angel Alita, Volume 9

Battle Angel: The OVAs

By Jim McLennan

★★★½
“Sweet, yet too short.”

Watching this after having read the manga version, it feels like the anime version can do little more than scratch the surface of the world of Tiphares, in the barely fifty minutes it has to work with across its two OVA (Original Video Animation) volumes. The stories here, originally released in 1993, cover the first two section of the manga, and it looks like much of what we see here will also be included in the live-action film next February. Slightly confusing matters, is the way this uses the original Japanese names. So Tiphares becomes Zalem here, and Hugo is Yugo. Most oddly, the heroine is not called Alita – hence the absence of her name from the title – but Gally. To avoid further confusion, I’m going to be consistent with our other articles on the topic, and stick to the translated ones for what follows.

We see Ido (Kariya) discover the head of Alita (Itou), and almost before we can blink, it’s back to being fully functioning. He’s a part-time cyber-doctor, part-time bounty-hunter, and after Alita follows him – suspecting he’s a killer who is stalking the streets of the scrapyard – she ends up rescuing him from the real killer. She also meets and falls for Hugo (Yamaguchi), a young man desperate to get out of the scrapyard, by any means necessary – a fact that proves to be the source of his downfall in the second OAV. Not present in the manga is the character of Chiren (Koyama). Like Ido, she’s a refugee from Tiphares, who resent his cyber-medical skills and wants to prove herself superior. To do so, she rescues gladiator Grewcica and sets him against Ido’s creation, Alita.

For something a quarter-century old, the animation has stood the test of time well. This is notable in the first part, and especially the battles between Alita and Grewcica, which remain more than capable of getting the blood pumping. The look of the scrapyard and Tiphares have been transferred nicely. The colours feel like your imagination told you they should, from the b&w manga, and even the sound design adds to the atmosphere, both in Kaoru Wada’s score and the groans of the pipes connecting Tiphares to the scrap-yard.

The problem, I think, is a script which doesn’t have enough room to develop the characters and their interactions. Especially short-changed is the relationship between Alita and Hugo, which feels like it goes from zero to passionate love (on her side, at least) in no time at all. As a result, you’re left to wonder why she’s prepared to go to such lengths for him, though his eventual fate remains poignant – not least the addition of a little flourish at the end, where Ido and Alita send up a balloon in his honour. I probably would have felt kinder towards these episodes if I’d seen them before reading the original source material; as is, while solid enough, I can’t help feeling there’s something missing.

Dir: Hiroshi Fukutomi
Star (voice): Miki Itou, Shunsuke Kariya, Kappei Yamaguchi, Mami Koyama

Battle Angel: The OVAs

  By

★★★½
“Sweet, yet too short.”

Watching this after having read the manga version, it feels like the anime version can do little more than scratch the surface of the world of Tiphares, in the barely fifty minutes it has to work with across its two OVA (Original Video Animation) volumes. The stories here, originally released in 1993, cover the first two section of the manga, and it looks like much of what we see here will also be included in the live-action film next February. Slightly confusing matters, is the way this uses the original Japanese names. So Tiphares becomes Zalem here, and Hugo is Yugo. Most oddly, the heroine is not called Alita – hence the absence of her name from the title – but Gally. To avoid further confusion, I’m going to be consistent with our other articles on the topic, and stick to the translated ones for what follows.

We see Ido (Kariya) discover the head of Alita (Itou), and almost before we can blink, it’s back to being fully functioning. He’s a part-time cyber-doctor, part-time bounty-hunter, and after Alita follows him – suspecting he’s a killer who is stalking the streets of the scrapyard – she ends up rescuing him from the real killer. She also meets and falls for Hugo (Yamaguchi), a young man desperate to get out of the scrapyard, by any means necessary – a fact that proves to be the source of his downfall in the second OAV. Not present in the manga is the character of Chiren (Koyama). Like Ido, she’s a refugee from Tiphares, who resent his cyber-medical skills and wants to prove herself superior. To do so, she rescues gladiator Grewcica and sets him against Ido’s creation, Alita.

For something a quarter-century old, the animation has stood the test of time well. This is notable in the first part, and especially the battles between Alita and Grewcica, which remain more than capable of getting the blood pumping. The look of the scrapyard and Tiphares have been transferred nicely. The colours feel like your imagination told you they should, from the b&w manga, and even the sound design adds to the atmosphere, both in Kaoru Wada’s score and the groans of the pipes connecting Tiphares to the scrap-yard.

The problem, I think, is a script which doesn’t have enough room to develop the characters and their interactions. Especially short-changed is the relationship between Alita and Hugo, which feels like it goes from zero to passionate love (on her side, at least) in no time at all. As a result, you’re left to wonder why she’s prepared to go to such lengths for him, though his eventual fate remains poignant – not least the addition of a little flourish at the end, where Ido and Alita send up a balloon in his honour. I probably would have felt kinder towards these episodes if I’d seen them before reading the original source material; as is, while solid enough, I can’t help feeling there’s something missing.

Dir: Hiroshi Fukutomi
Star (voice): Miki Itou, Shunsuke Kariya, Kappei Yamaguchi, Mami Koyama

Black Lagoon

  By

★★★½
“Black to basics.”

Thanks to Dieter for pointing me in the direction of this series, whose 24 episodes feel like a bit of a throwback to the days when watching anime felt hard-edged and dangerous, almost a subversive act. Mind you, this actually came out in 2006, so I guess it’s actually something of a throwback, full stop. [Random aside of no relevance to anything much: startled to realize today it’s more than eight years since Salt came out. Would have sworn it was only about three, tops] It’s hyper-violent, clearly for mature viewers only, and its multiple action heroines possess generally poor attitudes. Clearly up my street!

It takes place in what I’m going to assume is a somewhat alternate reality, where the Thai city of Roanapur has become a modern-day equivalent to Tortuga, the 17th-century pirate haven in the Caribbean. It’s a free-fire zone where organized crime operates with impunity, including Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Colombian and Italian groups, along with all the necessary “support services,” from gun-runners to brothels. Lagoon Company are one such, mostly specializing in smuggling goods, people or whatever needs to be moved quietly around. Into this setting falls the unfortunate Rock (Namikawa), a Japanese salaryman on business, whose ship is boarded by Lagoon, and he is taken hostage. After his company abandons him, to conceal the shady business they were doing, he joins Lagoon as an accountant-interpreter-negotiator-factotum. He’s in for a culture shock.

Leading the parade of counter-heroines is the Chinese-American Revy (Toyoguchi), who is Lagoon’s main enforcer, and loves her job, which she carries out enthusiastically, with the slightest provocation. She’s a fascinating character: Revy has absolutely no scruples about blowing away anybody who gets in her way, and in “normal” society would be far beyond the pale. However, in Roanapur, she’s just one among a myriad of similar types – there, scruples are likely to get you killed – and her unswerving loyalty to the rest of Lagoon, and Rock in particular, are a redeeming quality. She prefers to wield, with extreme prejudice and skill, a pair of modified Beretta 92FS’s, and Revy’s ambidextrous skill has earned her the nickname “Two Hand” around town.

If she were the only candidate, this might end up being a bit of a borderline entry, but over the 24 episodes in the two series (there’s another five-episode arc I haven’t seen, Roberta’s Blood Trail, which came out in 2010), Revy is joined by a number of other, morally ambiguous women, all of whom are more than comfortable with firearms:

  • “Balalaika” – the pseudonymous head of Hotel Moscow, the Russian crime group under whom Lagoon frequently operate. She’s a veteran of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, which left her with serious burns. She got her name from the sniper rifle which was her weapon of choice, and often calls upon her ex-Army colleagues when reinforcements are needed.
  • Eda – a drinking buddy of Revy, she’s a nun in the Church of Violence a.k.a. the Rip-off Church. They are perhaps the premier gun-running outfit in Roanapur, who count Lagoon among their customers, and you interfere with the Church or its leader Yolanda, at your own peril.
  • Roberta – the maid of the Lovelace family, one of the leading South American cartels. When its scion, Garcia, is kidnapped, Roberta goes on the hunt. Turns out she’s actually a former FARC guerrilla, who had been trained as an assassin in Cuba, and proves capable of fighting Revy to a time-limit draw.
  • Gretel – one of two Romanian orphans, who may be the most screwed-up characters in the whole show, due to their background in child porn and worse. [‘Snuff said, shall we say…] While life is generally cheap in this series, she and her brother Gretel take sadistic and visceral pleasure in torturing their victims, extreme even for this show.
  • Yukio Washimine – daughter of a yakuza boss. She takes over the group after the incumbent is killed by Balalaika, despite Rock’s efforts to prevent this.

There are all, in their own way, interesting (if largely damaged, in some cases severely) characters, who have enough potential that they could each merit their own series. Add them to Revy, and its an impressive line-up, even if some only appear for a couple of parts. The structure of the series generally has each arc occupying two episodes, though the Washimine storyline occupies the final six. It’s a good approach, allowing for a bit more expansion than the 25-minute format usually permits. My main gripe is the near-total lack of character development over the two seasons. Revy, Dutch and just about everyone else are the same at the end of the show as at the beginning. There’s no sense they’ve learned anything from their experiences, and even Rock has simply settled into his new life with barely a ripple. The show seems more interested in their past, than their future.

It is still a lot of fun to watch – admittedly, you need to suspend your disbelief in the way gun battles work. But if, like me, you’re a fan of John Woo films like A Better Tomorrow (an obvious and admitted influence), then the remarkable invulnerability to bullets shown by Revy, etc. will not be an issue. Having cut my anime fandom teeth on the likes of Wicked City and Vampire Hunter D, this plays like the organized crime equivalent, and provides an enjoyable blast from the past.

Dir: Sunao Katabuchi
Star (voice): Megumi Toyoguchi, Daisuke Namikawa, Tsutomu Isobe, Mami Koyama

Ghost in the Shell: The New Movie

  By

★★★
“Not be confused with the old movie.”

Really, that was the best name they could come up with? Oh, well. “A rose by any other name…” Released in Japan in June 2015, more or less on the 20th anniversary of the “not-so-new movie”, I guess, it’s the most recent incarnation of the animated universe. This is more or less a direct follow-on from the Arise series, following up on the “Firestarter” arc, the name for both a wizard-class hacker and the virus they have created. As such, you’d definitely fare better if you’ve seen that series first, since (as we’ll see) it has enough issues with new plot elements, and doesn’t bother with much explanation about any pre-existing ones.  This feature is also using the same redesigned character designs, and with the Major (Sakamoto) operating in conjunction with Section 9 and Aramaki (Juku), rather than under his direct control.

The main incident under investigation is the assassination of the Japanese Prime Minister, blown up with a briefcase bomb, during a meeting. That’s the simple synopsis. The more accurate one would involve a complex and tangled web of government departments and their intersection with elements of the military-industrial complex. It’s a alphabet soup blitzkrieg of acronyms: MOD, MOC, DFA. Or was it MFA? Either way, it becomes awfully hard to keep track of who is doing what to whom, for the sake of which alliance. Perhaps it makes more sense if you have a pre-existing awareness of the intricacies of the Japanese federal bureaucracy. Otherwise, you’ll be left scratching your head and/or yawning for significant chunks of this.

Which is a shame, as there are some aspects which are still enjoyable. I particularly liked the idea that the head villainess actually uses the same make and model of prosthetic body as Major Kusanagi, so in effect she is hunting her own doppelganger. This ties together with more information on her childhood, in a cybernetic orphanage, which is being run for purposes that are very far from charitable. There is more of a sense of team here. The Major refers to her colleagues as “parts,” something they take to mean they’re expendable – or it could actually be high praise, given the nature of her existence. It’s symptomatic of the ambivalence about technology that has been present throughout, over a period now spanning two decades.

The action is as impressive as it was in Arise, with a number of show-stopping set-pieces, pitting Kusanagi and her team against a range of opponents, from near-human to entirely artificial. There are also surprisingly poignant moments, such as their questioning of a former active-duty soldier whose job is now to receive the last words of his colleagues. This renewed his purpose in life, after he had been left behind to wallow in his obsolete prosthetic body. But these elements just make the murky plotting all the more frustrating, and I can’t help suspecting the writers confused obscurity with depth.

Dir: Kazuchika Kise
Star: Maaya Sakamoto, Ikkyuu Juku, Kenichirou Matsuda, Tarusuke Shingaki