ストリートファイター II MOVIE / Street Fighter II Movie / Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie

It was time, today, to get my 1995 VHS of SFII: The Animated Movie out, mostly for the nostalgic laughs. It’s a very, very silly film made yet more comical by the silly, hammy dub, full of lines that were much-quoted in my youth: ‘You worthless pile of excrement!’ ‘My beautiful face is ruined! You bitch I’ll make you suffer!’

But for the time, given the other feature films being made at the time, and beside the terrible anime made for other fighting game series (like Tekken’s), this really isn’t bad. It’s actually pretty good-looking, well-paced and smoothly animated for an anime from the 90s – obviously not up there with Ghost in the Shell or Princess Mononoke, and with some rather odd facial expressions and funny muscle-men bodies, not to mention the silly soft porn meant for the teenaged male audience (bizarrely, the version we had kept a shot of Chun-li's breasts but not one of her rear), but still on the good side. It nicely sets up its premise and makes Bison more sinister than in any other media up to that point, it works in good solid flashbacks for Ryu and Ken and it finds space for all the SSFII characters to make at least a cameo, although most could do with a few more minutes’ screentime, and it does a good job of giving Ryu and Guile some time as point-of-view characters. It’s all very much to a formula and it’s hard to care that much about these super-powered strongmen with chests eight times the size of a normal person’s, but this probably remains to this day the best feature film to come from a fighting game.

ブラック・ブラッド・ブラザーズ/ Black Blood Brothers

When I saw the first episode of Black Blood Brothers, I thought it had potential to be a real gem of a series. While it was released amidst a peculiar proliferation of supernatural shows, its take on vampire lore stood out as somewhat different from the rest. When a modern-day shipping vessel is boarded by armed men, the vampire kicks some serious arse, stopping bullets in mid-air, displaying magnificent skills with a sword and enormous strength, and wearing a natty long coat with a matching Guy Fawkes hat - both in a fetching shade of red. So far, nothing new. But that’s not mentioning how the vampire has a little brother, a sweet little befanged blonde kid, and when this young sibling annoys him, rather than a typical brothers’ scuffle, the vampire uses telekinesis to slam the poor boy onto the deck so hard it dents it. And it’s oddly enough a great moment.

The two of them are going to a safe zone for ‘Black Bloods’, or vampires. However, all is not peaceful in the community. The ‘Kowloon Child’, a kind of vampire who can infect and control a victim just by biting them (as opposed to having to share blood), is causing problems, and our hero has a history with them.

I liked Black Blood Brothers. Most of the characters were well-designed, well-voiced and some of them had some pretty cool fighting skills. The back-story in London was interesting as it unfolded. However, the trouble is that there just isn’t enough of it. I watched twelve episodes, and thought, ‘Oh good, the exposition’s over. Now the real story can begin.’ But that was it. To tell you just how surprised I was, I seriously thought that I had one episode to go even AFTER I’d already watched episode twelve.

So while the characters, the world and the concept all appealed to me, the twelve episodes just didn’t satisfy. Twelve episodes isn’t necessarily insufficient; there are plenty of series that tell a full story and make their mark in twelve eps – that’s still as much screen time as two movies, after all. But Black Blood Brothers just doesn’t pace itself right. It introduces so many factions that you don’t really get to know any of them. You get some flashbacks, and the twist in them gets unveiled, but they really feel like vignettes, and that there’s plenty more story to come. The bad guys appeared too briefly and were ultimately too inconsequential for their defeat to feel like it supported the whole story.

Perhaps there’ll be another series. The source material is after all a series of novels. But this first taster really feels unfinished, and as such is like a bloodsucking session interrupted – no doubt tasty and seemingly rather erotic, judging by this series – but ultimately unsatisfactory.

Try Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust for a partial story that nevertheless stands well alone.

(originally written 18.1.07)

しにがみのバラッド/ Shinigami no Ballad

At the opposite end of the cute anime spectrum from Bokusatsu Tenshi Dokoro-chan is this fellow short OVA. Shinigami no Ballad’s six episodes revolve around different human lives touched by Momo, a sweet young Shinigami (god of death) who cannot help herself intervening when she knows she can make a difference to a tragic situation. Thus we have her, along with her black cat Daniel (played by the seiyuu for Mai-HiME’s Mikoto, Ai Shimizu, obviously a girl much equated with cats!), helping an aggrieved boy to redirect his anger away from those who don’t deserve it, or playing the Ghost of Christmas Present to the spirit of a girl. All, perhaps inevitably given the subject matter, infused with a great deal of bittersweet melancholy.

The first episode was my favourite, dealing with the feelings of guilt and denial that can be felt by one who loses a loved one, but other episodes also brought a sympathetic smile to my face. But other than the two kids in the first episode, I can’t say that any of the other characters were really memorable for me, nor that Momo herself made much of an impression, barely appearing in most episodes, and always a somewhat distant, if beautiful figure. That’s the trouble with such an episodic anime: unless the characters that link the disparate elements are really likeable, familiar or both, each plot must be judged on its own merits as though an entirely new series, and weaker ones stand out all the more for it. That said, the show began to feel a little repetitive, even after only a few episodes.

Stylistically, the anime is very well-conceived, much like director Tomomi Mochizuki’s previous project, Zettai Shounen (which I really should resume watching soon). We see a fair few brave decisions, from bizarre camera angles to very realistic facial movements on very non-realistic faces. The colour palate changes subtly for different moods and levels of reality, and plots are generally formulaic, but very tight and well-paced.

But ultimately, Shinigami no Ballad just doesn’t have anything that makes it stand out, and it’s difficult to form a connection with most of the characters. Six episodes like the first might have made a superior OVA series, but equally, might have made the show more samey and flat than it already was. I really wanted to like this show, but – perhaps appropriately – there just wasn’t enough substance there.

On the other hand, I for one am quite pleased that a show ostensibly about death was really predominantly about love.

(originally written 6.7.06)

学園アリス/ Gakuen Arisu / Gakuen Alice

It’s often much easier to know whether a manga, or an anime based on a manga, is written by a man or a woman than it is to describe why, even when they’re generally action-oriented. It’s difficult to say that female mangakas tend to make ardent friendships central to their story and resolve tension with melodramatic speeches while men tend to focus on striving for a goal and solving problems with fights when you have, for example, Naruto and Sasuke’s deep friendship in a very male comic indeed (though it’s true that Naruto makes more concessions to its female fanbase than most shounen manga) on one hand and the dramatic fights of Rozen Maiden on the other.

But sometimes you get shows on very familiar turf that are a little bit different because of gender differences. Gakuen Alice is about a little girl who follows her best friend to a privileged school, only for it to turn out that all the children there have super-powers known as ‘Alices’. But while the premise is very X-men, the tone of the show turns out to be far more Harry Potter – and I mean before it got ‘dark’.

Pretty much every male character is waifish, pretty and sexually ambiguous. Girls tend to have crushes and get themselves into embarrassing situations that make them blush. There are darker themes, kidnappings and forced child labour, but really, the problems never seem very threatening, and there’s never much real sense of danger. Kids may be tied up and dumped in a warehouse one week, but soon after they’re happily watching boys cross-dress in school plays. (Now there’s something typical to female writers!) No combating galactic perils here, only threats to a way of life, and problems that can be resolved by having a tearful talk with the opponents. And of course, the show is cute, cute, cute, cute, cute!

The heroine of the piece is Mikan, an earnest little girl who isn’t too smart but who always tries hard, voiced by Ueda Kana (Yumi from Marimite, to whom Mikan bears some resemblance) with such a strong Osaka-ben accent that when she tries to speak English, she calls herself ‘House’! Mikan’s best friend is the spacey, rather cold Hotaru, voiced by Kugimiya Rie in a role very far from Alphonse Elric in Hagaren, which is amusing because Paku Romi voices Natsume, the dark, brooding boy with a painful past who of course starts to open up to kind-hearted Mikan, with a voice very similar to the one she used for Edward Elric. Natsume’s best friend is Ruka, who can talk to animals, and while the two are together with suspicious frequency, they might just both have a crush on Mikan. All these characters are adorable kids, with very cute character designs and archetypical anime personalities. It’s nothing new, it’s nothing incredibly gripping, but it’s very sweet and makes for compulsive viewing.

But it is undeniably girly, with a lot of cute and not much cool – and what cool there is neatly packaged into understandable categories. Which is fine, for a nice, light series. There’s nothing epic about Gakuen Alice – except for how long it took to get subtitled: I started watching this show in 2004 and the last eps were released yesterday!

(originally written 22.5.07)