おジャ魔女どれみドッカ〜ン! / Ojamajo Doremi Dokka~n!

Though of course it can’t compare with how the kids who grew up watching this series felt, I was sorry to see Ojamajo Doremi end. It couldn’t have lasted as long as fellow Toei animation One Piece of course, and nor should it have, but I actually hold it in higher esteem than predecessors like Sailor Moon and Digimon. Ojamajo Doremi had so much heart it was deeply touching, and if ever there’s a revival, possibly adapting the still-ongoing light novels, I will certainly be there for it.

Unlike Mo~tto, I didn’t rush through Dokka~n, partly because the translators were still working on it (and their work is much appreciated!), but also because I was a little resistant to finishing the show and knowing there was no more of this sweet, relaxing series for little girls.

Previous series have in large part relied on the introduction of new witch apprentices to mark the start of new eras. Dokka~n does this too – sort of. In the beginning of the series, little baby Hana, heir to the throne of the witching world, decides she is fed up of being a baby and uses magic to make herself an eleven-year-old. A stubborn baby, she thus must learn to fit in with the structures of Japanese elementary school society alongside the other girls while of course still having the mind of a toddler – and some formidable magic powers. Doremi and the gang must care for her – and at the same time continue to work to free the former queen’s predecessor from her enchanted sleep by delving into her past.

The series is paced very slow, but that is no negative point. After all, this series is at its best when it is focusing not on progressing the main plot – though there are very lovely moments in it, not least the point where the curse on magical frogs is lifted – but on peripheral stories. Aiko and her parents’ broken relationship continues to have the series’ heaviest punches, but begins finally to shift towards a happy ending now. New focus falls on classmates like the one with social anxiety and the one who loves to write books about the people she knows, which make for very sweet asides. Cuter still are the little episodes of puppy love, and the not-quite-confession in the last episode is one of the cutest I’ve ever seen. Perhaps I’d like more of Akatsuki and the FLAT 4, who are barely seen this time, but they are perhaps distracting from the more interesting real-world stories the girls face. Onpu has to face failure for the first time. Hazuki knows that going to a specialist school is the best for her, but has promised Doremi she’ll go to middle school with her and is now in a difficult situation. Momoko is faced with the prospect of going back to America, and even if things go Aiko’s way, that may mean returning to Osaka. There are a lot of goodbyes to be said – and if they all decide to become witches after all, the girls must leave behind the human world altogether.

Of course, all this builds up to that staple of Japanese series about friendship between students – the tearjerker graduation episode. Doubled, because there’s also the ‘graduation’ of witch apprentices to full-blown witches to consider. As graduation episodes go, this is one of the best ones, a superb mix of melancholy, dramatic gestures and humour. It makes for a very powerful episode, and one that made me smile throughout.

Weaker parts of the season include the need to have another ‘shop’ gimmick, and having run out of things like flowers and cakes, the girls decide to try making tapestries, which is not the most dynamic or identifiable of activities. Then there is Hana’s pet baby elephant Pao, which is occasionally cute but mostly annoying, and solves the pecuniary problems of the Maho-Dou by...well, upon vacuuming up dark energy released by the former queen’s predecessor through its trunk, pooping out little golden pellets. That’s...that’s charming, that is.

But Ojamajo Doremi does one of the things that is a staple of why I love anime: it starts with the big premise, the girl who stumbles upon a witch and ends up having to become a witch apprentice, and then after being given plenty of time to breathe and develop, becomes about having to separate from your friends, learning parental responsibility, coping with your parents’ divorce and early romances. That’s not something you see in many cartoons, and it’s to be treasured.  

Transformers - G1 season 1

I may have been very keen on Thundercats, and probably consider it the better cartoon today, the cartoon I loved above all others as a young child was Transformers. There's a long list of cartoons I loved and will eventually revisit - MASK, Inspector Gadget, He-Man and She-Ra, plus all the home-grown cartoons like The Raggy Dolls, The Poddington Peas, The Family Ness, Trap Door, Stoppit and Tidyup and The Shoe People. And now that we're making a list I can't leave out the quirky Mysterious Cities of Gold - need to finish Season 2 soon - and its sister Ulysses 31. Or, indeed, that Betamax to the VHS of Transformers that is the Go-Bots. 

For all that I loved the Transformers, though, I can't say that these episodes of the very first season were familiar to me - and they deserve their reputation for being very low-quality in production terms. Of all the big 80s cartoons, only He-Man is this clunky. There are constant colouring errors, with characters that share very similar designs constantly being confused, layering errors and plain bad animation choices. Grimlock and Devastator have robot heads that keep changing. Thundercats had its iffy parts, but every episode of Transformers is stuffed full of them - something compounded by the DVD I was watching, from the Kid Rhino remasters, had gone back to pre-broadcast masters that contained even more animation errors than made it to the original airings, for the sake of better overall picture quality. Luckily, the latest DVDs from Shout! have mostly fixed these problems - but I don't have those. 

My Transformers is really the Transformers of the latter part of the second season and the movie - which I will still defend. I didn't see much of season 3 - I don't think it made it to terrestrial television in the UK, so what episodes I saw were bought on VHS. Similarly, I don't remember a this season either, with only Heavy Metal War as part of my modest video collection. My brother and I didn't know at the time that the Marvel Comics continuity was different from that of the cartoon, so until I rewatched these initial 16 episodes I thought the Dinobots were created to deal with Shockwave but trapped in a tar pit. That's only in the comics - here, they are simply built. If anyone asks about the later need for Vector Sigma to activate new Transformers, you either hand-wave frantically and talk about supercomputers being needed to make intelligent bots but regular ones being able to make simple-minded robots, or you just point to the numerous contradictions within the cartoon (just try to trace the Constricticons' origins) and run away. 

The fact is that Transformers is simply not well thought-out. The plots are clearly utterly thrown-together and often nonsensical. Reasons for the Decepticons retreating can be as simplistic as having some foam on them. In one episode, Skyfire is honoured as having sacrificed himself for the rest, and then after only a couple more, they dig him up when they need a lift and he's alive and well. The pilot episodes end with the Transformers preparing to return to Cybertron...and then they just pretend that never happened. Most egregiously of all, the show never gives adequate reason for the robots to ever need to transform, which is rather the key point of the whole series. Soundwave will turn into a tape player to sneak into a station...but the giant robots can just rip the walls apart and walk in anyway, so why bother? Why does Reflector need to change into a camera to look at a code when the robots all have these capacities in their eyes? There's a vague sense of powering up by transforming - the Dinobots' dinosaur forms are like heavy artillery, Megatron's entire form being a gun makes him more powerful than just using his fusion cannon, and the Autobots who for whatever reason cannot fly get places faster by being vehicles, but the premise is robots in disguise, and given that they do not fool one another and are so much stronger than the puny humans that they have no need whatsoever to fool them, there's never any call for a disguise.

For this first season, I must say that I entirely sympathise with the critics who condemn the cartoon as a poorly-made excuse to sell toys. It's undeniable that this is not a cartoon made out of love for telling a story. A whole lot more effort could have been put into this. The times it looks awesome are far outweighed by the times it looks stupid, the human characters are all absurd - especially 'hacker' Chip Chase, who can somehow completely remote-control a super-advanced living robot on his 80s computer - and Megatron's vague plans to get 'energy' soon becomes bizarre, once he has access to Cybertron and could go and harvest energy anywhere. The cast is also plain outsized, so the likes of Skywarp, Blue Streak and Windcharger aren't exactly unique enough to be well-remembered. 

And yet - there is a certain sparkle here, and it's not just nostalgia talking. There's a reason Transformers excelled beyond various very similar franchises, and it wasn't just the marketing machine, which was also present with its competitors. Even if the series never really gets there with the explanations, the transforming robots thing still captures the imagination and the sound they made for it is perfect. And in common with the Go-Bots and Thundercats - especially once the Lunataks arrived - one of the key factors to Transformers being compelling is that the bad guys are not just cackling maniacs, though Megatron is little more than this, with plenty of hubris. What is crucial, though, is that he is surrounded by such a colourful crew of fellow baddies - the hilarious Starscream, always trying to usurp Megatron and mocking him yet being entirely ineffectual, the hilariously deadpan Soundwave with his awesome shoulder bazooka, and his snappy little streetpunk tape Rumble, who I'm oddly glad became the nicer-looking blue robot despite the well-known controversy. Looking into the extant fandom I found lots of cutesy 'Daddy Soundwave' art, with Rumble and Frenzy as his badly-behaved kids and Ravage and Laserbeak his pets, something which has no more support in canon than Soundwave stroking Ravage in 'Heavy Metal War', but my god it plucked my heartstrings in a funny way. 

This first series was laying the groundwork for something better. In season 2, there would be a lot more development for the primary cast, the animation would gradually improve and the new characters would often add a lot to the dynamic of the teams rather than simply exist somewhere in the background. I still feel the Transformers series is defensible - even good. But that's with a few provisos, and one of those is that it isn't judged purely on its first series. Because much as I enjoy every episode, that's with a fair bit of cringing. 

ドラゴンボール 最強への道 / Dragonball: Path to Greatest Strength / Dragonball Movie 4: The Path to Power

This is something a little different from the other Dragonball movies I’ve seen: it was made in 1996 and was actually the seventeenth theatrical film in the Dragonball series as a whole – so strictly speaking comes after thirteen other films I haven’t seen yet. I thought it would be good to watch it now, because after all there won’t be any spoilers any more, and with it I can move on to DBZ. But I kinda wish I’d waited until after I’d finished and seen some of GT, because…yup, once again this was a retelling of the start of Dragonball. Probably at the time it was a great rush of nostalgia, but y’know, for me, it’s not that long since I saw those first episodes, and then they were all rehashed for the first Dragonball movie, though here the plot speeds along to the Red Ribbon Army arc, condensing it all into the Muscle Tower.

The most notable thing, really, is that the art is in the style Dragonball evolved to, with its distinctive eyes and more rounded faces. I have to say, I prefer the original aesthetic, which had more variety. Yamucha and General Blue in particular look very odd with Trunks’ face and proportions, and though it’s nice having Bulma with hair colour closer to Toriyama’s intentions, and the animation is obviously much more ambitious – in the climactic fight scenes in particular – generally I just feel it’s better to watch the original and this is a nostalgia trip that no longer boasts cutting-edge visuals. It makes me wonder if I’ll consider the first of the Eva remake like this when its visuals, too, are dated.

There’s also the fact that Muten Roshi’s voice actor, so instantly recognisable, had recently passed away when this was produced, and the replacement just doesn’t compare, especially when the scenes here are from when he was about the most powerful character yet introduced.

The story essentially covers once again the introduction of Goku, Bulma, Oolong, Yamucha, Pu-erh, Muten Roshi and his Umigame, and the Dragonballs. Skipping Pilaf, we more or less go to the Muscle Tower, where Metallic is given a makeover and Android 8 is given an inflated role. General Blue is given an ignominious end, no longer the formidable fighter of the original, and General Red is no threat at all, with only Staff Officer Black managing to be formidable. The ending is something a bit different, but let’s face it, no wish to Shen Long is ever going to match up to Oolong’s.

The long and short of it is that there was a time and place for this, and it’s probably more in line with what Dragonball Kai represents now. This doesn’t have the advantages of nostalgia nor up-to-the-minute visuals, so it serves only as a slightly-updated curio.

ドラゴンボール 魔訶不思議大冒険 / Doragon Bōru: Makafushigi Dai-Bōken / Dragonball movie 3: Mystical Adventure

The third Dragonball movie is the last made during the lifespan of the original series (the extent of what I’ve seen so far), though there is one more to watch yet set during the run of the original series produced much later that had a proper nationwide theatrical release rather than screening at the Toei Manga Matsuri. Compared with the last two similar films, it is a whole lot more enjoyable, for while it has a similar unimaginative original plot, it is not a riff on a set-up from the original series but rather a whole new story with familiar characters in unfamiliar roles, which makes for a much more entertaining set-up and some strange scenes that bring together unlikely characters in a very entertaining way.

There are many familiar elements here – Goku and Krillin are training with Muten Roshi and enter a big martial arts tournament, while characters familiar from the Red Ribbon Army are after Dragonballs. Poor little Oopa loses his father to Tao Pai Pai, giving the heroes a noble motive to bring the Dragonballs together, and Tien Shin Han must question his loyalties. But nothing here is quite the same, and there is no Red Ribbon Army in sight.

Instead, Chaozu is now a little emperor in the country of Mifan. It seems his country is initially protected by this alternate universe’s Red Ribbon Army, with General Blue making an appearance early on, but the inner circle around Chaozu is the Crane Hermit and associates – Tien Shin Han, who the Emperor considers his friend, and the formidable Tao Pai Pai. After using and dispatching the unfortunate Pilaf Gang, these three locate six of the seven Dragonballs, but unfortunately for them, it is Oopa’s father Bora who has found the last of them. Travelling to Mifan to attempt to use it as leverage to stop the destruction of their land, they are almost captured, protected only by Muten Roshi and his disciples, who are in town for a martial arts tournament which in one of the film’s two big coincidences is the next day. As contestants are protected by law as guests of the emperor, Bora is safe as long as he says he is a competitor, and he enters intending to win – though gives the Dragonball to Goku for safe-keeping.

In the tournament, after poor Yamucha is knocked out when Muten Roshi uses some dirty tactics from the sidelines, Bora meets his fate at Tao’s hands and Goku, trying to defend him, is knocked away into the distance by a dodonpa. In the second great coincidence, he ends up landing in Karin’s tower, which in this universe apparently doesn’t have whatever enchantment is needed to stop people reaching it by means other than climbing. At this point, things get interesting as a number of things that you can’t see in the real Dragonball unfold: Chaozu is victim of a coup, and his heartbreak seeing his only friend deceive and overthrow him is adorable. Pu-erh and Oolong transform into Chaozu and the Crane Hermit to sneak into the palace with Bulma and Lunch, stealing the dragonballs. And who should help Goku in his fight against Tao but Arale from Dr. Slump? And though she is hit by a dodonpa, she is just as unphased as she was by anything General Blue could throw at her in the main series, and still thinking she’s playing, she helps Goku take care of Tao without all the powering-up he needed to do in the original. And, y’know, throws a huge boulder at him for a bit of fun.

Goku is then able to go to the rescue at the palace, where Sgt. Metallic holding Oopa shows the fun of characters on opposite ends of the teeny and large scales of Toriyama’s world without being particularly notable for their size being juxtaposed. By that I mean that Oopa is not remarked upon as being a tiny little spirit and Metallic is the size of a very huge man but not a giant monster like Goku under the full moon, which somehow brings them into the same general sphere of existence yet still has such variance in scale that Oopa is about the size of Metallic’s hand. It all adds to the fun of the early Dragonball, I think, that casual approach to very silly size differences.

Everything works out, of course, and Chaozu is left delighted by being rescued. Again, this seems overall rather inconsequential, but then, it only takes 45 minutes of the viewer’s time and has enough feel-good moments to be well worth it for any fan. This is what I want from a shounen movie adaptation – a chance to see characters doing things I can’t anywhere else. And if that means an alternate universe, so be it – after all, that’s tended to be how One Piece does its best movie adaptations.  

手塚治虫のブッダ 赤い砂漠よ！美しく/ Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha: The Red Desert! Beautiful / Buddha: The Great Departure

Tekuka, so often called the ‘God of Manga’, never really paid much attention to the original stories he was adapting. When it came to Metropolis, for example, he simply riffed off the impression he got when seeing the poster for the film. When it comes to the life story of the key figure of one of the most significant religions that make up the melting pot of Japanese syncretic faith, one might expect a little more reverence. And reverence there is, even though this account is highly fictionalised – what Tezuka opted to do was to create an original story about the Indian caste system and run it in parallel to the early life of Siddhartha Gautama, providing action and drama to complement the biographical story and bringing the main characters of each strand together as prominent figures in a key battle. Unlike most accounts of the life of Buddha, Tezuka opts to not to take an abstract, historically isolated view of the young prince, in which he is kept in his palace and sheltered until as a young adult he goes out into the world and sees the hardships there, leading to his becoming a mendicant, here he is shown training in martial arts, participating in battle and being exposed at an early age to death, poverty and, as a result, compassion – but being too young to do anything about it. This nuanced version could be argued as bringing a sense of realism and thus maturity, or as being more juvenile because it allows for typical shounen elements like battles, swordplay training, melodrama and cackling battle-freak antagonists, which is an interesting microcosm of the general reputation Tezuka maintains.

The manga ran from 1972 to 1983, and this adaptation contained perhaps the first third of the story, which tallies with reports that there will be a further two parts of this 2011 animation, though it having cost a billion yen to make this one and the result being…not exactly spectacular may throw a wrench into those plans. There is a lot of appeal to the production here, and it’s clear a lot has been spent, but, well, even for a Toei movie it doesn’t exactly look superb. The aesthetic finds an uneasy medium between slick new-millennium character design and Tezuka’s charming caricature style – though it seems the Buddha manga was even more restrained than Black Jack in terms of characters with exaggerated features, reflecting the historical background and reverence due – ultimately ending up with a style that looks slightly retro but mostly a bit generic. The major characters also stick out from the background cast as over-attractive and pale in a rather jarring way – and not just the sheltered prince. There’s a notable lack of that charming, somewhat babyish Tezuka humour I’m certain was in the manga.

Shortly before Siddhartha is born, a lower-caste urchin called Chapra transcends his station in life by aborting an assassination plot at the last moment and instead saving its target’s life, for which he is adopted and raised as noble. Meanwhile, the young Buddha is born and raised in a martial tradition. Sneaking out of the palace, he falls in love with a girl named Migaila, but when the possibility of a relationship reaches his father, she is flogged and has her eyes put out, while he is given an appropriate bride. At first a rather wet child, not apparently divine other than the Lion King-esque gathering of animals for his birth, Siddhartha becomes a warrior, and when his father’s army must clash with that of the rival kingdom of Kosala, headed by Chapra, the two meet – if only for a fraction of a second, where Chapra, poisoned by an arrow, falls just short of killing the prince. Chapra survives thanks the intervention of his magical friend – a small, seemingly eternally young boy named Tatta who can possess animals in the strangest supernatural element of the film – but ultimately the caste system will once again prove its inequalities cannot be held at bay forever.

Though I enjoyed this, liked the unique spin on the traditional story and found the art appealing overall, it fell well short of really wowing me, and structurally was a mess. It may have worked in an ongoing manga paced this way, but in a feature film it was confusing and uneven, resulting in batches of boredom. The voice cast was also odd, for while I’m sure no expense was spared, Toei seem to have decided to bring in a large chunk of the cast of Naruto, including many of the most distinctive seiyuu: Takeuchi Junko (Naruto himself) is the young Capra, while Tatte is Konohamaru (also Pikachu and Chopper). Temari (Paku Romi, in female mode) plays Tatta’s sister, while the slug Katsuya shows up as Siddhartha’s child bride and Hinata goes a little against type as Migaila. Hinata’s seiyuu, Mizuki Nana, was also Collette in Tales of Symphonia, and is joined by Orikasa Ai as the young Siddhartha, who played Genis – as well as the boy in the third One Piece movie and Quatre in Gundam Wing. While there’s much to say for an all-star cast, this one was just too full of distinctive shounen voices – which got distracting.

Overall, well worth seeing, and I want to see more, but this could and should have been a whole lot better. 

ドラゴンボール 魔神城のねむり姫 / Dragonball Movie 2: Majin-jou no Nemuri Hime / Sleeping Princess in Devil’s Castle

The second Dragonball theatrical release was, like its predecessor Curse of the Blood Rubies, released with other Toei movie versions at their little festival and thus ran to only 45 minutes or so. Also like Blood Rubies, it starts with a scene from the original series and gives it a new twist. Whereas that first film was a retelling of a plot arc with its antagonist changed to an original one, here we get the very basic outline – Krillin arrives at the Kame house and Muten Roshi sends him and Goku off to find him a woman as an expedient sort of a test, and they come back with Lunch (or ‘Launch’) – but spins that into a new plot involving a vampire-themed mystery riffing on Sleeping Beauty.

Muten Roshi has heard of a sleeping princess far to the West, so sends the boys off to rescue her as their test. Off the go in an amusing condensed race against one another, while the rest of the original gang – Bulma, Yamcha, Oolong and Puerh, bearing in mind that when this film was released in 1987 Tenshinhan and Chaozu had not yet appeared in the anime – arrive at the Kame House and, believing Roshi’s embarrassed lies, set off after the boys thinking they’ve gone to a theme park.

The sleeping princess is kept by a handsome vampire called, in that very Japanese Shounen way, Lucifer, who amusingly quite obviously has the same voice actor as Vexen in Kingdom Hearts. His minions take down Bulma’s ship and manage to subdue Goku when a cute pink demon thing latches onto his tail, and while Bulma is flattered at first and won over by Lucifer’s good looks, he soon restrains her and reveals he’s going to suck her blood, mwahahaha. Of course, the good guys interrupt and that all goes awry.

When Goku crashes into the large four-poster bed at the centre of the stage Lucifer has set up for Bulma’s execution, it is revealed that the sleeping princess is not a Pichi Pichi Girl after all, but a large diamond. Lunch makes her entrance, in her badass form, stealing it and making her escape, but of course she sneezes before she gets too far and is captured along with the rest. As it turns out, the huge diamond can be powered up by the full moon to fuel a big weapon, but for whatever reason, Lucifer has only now decided to use that to destroy the sun and bring about eternal darkness. The full moon has another effect, though, and Goku sees it and turns into his giant werewolf-ape form, going on a rampage but setting everyone free until Puerh cuts off his tail. They are then able to confront Lucifer at last, and contend with the terrible new weapon.

Apart from the huge question of why Lucifer has never used this huge laser gun before, when meddlesome warriors weren’t running amok in his castle, the plot is simple and workable enough and it’s a nice alternate introduction to Lunch. There are the usual laughs based on stupidity and perversion, and some big silly monsters to have exaggerated fights with. The standard of art and animation are really no better than an average episode of the series, but it was still a worthwhile addition to the anime and had rather more substance than the first short movie adaptation.

One more Dragonball film to come, then one made much more recently, then I’ll move on to DBZ at last!

ラゴンボール神龍の伝説 / Dragonball: Shenron no Densetsu / Legend of Shen Long / Dragonball: Curse of the Blood Rubies

This, the first of Toei’s many theatrical releases based on Dragonball, is a fun curio in several ways. Firstly, it was the basis for the amusing Taiwanese Dragonball rip-off The Magic Begins. Secondly, it was the first Dragonball ever to appear in English, though it didn’t take off – which is probably a good thing, because otherwise we might have had Son Goku renamed Zero and Bulma being Lena in the long-term. Thirdly, it has been dubbed into English no less than four times – though those are four different versions I have no interest in watching.

Like many Toei movies, including those for Digimon, Ojamajo Doremi and the first handful of those for One Piece, this was screened as part of a Toei event alongside two other Toei properties (in this case, Kinnikuman and Gegege no Kitarou), so its running time is not the 80+ minutes one might expect from an animated feature, but only around 50. Despite this brevity, the film does a very good job of truncating the entire first arc of Dragonball into a neat little package with only small alterations. Yes, rather than providing an original story, this first film went back to the beginning, to Goku being a strange, lonely monkey boy who had never seen another human being until Bulma showed up, to Yamcha being equal to Goku and scowling like a bad guy, to Kame-sennin being the strongest fighter in the world. Most of the major events bringing together the initial cast get repeated in a satisfactory and unrushed manner, with only the side-trip to the kame house seeming a bit extraneous when separated from the need to see a fan-favourite character.

To neaten things up, instead of Pilaf and his silly sidekicks, there is a new antagonist – a gourmet overlord who wants the dragonballs to give him food that will finally satisfy his tastes. Instead of Shu and Mai, we get Pasta and Vongo, who actually do pose a threat to the gang, plus a little girl called Panji who sets the action in motion by going to find someone to help rid her land of the gourmet monster. Handily, the overlord has already gathered most of the Dragonballs, so that with Goku’s and Muten Roshi’s, it doesn’t take long until Shen Long makes his appearance. The brilliant, iconic first wish made by Oolong is replaced here by a heartfelt one for a happy ending rather than bathos, but that’s a decision that makes sense for a film.

Brisk, simple and well-adapted, this early release really adds nothing to Dragonball, but is still entertaining to watch – and offers a chance to reminisce for those who haven’t seen the early episodes in a very long time. 

ドラゴンボール/ Dragonball

So then, here is one of the big ones. In any way you can think of – impact, influence, commercial success – Dragonball is one of the biggest manga and anime there have ever been. Animated by Toei between 1986 and 1989, the title has had a direct influence on about every shounen action series that has followed, especially in Jump.

My personal connection to it, however, was minimal. Unlike many of my friends and peers, even those with little interest in anime, I never watched it as a child. I never had satellite TV, and it was not on terrestrial channels, so as with Sailor Moon, I was loosely aware of the phenomenon but not involved in it. Until I decided to start watching from the beginning, my only exposure to Dragonball had been watching one random episode of Z (about Kid Buu), playing some SNES fighting game circa 1995 a friend had imported/pirated and reading the crossover chapter of the One Piece manga. To this day, I have no idea who Vegeta or Trunks are beyond their appearances and basic relationships with the other characters, and know of the likes of Great Saiyaman and Frieza only through seeing pictures, cosplays and the like. Also, having only seen the original Japanese version, I am liable to blink in confusion if I hear Yajirobe sounding like a big barrel-chested guy instead of a brat or Karin called Korin. But I have actually watched all 153 episodes of the original series (plus the two cute animated safety announcements that were made) and consider myself well-versed in Dragonball lore now – if not Z or GT.

The story is well-known – wide-eyed and innocent but immensely strong Son Goku is the guardian of one of the seven dragonballs, which he believes contains his grandfather’s spirit. One day he meets Bulma (‘Bloomer’), a rich, spoiled girl who is nonetheless a genius inventor, and is searching for the seven balls that will grant any wish. And so they set off to find the rest, meeting several friends and adversaries along the way, the first handful of which follow the loose pattern of the companions in Journey to the West until that gets dropped altogether, save for the throwaway final arc of the series inspired by the Princess Iron Fan segment of the story – which gave me an itch to watch the 1940s Chinese animation of it! With help from the wise, perverted and generally awesome Kame-sennin, the group actually manage to complete their quest several times, only for greater and greater threats to face them as Goku and his friends get stronger and stronger, and the need to summon Shen Long with the Dragonballs becomes more and more urgent.

Dragonball’s strength is that like what is arguably its successor, One Piece, it is silly and adorable, but can switch to being serious and moving. Early on, there’s even a meta joke about Dragonball being, after all, a gag manga, and it’s full of jokes about naughty parts, farts, perversion and stupidity. And this suits it very well indeed – to the extent I’m worried about Dragonball Z and its reputation for being over-serious and obsessing over battles with endless charging-up and silly speeches. When I got into anime Dragonball Z was hated for that reason. It will make me sad if the humour and fun is lost, but then again, it makes me sad to know the likes of Yumcha and Tenshinhan – currently on-course to being some of the most powerful warriors ever to have lived – will soon be considered useless weaklings. I like those guys and it’s sad that they will be a joke by the time everyone’s going super-saiyan, especially when in the Dragonball world, a major power-up is as simple as drinking the right magical water. And it would be nice to see Oopa again!

There are numerous arcs in this long series, from initial scuffles with the silly Pilaf to the long, long conflict with the Red Ribbon Army, which I must say outstays its welcome after General Blue’s defeat. There are several tournaments, and the rather pitch-perfect battle with Piccolo Daimaou, which seems like it will drag as it extends into a timeskip, but actually sustains itself though a third iteration of the ‘Tenkaichi’ tournament, especially with the entertainment of seeing Goku grown.

Dragonball is a comedy action series. It doesn’t take itself seriously, and nor should it. It is full of stupid situations and throws in everything it wants to, from invisible men to mecha, from talking turtles to God himself (in unique form, of course). Nowhere else would you find a character like Mr. Popo, who is often cited as a version of a golliwog but is actually one of the best characters in the whole thing, clearly not human, and apparently the second most powerful being in the universe at his introduction – though I’m confused as to why he doesn’t become the next Kami-sama, which was apparently what he was preparing for, but is stuck in a servant role. His dub speaking voice is also not a good decision at all.

There’s not a big leap between Dragonball and Dragonball Z, despite another time-skip – only as much there is between seasons of Ojamajo Doremi, to take another Toei series as an example. Dragonball Z episode 1 aired the week after Dragonball episode 153. But for me, I will take a break from it now, and watch the three Dragonball movies after a while before I start on the mammoth task of getting through Z. I just hope it doesn’t shatter my liking of what is after all a great, silly, uncomplicated and free-wheeling series. I have to say, I’m not optimistic. However, Dragonball surprised me by being great, and actually deserving its immense reputation. So I will have to wait and see.  

Movies: 1 - link
2 - link 
3 - link
4 - link

First impressions, 01.02.08: Watched ep 1 of DragonBall in Japanese. Bulma’s so loathsome. She shoots a little boy in the head wanting to kill him, manipulates him with lies and her sexuality, and the first episode of this monumental landmark series ends with her wetting herself. Nice

白蛇伝 / Hakujaden / The Tale of the White Serpent

That this was so, so much better than Shounen Sarutobi Sasuke in just about every way – except perhaps consistency of action and coherence of narrative – at first made me quite annoyed I’d seen that film first. Why did Toei follow up a very impressive first feature film (also Japan’s first feature-length anime in colour and as far as I can discern only their second feature-length anime ever) with one of decidedly lower quality? Watching it the way I did made me totally underestimate Toei’s animation standards in the late fifties. But then I grew to think it was better this way – for Shounen Sarutobi Sasuke would have been much more of a disappointment and I wouldn’t have the pleasant surprise of Hakujaden being so much better.

For 1958, there is a lot of impressive stuff here – and it is clearly a new studio with something to prove pulling out all the stops. It may not look anything close to as good as 50s Disney (the closest contemporary being the classic Sleeping Beauty), but for the first colour feature animation the country ever produced, long before anime was the seething mass of studios it is today, it has moments that are greatly impressive. The scene with a dragon has some clever work with angles and objects approaching the camera that reminded me of the brilliant chase sequence in The Thief and the Cobbler, and part of the plot is basically an excuse to show a lot of very carefully-done animation of performers at a festival. The animators also seem to have a grasp of making characters seem to have weight that gets forgotten for Sarutobi Sasuke, and fight scenes – both earthy ones between silly animals and fantastical ones where monks are blown away by great gusts of wind – work so much better.

The plot is unwieldy, though, especially compared with Disney’s slickness, and has to be ponderously explained by a narrator. In an opening sequence that I like to think made at least a few in the audience think they were in for a full film of still images and puppets, a young boy named Xu Xian buys a white snake at a market, but is told he cannot keep it. Unbeknownst to him, the white serpent is a youkai, the snake princess Bai Niang. When Xu Xian is older, Bai Niang, along with the fish she has transformed into a servant girl, acquaints herself with Xu through music. The fish girl, Xiao-Chin, leads Xu Xian’s little animal friends (a panda and a red panda, very similar to designs for Sarutobi Sasuke’s animals but better-drawn and with far less horribly-recorded voices) to her mistress’s shamisen, and they are soon united. However – and here it gets a bit confused – the animals then take a dragon down from a pillar, only for it to come to life, carry them through the skies and drop them in the local treasure house, where – through theft or magic – two pretty stars end up in the possession of the lovers. Using some sort of tracking, one assumes, the local police force shows up and poor Xu Xian gets exiled. Bai Niang slips away, her palace only an illusion. Xu Xian is unable to enjoy the festivities of the country/province he is exiled to, and trouble is nearby: the exorcist Fa-Hai knows of Bai Niang and wants to rid Xu Xian of the evil spirit. He does battle with her and prevails, robbing her of her human form. With the last of her strength, Bai Niang projects a human image of herself leaving the world so that Xu Xian will be able to see her disappear – only he chases the phantasm and ends up falling off a cliff. The only way to save him is for Xu Xian to give up her immortality, as for doing so she is granted a flower of life from what I’m guessing is the Jade Emperor. With the help of all their allies, love wins through and there’s a rather artificially bittersweet farewell for the ending.

It’s rather convoluted, but I’m assuming that’s because it’s based on an established Chinese folk tale, which also gives the plot some real strengths – like the way the antagonist is not evil but doing what he truly thinks is the best thing he can. Toei chose this Chinese story for, to my mind, three reasons – first, because according to Wikipedia, the Toei president wanted a ‘note of reconciliation’ with China after the atrocities of WWII. Second, because Princess Iron Fan had been so influential, and this may have been an attempt to look like part of a legacy. And third, because the story had already been made into a successful 1956 live-action film and was thus familiar to the public.

Though the plot is clumsy and the pacing odd – for example, what ought to be the action building to a climax is punctured by a long scene of animals having a scrap to see who’s strongest – there is much to admire here, including surprisingly high-quality animation and some great experimentation with visual effects. Well worth seeing for the historical significance, but enjoyable either way. Also currently the oldest anime I’ve ever seen – until I get to the Momotaro feature film. Which will finally be going back far enough that Rintaro is not involved: his first-ever job was on Hakujaden!

も～っと!おジャ魔女どれみ/ Mo~tto! Ojamajo Doremi

Though I’ve been watching Doremi for years now, it’s only with this series that I’ve really started to love it. I suppose it’s quite telling that while it took me six months to watch Sharp, I watched the full fifty episodes (plus rather surreal short movie) of Mo~tto in under four weeks. It’s really the only series I’m watching just now that leaves me wanting more each time – and it’s a silly, playful comedy about little girls, for little girls. But at the same time, it’s very well-done.

After the climactic action of Sharp, the Ojamajos were again left without magical powers, having sacrificed their crystals to save Hana-chan from a deadly fever. But involved here is the fate of a very powerful witch destined to be the new queen, as well as the politics of bringing the witch and human worlds back together – and so the queen proclaims that the gang can be restored as Witch Apprentices, as long as they convince every member of the witch high council who opposes their restoration that they are worthy. For whatever reason, the way they are to convince these high witches of their worthiness is to bake cakes for them, which sometimes gets a bit Yakitate!!. To help them in this task, the Queen introduces them to Momoko, a blonde Japanese girl who moved to New York at a young age and forgot most of her Japanese, but there met a witch named Majo Monroe (who even has Marilyn’s beauty spot), and from her not only learned magic but how to be a pâtissière. Meanwhile, Hana does not cope well being taken away from her ‘mamas’ to be kept in a magical kindergarten, as is traditional in the magical world, a situation that comes to a head when the lingering spirit of the queen-before-last, responsible for the curse that turns witches whose cover is blown in the human world into frogs, takes notice of Hana and curses her to hate vegetables.

Thus, several plot strands run concurrently – the various dessert-making exams, more or less replacing the last season’s health tests; the heartache of missing the child you bonded with, which after a while turns into the attempt to make Hana like vegetables again by disguising them in different foods or changing the circumstances in which she is eating; and Momoko’s attempts to fit into Japanese society again when she is culturally very much American and doesn’t have a very good grasp of honne and tatemae. This last part spreads out to encompass the various other little stories of girls in Doremi’s class, including the other ojamajos, and is very much the backbone of the whole series, and its heart. It’s what makes the series much more interesting than the last ones, for while it covers similar ground to the ones in Sharp revolving around the young wizards (who I was quite sad to see were never mentioned again, even by Oyajide), they were much better. There’re some very touching little stories here, including ones revolving around classmates old and new: one girl is a hikkikomori who needs friends just like Doremi; another wants to be best friends with the writer girl who idolises Aiko. The SOS trio is split up, and one very cute boy wants to join in the terrible comedy action. A new smart boy is in Doremi’s class, who rather oddly is the second character voiced by Takeuchi Junko (or third if you count a female witch who happens to look just like her first character Kimitaka), which is a slightly strange choice given that her voice, best known as Naruto and the original Gon, is so distinctive. He comes into conflict with proud Tamaki, as does straightforward Momoko, but in reconciling some interesting ideas about racism, arrogance and tact get explored. These are the sort of episodes that really flesh out characters and make them interesting, and it’s these that make me so interested in what happens next.

Momoko’s seiyuu finally provides a strong link with Demashita! Powerpuff Girls Z, which always seemed to me a poor imitation of Ojamajo Doremi – previously other main Ojamajo girls played minor characters in PPGZ, Hazuki having been Miss Keane and Onpu having been rather oddly having been Sedusa, but Momoko was Bubbles herself. She’s an interesting voice actress, having learned English while at an international school at Austria, and thus being seen as a specialist in English. Her pronunciation is certainly far from natural, but it’s definitely a step up from a lot of supposed English-speakers in anime. She was previously on the cast – as the cool guy Masaru – but now she really gets to shine, and though it took a little while I soon warmed to her. Though she looked like she was…really designed to be a white girl but then it was decided that’d be too alien and turned into a blonde Japanese girl (in a world of natural blue and purple hair, mind), it allowed for some interesting things that aren’t often covered in anime, like xenophobia and tolerance.

A strange thought occurred to me when at one point I watched a new episode of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and it struck me that the two are really very similar. Several of the girls are much like those of the popular pony cartoon’s so-called ‘mane six’, there are similarities between the Magical World and Equestria, and the way stories are told when an individual main character causes problems when facets of their personality are exaggerated certainly has some crossover. Of course, Ojamajo Doremi isn’t as slick, as widely-lauded or as funny as MLP:FiM, but I have to say that nothing in the season and a half that show has produced so far has inspired the same sort of feelings I had when Aiko’s father lost his job and tried to drive his daughter away to have a better life with her mother.

少年猿飛佐助 / Shounen Sarutobi Sasuke / Boy Sarutobi Sasuke / Magic Boy

Released in Japan in the last few days of 1959, this is the oldest anime I have yet watched. It was Toei’s second animated feature film, after Hakujaden, and as far as I can tell only the third animated feature film Japan ever produced, the first being 1945’s black-and-white Momotarou, which today is looked at slightly askance for being made under a regime after all allied to Nazi Germany. This film and Hakujaden were released about three months apart from one another in the US, the first of a slew of Toei films to be released in the States, until 1966 and Gulliver’s Space Travels made it clear that the idea wasn’t working – so American kids missed the period where Toei’s films actually got really good, for example with Puss ‘n Boots.

I can see why the release of this film was unspectacular. Having to work from the (reasonable) premise that American kids in the 50s didn’t really know what ninjutsu was, MGM tried to make everything more universal – ninja arts became generic magic, the idea of ninjas isn’t raised at all and there’s no attempt to convey that Sarutobi Sasuke is a legendary figure in Japan not too far removed from Robin Hood in the English-speaking world, thus already familiar to the audience. What comes over – from what I’ve seen of the dub – is something quite awkward and unwieldy, like a drab Peter Pan vs a witch story.

And the fact is that this is a very, very difficult film to attempt to detach from its Japanese origins, because beyond the opening scenes – which are by far the worst thing about the film – it is very, very Japanese.

It’s the opening that gets the film its reputation as derivative of Disney. This is true, but not to the extent many critics would have you believe, especially as I suspect many of those watched the dub, which introduces more songs. Young Sarutobi Sasuke lives in the forest with his big sister, making friends with all the animals of the forest (who speak in annoying baby-talk) and – appropriately, given that his name means ‘Monkey Jump’ – swinging through trees with monkeys. Amongst these animal friends is Bambi…no wait, Eri, who is very much a Bambi rip-off. When Eri gets in trouble with a hawk and ends up in a lake, he is attacked by a mysterious salamander. Sarutobi and the little deer’s mother save him, but at the cost of the latter’s life, though there thankfully the Bambi derivations end. The salamander just then decides to reveal itself to be a powerful evil spirit, a hideous woman in the oni/yama-uba/hone-onna tradition. To fight her, Sasuke realises he must learn ninjutsu. After a rather confused encounter with some bandits and the demon, Sasuke stumbles across the sennin/hermit Tozawa Hakuun (Presumably a descendant of Tozawa Hakunsai) who can teach him the ways of the ninja. Along with his sister, their animal friends, a little girl the bandits almost didn’t have the heart to kill and historical feudal lord Sanada Yukimura (played by a young Nakamura Katsuo, who would have a distinguished acting career and return to voice acting after several decades for Steamboy), Sasuke returns after three years to put an end to the demon – who hasn’t honestly done very much harm in that time.

The main problems with this film are its mixed animation quality and its pacing. Sometimes there is such fluidity in the animation that it rivals the Disney it aspires to emulate – two scenes in particular are remarkable: one of the demon doing a geisha-style dance that’s very obviously traced from live-action in the Snow White tradition, but another where Sasuke climbs up a mountain that I’m not sure could have been done that way. This latter scene is the only time there’s believable weight behind the boy’s movements, and a lot of reason the animation looks poor near the start is that characters sort of float, and if they fall, they never seem heavy at all. The art is very mixed, the characters constantly going off-model and some jarring filtered photographs used for the backgrounds. But this was a studio in its infancy (including being Rintaro’s second anime job), and the weightlessness becomes acceptable once Sasuke can fly and shoot fireballs and walk on water.

Overall, a piece of animation history well worth seeing, with occasional bursts of charm, style and technical excellence, tempered by a lot of problems. I’d avoid the dub, too: it’s a liberal adaptation that freely changes names and even events – at the end of the film, for example, the dub and my subtitles both had Sasuke agreeing to enter Yukimura’s service, but what he actually says is that he’s just a kid, and goes skipping off. Not Toei’s best, nor genre-defining, but well worth the watch.

おジャ魔女どれみ# / Ojamajo Doremi #/ Ojamajo Doremi Sharp

The different series of Ojamajo Doremi almost don’t count as such, seeing how after the season finale, invariably a cliffhanger about the girls no longer getting to be witches, the first episode of the next season airs the very next week. So it was with the beginning of this season, and so it was again at its end.

However, the seasons seem very much to have been conceived as separate, whole storylines with a good sense of progression and strong themes to define them. The first season revolved around Doremi and co learning to be witches, then taking part in a collection quest while having to face opposition from the mysterious Onpu. By the end of that season, Onpu was more ally than antagonist, but still had the wrong attitude to magic, and it was that which provided the climactic action.

We join Doremi and co given a new chance to be witch apprentices. Through coincidence – or fate – Doremi and co go to the magical world and happen to witness the birth of a new witch from a flower in the Queen’s garden. Naming her Hana-chan, they are now responsible for raising the baby. The first half of the series is more or less concerned with raising Hana, who is adorable but whose strong magical abilities cause problems. The second revolves around Oyajide, the collection quest summarily dispensed with, returning to the Wizard World and then conspiring to kidnap Hana to ransom her for more territory. He is aided by four young wizards, who are more or less counterparts to Doremi and co, though most of the time they manage to get hold of Hana, they just hand her to Oyajide at the wrong time, and he ends up on the receiving end of a spell from the Ojamajos and goes spinning off, Team Rocket-style.

These larger storylines are peppered with one-offs, both character-developing and throwaway. Most revolve around the theme of family – we have Aiko (the tomboy and thus inevitably my favourite) trying to reconcile her family, Doremi and Pop learning the value of their sisterly bond in the short movie (aired between two Digimon movies) and even see Majo Rika’s mother, a lovely but clumsy old dear who has the same habit of saying ‘Ara ara, maa maa’ as Alicia from Aria. Then there are numerous little stories, such as trying to help the fat girl diet before finally just accepting her as she is, and then in the last few episodes the tone swings to that pleasantly non-serious atmosphere of a cute anime going for melancholy as it looks like only a great sacrifice can save Hana-chan from her sudden fever.

It’s almost as if to offer proof that this is an anime for young girls and not for Nanoha fans, the priority being a mother and looking after a baby gets. Hana is more than a doll, and sometimes it’s hard for the girls to care for her in the right away, after all only being children themselves, but they love her very much and regard themselves as Hana’s ‘Mama’. For her part, she’s very cute, always causing problems, and the contrast between the hapless baby and her huge magical power is one of the charming points of the series. Doremi and the others are on occasion tested by the witches to ensure they are raising Hana right in a series of tests, and the writers prove themselves equal to Peach-Pit in taking characters formerly hard to like but then very loveable with an examiner who starts out prickly but eventually softens – as if Onpu were not evidence enough. Recurring comic characters from the first season who take the exam alongside the girls are hilarious, with the examiners Mota and Motamota both raising babies who they brilliantly call Teki and Tekipaki, and if the octopus/squid love story from the first season seemed ill-judged, their hilarious baby Atarimeko-chan more than makes up for it.

There is almost nothing in this series that isn’t cute, but it is also smart, likeable and can be quite moving when it likes. The only thing I could do without is sucking at a baby’s nose to clear its sinuses, but that may just be culture shock…

Series three: here

One Piece Movie 8: エピソードオブアラバスタ 砂漠の王女と海賊たち/ Episode of Alabasta: the Desert Princess and the Pirates

The real question for this film is…why?

I thought it would make for quite a good idea. Going back to one of the more memorable One Piece arcs and giving it the big-screen, big-budget, bravura animation treatment. After all, Studio Pierrot’s films for their Jump properties often look far, far better than the weekly television show – the most recent Bleach film in particular – and as for just going over the material of the series but making it look nicer, well, that just about worked for Evangelion and Gurren Lagann.

But the trouble is…other than the very last scene – the highlight of the arc – in which Luffy and co hold up their arms to show the sign that links them to Vivi, it really doesn’t look very much better than the weekly series, and at some points far worse. Sure, there are some shots where whole armies are clashing, far beyond what got shown on the series, but mostly it’s jarring CG that doesn’t look right at all and is obviously the same thing copied over and over. There are some lovely fluid moments in the fights, but there were some impressive moments in the series, too, especially in the Sanji/Bon Kurei fight. Here, far too often characters go off-model. So if it doesn’t look much better than the weekly show, that just leaves the retelling of the story.

It doesn’t work. People who don’t know the story aren’t going to know what’s going on at all. It’s an attempt to cram a whole arc into a single film, which means not only do a lot of nice details get left out (Mr Prince, Usopp’s hilarious hammer bluff), but the fights get truncated into nonsensical little snippets that would be better left out or incidental. And the only thing really added is a tiny flash-back for Robin that we wouldn’t see in the series until a fair bit later.

Plus this has always been an arc I’ve found problematic. When I read the manga version back in January 2007 (which was a while after I’d seen the animated version), I wrote, ‘It’s often cited as the highlight of One Piece so far, and while I prefer it to Skypiea or Arlong Park, I really don’t think it’s a great arc. It’s just too sloppy, and I don’t buy that Crocodile’s big plan was to frame the king of a country, start a civil war, make sure a big fight happened in the square in front of the palace, reveal all his plans to the King, kill him and steal his secret weapon then blow up everyone in the square with a bomb, blame the King, seize power and go after the world. I mean, what? I think it’s mostly the bomb part that seems tacked-on. However, One Piece revels in using every cliché in the book to tug at the heartstrings, especially brave sacrifices, and I can’t deny that there’re some really great moments of sheer uplifting cheesiness.’

That still holds. Crocodile had all the cards, had the king captive and the whole kingdom fighting, and still decided he needed a big bomb and that the time to interrogate the king to find the hidden weapon was in the middle of the war, knowing his minions were fighting against powerful opponents. Especially when truncated to its bare bones, I don’t think that the overarching plot works that well – the only time I’ve ever had such a complaint when it comes to One Piece.

This probably ranks as the most pointless animated companion piece to a series I’ve seen yet. At least the next one, another retelling of an existing arc, adds a different flavour by reimagining it with characters who weren’t yet in the series.

デジモンアドベンチャー / Digimon Adventure (Digimon movie 1)

I watched the first Digimon movie in June 2007, and even then I’d had it sitting about for about three years before I got around to it, thinking I’d see the series first. No need, though – it was, after all, only twenty minutes long. Besides, it was the first Digimon anime to get released, on March 6, 1999 - one day before the series began.

I was very surprised by it, in fact. I had expected a silly, cheap, babyish piece of animation much like the first episodes of the series. Instead, I found that it was much closer in mood to Tonari no Totoro than to the series, and nicely animated too. It would be something you could show to non-anime fans with little embarrassment, I wrote – unlike the first episodes of the main Digimon series.

And besides, it was the directorial debut of Mamoru Hosoda, acclaimed director of Summer Wars and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time – not that I knew this at the time. And while the Digimon series is ultimately about crudely-drawn juveniles who get cutesy little monsters that eventually evolve – or, rather, digivolve – to fearsome fighting machines in a fantasy world, this is about two very little kids who find and care for a mysterious creature that eventually helps them avert a disaster in their own city. It’s got the kind of charm and humanity it took the series itself many months to find, and all in a very short running-time. Oh, and let us not forget the superb use of Ravel to accompany the action.

It’s a little unfair to treat the first Digimon movie as a pilot for the series, because in all honesty, it’s better than Digimon generation 1 ever managed to be again. If the entire series had been like this, we would have had a very, very different series overall.

(Expanded from original impressions written 8.6.07)

One Piece Movie 6: オマツリ男爵と秘密の島 / Omatsuri-danshaku to Himitsu no Shima / Baron Festival and the Secret Island

The sixth One Piece movie was rather different from what I had been expecting. It had a weird, weird art style, which put me in mind of the episodes of Naruto where the art gets really sloppy so that the animation can be exceptionally fluid. Despite the parallel, though, and despite the movie budget here, the visual effect actually wasn’t so impressive and Oda’s exaggerated expressions really didn’t look right in the style – a problem compounded by them being held far too long. While it’s respectable to try something different, I was not very keen on the aesthetic, and ended up suspecting too much of the budget went on the impressive CG – because most of the One Piece movies have superior animation and art.

On the other hand, the plot grew from something really unimaginative (The Davy Back Fight – the movie!) into something very dark, with some genuinely nightmarish visuals. Some of the decisions made towards the end were quite brave…but it’s still probably been the One Piece movie I’ve enjoyed least.

Only later did I discover that this was the first feature film directed by Hosoda Mamoru, who only a year later would make the beautifully-told and very nice-looking Toki-o Kakeru Shoujo and then the stunning Summer Wars. He had previously only worked on episodes of Ojamajo Doremi and Digimon, as well as the first two half-hour Digimon films. Despite the latter two plus a third from another director being truncated into ‘Digimon The Movie’ for the West, this was his first feature-length work as a director.

Well, I can’t say I’m not pleased he got the chance. He’s a big star now. I just wish I’d liked his One Piece film more.

(Expanded from impressions, 29.5.07)