Tag: anime

Project A-ko

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★★★½

“Raises some interesting questions regarding the Japanese educational system.”

Project A-ko is one of those odd films that probably could only be done as anime, though as live-action goes, something like Kung Fu Hustle comes close. It centers on three schoolgirls, A-ko, B-ko and C-ko: the first two are rivals for the third’s attention…but despite the lesbian subtext, it’s really not that kind of story. [Though the film was originally intended to be part of the Cream Lemon series, which definitely are those kind of stories] No, it’s far more concerned with A-ko’s superpowers, to which she’s largely oblivious, the gadgetry cooked up by B-ko, thanks to her apparently limitless finances, and C-ko’s ancestry, which turns out to be not of this Earth – and that explains a lot, it has to be said.

This is as much parody as anything else, and what you get from it will, to some extend, depend on what you bring; for example, knowing that Mari, part of B-ko’s gang, is a pig-tailed dead-ringer for Ken from Fist of the North Star, with a squeaky voice. The rest is tongue-in-cheek SF, that revels in excess, particularly in the second-half. This is markedly less successful than the simple love-triangle, culminating in a marvellously destructive brawl between A-ko and B-ko, that starts off in school, then moves into the nearby city, where the pair end up facing an alien invasion. In the words of Monty Python, it’s just “too silly”, toppling over into ludicrous explosions for far too long, that proves rather less entertaining than the more understated irony from before.

The voice-acting (at least in the Japanese version; as usual, I couldn’t bring myself to listen to the dub) is solid; B-ko is one of the most tremendously irritating characters you can imagine, but that’s entirely deliberate. Of particular note is the soundtrack, largely by American session musicians, Richie Zito and Joey Carbone, which thereby avoids the usual J-Pop cliches. Okay, largely by replacing them with American cliches, but the result is still pretty cool, in a Giorgio Moroder kinda way; hey, it was made in 1986. The result is solid, if entirely brainless, fun – and how can you not like a film which borrows its title from one of Jackie Chan’s best?

Dir: Katsuhiko Nishijima
Stars (voice): Miki Itoh, Michie Tomizawa, Emi Shinohara, Tessho Genada

Kite

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★★★½
“Leon, if Matilda had been adopted by Stansfield, instead of Leon.”

Concerns about some content here means Kite has had a tortuous release in the West. First time out, in 1998, it was shorn basically of all explicit sexual content: given the potentially underage nature of the animated heroine, Media Blasters didn’t want to be hit with a kiddie porn charge – laughable though that may seem for a “cartoon”! – and played it very safe. Subsequent releases over the next six years restored first much, in the “Director’s Cut”, then all (“Special Edition”) the footage, but the OAV* might just work better without the sex. It’s hardly as if I finished it and thought, “Y’know, what this really needs is some sequences of the heroine getting molested.”

Because the story is interesting enough on its own. Sawa is a teenage assassin, basically mind-controlled by her foster father, Akai: he’s a cop who uses her to mete out vigilante justice to paedophiles, etc. [This is ironic given their relationship, the nature of which even the edited version makes fairly clear.] She meets a young man, Oburi, in much the same situation, and their growing relationship threatens to disrupt the status quo of everyday slaughter. And, “slaughter” is the word, since Sawa’s weapon of choice is bullets that first penetrate the victim, then explode. Cue more irony: in America, even animated teenage sexuality is entirely verboten, but teenage, paint-the-walls-blood-red carnage? Bring it on.

The action is certainly intense, well-animated and directed, though perhaps excessive. Even after falling from a building, through the road, down to the subway – then being blown up, flying back into the air and blasted through an apartment window, some BandAids are apparently all the medical attention Sawa requires. This conflicted badly with the gritty realism of the story, and I also hated the doodling sax soundtrack, which sounded like something rejected by Abel Ferrara for Driller Killer. Otherwise, though, it’s generally impressive and stylish, with a downbeat approach that is refreshing, as well as some spectacularly messy violence.

* = Original Animation Video, a common “straight to video” anime format. It’s only 50 minutes, about standard length for such things. A live-action version, directed by Jorge + Javier Aguilera, produced by Rob Cohen & Anant Singh, was announced earlier this year, but no release date has been scheduled. And No Doubt’s video for Ex-Girlfriend borrowed heavily from Kite – the bathroom assassination is re-staged, almost shot-for-shot, as this video shows.

Dir: Yasoumi Umetsu
Star (voice): Kotomi Naruse, Shingo Oyamada, Goro Shibusawa, Tatsuo Matoba

Armitage III: Dual Matrix

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★★★
“Oppressed robots = clumsy social metaphors, despite some very cool fights.”

It’d probably be best to watch the original film, Poly Matrix, immediately before this, as otherwise, you’ll be kinda hitting the ground running. After those events, Ross Syllabus and “Third” [a model of android which can reproduce] Armitage have set up home with their daughter, who doesn’t know her mother is anything by human; meanwhile Ross operates under an assumed name as a security guard. However, an incident turns him into an unwilling spokesman for robot rights once again, and when he is sent to Earth as a Martian delegate, his daughter Yoko is kidnapped by a faction seeking to reverse his vote. It’s time for Armitage to put aside her chores and kick butt.

If I’m flaky on details, it’s because chapters 10+11 on the DVD were faulty and refused to play. But I don’t think it made much difference. This improves slightly over the original, since it doesn’t get bogged down in android angst, and the action scenes are lengthy and largely entertaining, particularly a finale in which Armitage takes on two relentless, giggling android killers (whose teamwork reminded me of Bambi + Thumper from Diamonds are Forever!). However, despite flashes of brilliance, the coherence of the story, and occasionally the animation, leaves a lot to be desired; too often, you’re left going “Eh?”, in the dark about what’s happening, and why.

For example, the climax takes place on a space elevator, a concept familiar in SF – but there’s no-one at all around. No security, customers, or staff. And Yoko’s kidnapping seems due to sloppy parenting as much as anything. Similarly to the first, there’s little original thought here, though in its defense, the recent release of I, Robot may make this seem less novel than it was on its 2002 release. In the English dub, Armitage is this time voiced by Juliette Lewis, but we stuck to the Japanese track, so can’t comment on her animation debut.

Dir: Katsuhito Akiyama
Star (voice): Ryôka Yuzuki, Hikaru Hanada, Kazuhiro Yamaji, Yuka Imai

Armitage III: Poly Matrix

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★★½
“Why’d they create me?” Seems a valid question to this viewer…

As a rule, we don’t watch dubbed anime, finding it a painful experience; unfortunately, this version, which compacts four OAVs into a feature, is only available in English. However, it’s not too awful, helped considerably by Sutherland’s comfortingly flat tones – in the seven years since this was originally released, his career has been revived, courtesy of 24 [co-star Berkeley, meanwhile, is still struggling to overcome her starring debut in Showgirls]. What does seem to have hurt, is the editing down, which leaves the storyline struggling for cohesion.

Chicago cop Syllabus (Sutherland) arrives on Mars and is immediately thrown into the investigation of a series of “murders”. Quotes used advisedly – what’s being systematically killed are “Thirds”, robots that are almost indistinguishable from humans. He’s paired with local officer Naomi Armitage (Berkeley), who has an aggressive approach and is a Third herself; the two have to solve the case while coming to terms with their own prejudices (Syllabus) or self-esteem, heritage and sense of being (Armitage).

In other words, the usual robot angst found in anime, such as Ghost in the Shell and Battle Angel. And this is really the problem, with little here we haven’t seen, and animation that is nothing special. There’s some imagination in the setting, and interesting hints at political conspiracy, but the detail has apparently been discarded in the race to get everything over in 90 minutes. The full-length, original language version is almost certainly a better place to start.

Dir: Takuya Sato
Star (voice): Kiefer Sutherland, Elizabeth Berkeley, Dan Woren, Wanda Nowicki

Blood: The Last Vampire (animated)

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★★
“Buffy goes East – and gets out of bed on the wrong side.”

Don’t believe the running time: listed at 83 minutes on the DVD sleeve, this is actually under 50, a nasty piece of marketing to make you think you’re getting a full-length movie. Not sure whether an extra 25 minutes would help or harm here: there is certainly room for development, but equally, there is an awful lot of slack which seems designed only to show off whizzy digital animation. Saya is a vampire. She’s also a killer, tasked by…well, it’s never quite made clear who, but she hunts down bat-like monsters who can take human form. The only way to kill them is to make them lose a lot of blood. Very quickly. Being trapped forever in her teenage years, she’s ideally placed to go undercover at a school and investigate mysterious occurrences there.

Set in 1966 for only one tangentially-connected reason, you’re never given enough information to care about Saya or any of the other characters. Mystery is one thing; obscurity another. She is perpetually pissed-off, which while initially appealing, does wear thin before long. I liked how some people spoke English, others Japanese, though this did have me fiddling with the DVD remote, since I thought I was watching a wretched dub. The Western characters seem horribly drawn; was this deliberate, or perhaps our faces just don’t suit anime style? As a standalone item, this is unsatisfying, despite some spectacular gore that will make you sit up and take notice. Give it another five episodes, and you could probably edit a decent feature out of this, but as it stands, it’s worth no more than a rental.

Dir: Hiroyuki Kitakubo
Star (voice): Youki Kudoh, Rebecca Forstadt, Joe Romersa

Bubblegum Crisis

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★★★
“Hardsuits, rogue mecha and day jobs.”

Worthy of note as one of the first pieces of anime made available to an English-speaking audience, (not long after its original 1985 Japanese release), BGC is set in 2032, when Tokyo has been rebuilt, post-earthquake. The Genom corporation are fiddling with Boomers, biomechanical robots of immense strength but with a nasty tendency to run amok. Standing guard are a mysterious team, the Knight Sabers, with their own technological strengths, who alternate between merc work and more altruistic concerns.

Any similarity to Blade Runner is entirely deliberate; the heroine is called Priss, and sings with a band called The Replicants. She, and her three colleagues (Nene, Linna, and Sylia) moonlight from their various day-jobs as the Knight Sabers, each with their own special abilities. The eight episodes in the series combine multiple plot arcs and standalone stories, with mixed effectiveness, though the later ones tend to work better. There’s not much background on the characters, save Sylia, and a tendency to gallop through towards the final fight in a number of the OAVs. There’s a lot of emphasis on the music, but I’m no J-Pop fan, so they needn’t have bothered.

The animation looks a little creaky now, as you’d expect from a show of its age, but also seems to improve as the series progresses – the artists learn what works and what doesn’t. I confess to preferring secondary characters such as Nene, to supposed heroine Priss; when we get to see their lives (as in #8, which has Nene acting as “babysitter” to a teenage girl on a quest to photograph the Sabers), it’s a more fully satisfying experience. Followed by two sequels, Bubblegum Crash and Bubblegum Crisis 2040.

Dir: Various
Star (voice): Kinuko Ohmori, Akiko Hiramatsu, Michie Tomizawa

Burn Up W

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★★★
“T & A = terrorists and armaments…as well as what you’d expect.”

This teeters infuriatingly close to greatness, but eventually succumbs to mediocrity because of a tendency to juvenile smuttiness, that fatally weakens what is, at heart, an intriguing story and setting. The Warriors are a special police group – mostly female, with one token (lecherous) man – sent in to sort out nasty cases. The main thread in the four episodes here, is a virtual drug which can turn the consumer into a mind-controlled killer – or, presumably, anything else desired.

Each episode has largely the same strengths and weaknesses. For example, one part builds to a gripping finale with the team trapped in their own station, but starts with a scene where heroine Rio is selling her used underwear, to a shop specialising in such stuff. Then her male colleague enters, trying to buy it direct from her. This is played for cheap laughs, but comes across as downright creepy to these (admittedly Western) eyes. Same with the last episode, which ends with an unarmed Rio facing a terrorist…who orders her to strip naked. And did I mention the nude bungee-jumping?

I, of all people, have few problems with gratuitous nudity, but when it brings an interesting storyline to a grinding halt and stops the action, even I have to draw the line. If I wanted to watch animated soft-porn, there’s plenty of it out there, and the creators here obviously have enough imagination that they don’t need to ramp up the jiggle factor – Rio is a character in herself, and I especially liked mad sniper Maya. Presumably aimed at the acned teenage boy market, anyone else will likely find themselves intrigued and irritated in equal measure.

Dir: Hiroshi Negishi
Star (voice): Yuka Imai, Maya Okamoto, Ryutarou Okiayu, Sakaru Tange

Golgo 13: Queen Bee

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★★★★
“A tale with plenty of sting, but too much sexual bee-haviour.”

Four stars but no seal of approval? That’s because this is about the most wildly variable animated film I’ve seen. The story and characters are great, but the frequent sex scenes are incredibly tedious and clearly put in solely for the teenage male fan (all pneumatic breasts and moaning). It’s rare for me to say this, but they are genuinely gratuitous, and the film could have coped fine without them.

Between times, there’s certainly plenty going on in terms of plot. Ultra-taciturn hitman Golgo 13 is hired to kill narco-terrorist Queen Bee, who has been sending threatening letters to a presidential candidate. From here an entire web is spun (sorry, failed to come up with a bee analogy!) of deceit, double-dealing and death. The anti-heroine comes across rather better than the anti-hero, since you see more about her background, and she’s certainly a fascinating personality, even in a grim world where no-one is innocent.

The animation uses every trick in the book to mixed effect, with some of the violence particularly well-executed. The tape I saw was dubbed, which is another reason to deny it the seal, though the voice acting here is largely painless (it helps that Golgo 13 has about five lines!). It may yet make it: I’ll likely pick up the subtitled DVD sometime, with a director’s commentary, apparently revealing that the candidate and his adviser were shown as gay lovers in a deleted scene. Frankly, I’d have been happy to trade that for one of the heterosexual encounters.

Dir: Osamu Dezaki
Star (voice, English dub): Denise Poirier, Carlos Ferro, Dwight Shultz, John Dimaggio

Gunsmith Cats: Bulletproof

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★★★★
“Fast, hardware-heavy fun in Chicago, Japanese-style!”

Watching this dubbed was, for once, viable since despite its Japanese origins, it’s firmly set in and around Chicago. So we did sit through some of it in English, but the accents were woefully Cal-girl and thus we’d recommend sticking with the Japanese, even more unlikely though it might be. That out of the way, this is an action-packed romp, in three episodes but effectively one story. Rally Vincent and May Hopkins, one a crack marksman, the other an explosives expert, own a gun store, but are blackmailed by the ATF into helping nail an arms ring. It’s not as simple as it seems, since the perps have connections at a high level, and the services of a former Soviet Special Forces hitwoman.

The episodic structure means there’s never a dull moment and you effectively get three climaxes for the price of one, with the car chase in #2 perhaps my favourite. If it occasionally teeters on the edge of cheesecake – Rally gets her blouse shot open – it’s made clear early on that the heroines have little time for romantic dalliance. Indeed, there’s little time for anything much, including character development, but the story charges on at a great pace, so it’s not as if they’re wasting time.

You can see why Sonoda set it in America, since handguns are illegal in Japan, and the crowded streets would likely impair the auto quotient. Creator Kenichi Sonoda’s fondness for fast cars was apparent in his earlier work, Riding Bean, and by the end of this, Chris had decided she wants a Shelby GT Cobra, just the like the one Rally drives. Drool. :-) A lot of effort went into reproducing Chicago and wiser heads than mine (who have actually been there!) say it’s accurately detailed. Though undeniably great fun, perhaps the most amusement we got was from pretending the opening song was the theme to Saturday Night Live, to which it bears a spooky resemblance…

Dir: Mori Takeshi
Star (voice): Michiko Neya, Kae Araki, Aya Hisakawa