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.

The Animatrix

I got The Animatrix shortly after its release, back in 2003 – nine pieces of varying length that acknowledged what the Wachowski brothers had already made abundantly plain: that The Matrix was as cool as it was because it drew heavily from anime’s aesthetics. This was an homage. It was also several months before The Matrix Revolutions made the whole world realise that there was not going to be an impressive and satisfying end to this immensely popular franchise, and it was going to disappear into psychobabble and overwrought symbolism.

You could say it was anime that made The Matrix the incredible success it was – and ushered in an era of anime being more fashionable than ever before. On the other hand, you could also say it was anime that held it back from being what it so nearly was: the new Star Wars. Because that ending fitted right in with 90s and early-2000s anime storytelling. But it did not cross over to a mainstream audience, because not enough people wanted to trust the filmmakers when they promised depth in what looked like nonsense. It’s 2011 now, and I know far more about all the studios who worked on The Animatrix.

The Final Flight of the Osiris
First on the DVD is The Final Flight of the Osiris, a 10-minute CG story that Square Pictures gasped out before the debts from The Spirits Within consumed them. Like that film, what in freeze-frame looks like an impressive piece of work comparable to much of today’s CG work is in motion stiff and awkward. As is the writing - the best contemporary animation money could buy was used to render a scene where a man and woman, blindfolded, use advanced martial arts techniques to slowly strip one another. Back in reality, they discover Zion is in danger, and decide a message must be delivered within the Matrix. The girl makes the drop (later seen in the Enter the Matrix game), but the ship is overwhelmed.

It’s a mere snippet without much of a distinctive voice – and there isn’t really much to connect the viewer with the characters. It’s basically a showpiece for CG, a box ticked for saleability, and at heart is just a video game intro.

The Second Renaissance: Parts I&II
The main ‘meat’ of The Animatrix, The Second Renaissance is essentially a documentary told from the point of view of the machines that the main Cartesian twist of the first film reveals have taken over the planet. It begins in an almost twee post-Asimov manner, with little humanoid robots gaining the ability to at least claim to have desires and fears. Humans and robots clash, humans make mistakes on an absurd scale, the tone shifts first to purposely confounding juvenile expectations – as in the scene where a robot woman first has her clothes ripped, then her face, and ends up in an unsettling middle ground that is a complete opposition to the techno-erotic imagery of the likes of Ghost in the Shell. Throughout the second part, the image of a human being is systematically objectified, until one final image of a child reminds us briefly that we are considering real people, before the illusion gives way to the reality in a harrowing sequence that is by far the most striking and memorable part of this project.

The animation screamed Gonzo to me – but as a matter of fact what I was recognising was Maeda Mahiro’s style. In evidence is the animation-overlaid-on-static-pattern most famously used in the brilliant Gankutsuou, and those CG creations were very much like what he designed for Last Exile. In fact, though, the animation work was provided by Studio 4°C: their work here is possibly what made them able to go on to such strong and successful work in 2004-6.

Kid’s Story
Kid’s Story comes next, and is again animated by 4°C. While much of the line-art, pseudo-rotoscoping and mixed media brings to mind eccentric 4°C works like Mind Game, the overall aesthetic, pacing and use of music owes much more to director Watanabe Shin'ichirou, building on his Bebop work and pre-empting SamCham. It’s a basic story of a student who discovers hints of the Matrix online, gets a phone call from Neo telling him to run, so does. What it lacks in interesting storytelling or interesting characters, though, it makes up for in style and fast-paced but quirky, down-to-earth action.

Program
This time when there was a strong Madhouse flavour, it was an accurate one. In fact, this one looks right out of Vampire Hunter D – Bloodlust, with an extra notch or two of stylisation. This is probably unsurprising given that it was written and directed by that film’s helmsman, Kawajiri Yoshiaki – with the character designer/animation director he had collaborated with there and in Ninja Scroll, too, Minowa Yutaka.

The melding of great, old-fashioned art, feudal aesthetics (in a ‘simulation’) and an interesting dilemma – what happens when one who knows about the Matrix wants to go back to ignorance with the robots’ help? – should make for a great short, but ultimately this one is sterile and predictable. No small part of this is down to the flat, lifeless voice acting.

World Record
Always my least favourite segment, this is another Madhouse effort, and it is ugly, disjointed and totally out-of-keeping with the tone of all the rest of the project, never mind the main films. I disliked the idea that a ‘kid’ who was contacted by Neo, escaped agents and has a near-death experience could escape from the Matrix by himself, but a guy who just pushed himself to extremes? As though that doesn’t happen all the time, all over the world? Directed by an in-betweener who years later would make the interesting and much less insipid Redline, it is ugly, its story is mawkish and the way the creators have obviously decided on certain little animated exaggerations thinking they’ll seem clever and unique only adds to the impression of it being juvenile, undeveloped and unnecessary.

Beyond
This segment sees Studio 4°C’s founder and Outomo collaborator Morimoto Kouji step up to the plate, and all the stops are pulled out. Beautiful background art and extremely detailed animation pre-empt Steamboy while the quirky character design and great work with an imagined camera lay the groundwork for Tekkon Kinkreet, the former being one of the studio’s landmark collaborations (with Sunrise) and the latter being their most groundbreaking movie. The kids playing in the abandoned house are gloriously in the middle of the two films design-wise in a way that makes me very happy as a fan.

With a lovely tense mood that often rapidly changes, striking visual images with the glitches and an interpretation of the world of The Matrix that is highly individualistic yet still works very well with the established premise, it is by far the best of the experimental films. The voice acting is also generally speaking much better than in the other shorts.

A Detective Story
Watanabe’s second contribution is again full of mixed media, but this time to pastiche noir films. The anime flavour, though, is very 80s, largely thanks, I think, to animation director Nakazawa Kazuto, who made the very juvenile and ultraviolent Bubblegum Crisis spin-off Parasite Dolls. He would later go on to work as an animation director with Watanabe on SamCham. I like the look of this piece, and the general concept, but it’s just not very interesting story or consequential.

Nice final pose, though. An archetypal image for a pastiche. Very Watanabe. Yet also very Studio 4°C.

Matriculated
The writer/director behind the last segment is not known for anime, but by the Korean American Peter Chung, with DNA Productions. Most remember Chung primarily for Æon Flux, but I remember him for Phantom 2040, and ‘Baudelaire LIKES the Phantom’. He also had a hand in the design for The Rugrats. There’s something nice about the inclusion of this different flavour, not so familiar as Square’s. The CG is bad and some of the animation needs a lot more subtlety, but the Giger-derived backgrounds are great and the concept – making a robot empathise with the humans – is a lovely bit of reversal. The very American animation flits between immature and absolutely perfect, and there are gorgeous lighting effects here.

幕末機関説 いろはにほへと / Bakumatsu Kikansetsu Irohanihoheto

Bakumatsu is what you might call a historical fantasy, or alternate-universe story. Set during the bakumatsu period, when the Bafuku was falling and the Meiji Restoration was about to begin, it’s so full of historical detail and characters based on real people that if you don’t have some sense of what happened in the last days of the shogunate, you may be a bit lost here - the series often assumes some knowledge of Japanese history. That said, you’ll likely follow the gist even if you’ve never heard of the Shinsengumi or the Ezo Republic, and there are a lot of fantastical elements overlaid.

As the shogunate’s forces slowly fall, a mysterious man with an oddly modern haircut called Akizuki searches Japan for an ancient cursed artefact called the Head of the Conqueror. He soon gets mixed up in a theatrical troupe’s quest for revenge, and then later with Hijikata Toshizou of the Shinsengumi as he struggles against the newly-established government’s forces.

Overall, Bakumatsu has a serious tone, especially for a Sunrise anime. Apart from some token cute kiddies, the characters are grim, there’s blood and death, and there’s an interesting presentation of the Westerner’s presence in Japan not long after the Black Ships. The first half drags a little too much, though, too much mystery and not enough character development. The action of the second part is better, however, and Hijikata is the real star of the piece, though as with Seirei no Moribito, everything is somewhat cheapened by the dafter parts: famous figures getting possessed by a magic evil skull, magic sword techniques, bullets deflected by blades, whole regiments taken out by lone swordsmen and most of all big flying castles that zap the world below with lightning. Also several bad cases of heroes saving the person who happens to be onscreen, even though several we don’t see must be dying elsewhere.

The show would perhaps have been better if it were as highbrow as it tried to be at the outset, but it was by no means a disaster. It was also certainly pleasing for the eyes, and with some superb period detail. Not bad at all – but disappointing at the end.

(originally written 5.5.08)

土方歳三 白の軌跡 / Hijikata Toshizo: Shiro no Kiseki

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of the Shinsengumi – although admittedly I’ve never managed to get through an episode of the ultra-cheesy live action Shinsengumi! series. While Peace Maker Kurogane had a lot of flaws with pacing and maintaining interest in a story that couldn’t really sustain 26 episodes, it really gripped me with its characters and imagery. I’ve since read and watched a lot about the Shinsengumi, a much-romanticised squad of samurai who were renowned for being some of the best swordsmen of their generation, and fought proudly in the losing battle against the Meiji Restoration.

Shiro no Kiseki (a bit of a pun on the Japanese words for 'miracle' and 'trail') tells the life story of Hijikata Toshizo, a vice-commander of the Shinsengumi. Like most romanticised Shinsengumi stories, it plays up Hijikata’s bravery against the odds, the tragedy of having to live by the warrior code and…well, makes him very handsome, with consistently lovely hair. Unlike PMK, though, it plays down his reputation as a harsh, brutal leader who was a butcher both in battle and when facing opposition from within his own corps, making him much more human and heroic. It also shows him as very close to Okita Souji (here looking and speaking like a 12-year-old, even in his twenties, with a design vaguely based on his surviving photographs), a popular element of shinsengumi fiction that doesn’t stem from any historical sources except for their long acquaintance. The story would probably be hard to follow by anyone not familiar with the Shinsengumi story, and the portrayal of Hijikata as brave and heroic but also extremely compassionate, mourning the men he himself cut down for trying to retreat, sending Tetsunosuke home because he reminds him of how he failed to protect Souji, riding into his final battle bathed in white hair (perfectly coiffured, of course) is a little bit much. The retro-style art, reminiscent of Fantastic Children, only serves to make it all seem rather less serious and grim than it wants to be.

It was only half an hour long, so its failings didn’t grate too much, and it could possibly be a good companion to anyone studying the history of the Shinsengumi, since most major events get covered, with dates supplied, but outside that niche audience, I can’t see anyone being particularly interested.

(originally written 28.3.06)

サムライチャンプルー / Samurai Chanpuruu / Samurai Champloo

The first episode seemed to me to promise something great. After the success of Cowboy Bebop, the director, Watanabe Shinichiro, was given a new project with an extremely high budget. The animation was stunning, the fight direction inspired, the characters well-designed and expertly voiced, the story – three misfits thrown together by tenuous circumstances – fairly interesting and the anachronistic humour of inserting elements of hip-hop culture into 17th-century Japan gave ample opportunity for laughs. But SamCham suffers from the same flaw as Bebop – no story. There’s a loose framework: the characters are searching for ‘a samurai who smells like sunflowers’, and get into all sorts of scrapes on the way, but ultimately, the series was totally episodic. This made for an extremely varied quality – sometimes good, solid stories were told in one or two episodes, sometimes it degenerated into terrible slapstick, as when the drifters were forced to play baseball against some visiting Americans. Yup. We also had to endure ogres, fake Christian missionaries, graffiti artists and beatboxers. The hip-hop elements were funny as incidental details. Over a whole episode, less so, especially when you just want to know when the real plot is going to kick in.

But in the end, it was an excuse to have two hyper-powered, pretty much invulnerable heroes (who survive stabbings, massive explosions and various other grievous injuries unscathed) going around kicking arse. Okay for a while, but it gets old quickly. Especially since the characters weren’t that good to begin with. Mugen was essentially Zoro from One Piece (with the same voice and everything), except less likeable. Jin was the strong, silent type, which was fine, but didn’t allow for much development. Fuu was the everyman character, but the injected plot device of this sunflower-smelling samurai that she keeps whinging on about despite never seeming very personally involved made her rather irritating.

The show was at its best when showing traditional fight scenes, such as when Jin battles a blind woman who is nevertheless an expert with her weapon on one of those Japanese bridges that has a gap between every step. Hard to swallow, perhaps, but extremely impressive nonetheless. But good fights can’t make up for a deficiency in plot, and that’s what really matters. A shame, because I was hoping to genuinely love this show.

It will find an audience with people overawed by pretty clashes and bangs, who like superpowered heroes who never really seem to be in much danger. But for people who want a little more substance, I would advise looking elsewhere.

(originally written 3.11.05)

ストレンヂア 無皇刃譚 / Sutorenjia Mukouhadan / Sword of the Stranger

Bones have done some interesting series in their time, but striking originality isn’t their forte. With Sword of the Stranger, then, perhaps we should say that they are playing to their strengths. A nameless ronin (far from the first ‘Nanashi’/No-Name) with some incredible skill but no loyalty but to money (a la Yojimbo), with a mysterious past that means he uses a sword that does not kill (a la Kenshin) gets mixed up with protecting a mysterious young boy hunted by an emperor (a la Seirei no Moribito) and finds his nemesis in a strong, blonde-haired fighter from the West (a la Bakumatsu).

What ensues is of course the child getting captured and the ronin going to the rescue. The plotting is a little bit weak – only because a rather uninteresting third faction are on the scene first can the ronin be in the right place at the right time, and their presence seems only to fill in gaps – plus the characters are straight from stock. There’s not a lot to say story-wise: it’s typical jidaigeki, and ticks those boxes.

But its strength is its style, and no-one’s going to be in the anime fandom long if they don’t like recurring ideas. The action sequences are stunning, dynamic and well-planned, and while there are of course character shields and overblown flips, there are also anticlimactic deaths and the reinforcement of the fact that you can be one of the strongest fighters on a battlefield and still die in an instant.

The gore is perhaps gratuitous; yes, war is bloody, but this isn’t gore for realism, it’s gore for gratification of teenaged testosterone fantasies. The kid’s design is perhaps a little stumpy, and it’s unclear whether he’s 5 or 9. The spoken Mandarin raised titters from the Chinese contingent at the screening, but anime always has poorly-spoken foreign languages. This is a simple and unsophisticated movie, but for an exercise in style, great animation, nice art and a solid atmosphere, it is a good diversion.

(originally written 24.2.08)

Peace Maker Kurogane

PMK was one of the anime broadcast in that era, around 2003-2004, when just about everything I watched was great. And while it isn’t the anime I remember most fondly from back then, and nor is it Gonzo’s finest moment, I still love it and have been interested in the historical Shinsengumi ever since.

Indeed, Peace Maker Kurogane is based on historical figures: the Shinsengumi were a group of rōnin who came together in the mid-1800s to police Kyoto and protect the shōgun. This put them on the wrong side of the Meiji restoration and placed prominent members into key battles of that conflict; in the years since their struggle, they have became romanticised and are generally considered some of the last, greatest swordsmen of Japan’s history.

Ichimura Tetsunosuke, along with his brother Tatsunosuke (no, really. You couldn’t make those names up…) are historical figures, too. Tetsunosuke was just 12 or 13 when he joined the Shinsengumi, and became an attendant to the formidable Hijikata Toshizou. PMK ages him up to 15 (to time historical events with better pacing, I suppose), makes him very much adorable, and then turns life in the Shinsengumi into a strange mixture of silly fun and deep melancholy.

All the characters turn out fascinating in their own ways, even if they may not quite sit right with their historical equivalents. Tetsu’s coming of age is achingly compelling, and the silly pig mascot is surprisingly never unwelcome. The music is catchy – although one of the sillier episodes using the can-can was a step to far – and the voice acting superb.

A lot of viewers were turned off by spewing blood in the first episode, far over-the-top. But that was never again an issue, and there’s a realism to the violence here that makes it compelling and actually meaningful.

What starts out seeming to be one of Gonzo’s least mature actually develops into one of their most sincere and compelling pieces. And the characters are just so good that whenever they – or close equivalents – crop up in the likes of Kenshin or Gintama, it’s these designs I think back to.

Afro Samurai

It pains me to call this ‘Anime Impressions’, rather than labelling the show ‘Western Animation’, because this production, catering for Western tastes, exemplifies everything that is wrong with the mainstream perception of anime in the West. Being animated by Gonzo doesn’t qualify it as anime – although then again, I'd say being based on a doujin series does.

Watching Afro Samurai was like being transported back to the early 90s, where if I wanted anime, I had to buy shitty VHS dubs of crap like Vampire Wars, only to find that there’s no plot, just cheesy fights between badly-conceived characters, along with an excess of gore, objectified women and awful, awful acting from English VAs. In fact, that pretty much sums up Afro Samurai.

The plot, such as it is, is as such: the great warriors of the world fight for headbands that supposedly grant great power. Anyone can challenge Number Two for his title, but only the existing Number Two can go after Number One. As a child, Afro’s (yes, that’s his name) father was Number One. He was killed by the then-Number Two, who happily remains Number One until Afro can go after him for revenge. On the way he is attacked by several antagonists, just about all of whom just happen to be linked to his past, so that we can have cheesy, dull flashbacks. He is accompanied by his comic relief imaginary friend, seemingly there only so that Samuel L Jackson can do more than grunt – yes, the respected actor gets to reprise his Boondocks role with painful clichés. Only here, it’s not funny.

There are some good voice actors here. Ron Perlman is great in one of the best-voiced American cartoons around, Teen Titans. But it’s the dialogue that’s awful. It’s just obvious, flat, dumb, disjointed. Some of the actors are pretty sub-par, but some are very good, and they falter too because everything’s so excessive.

Even RZA’s beat-heavy music is bland, except for the awesome OP. And Gonzo should have learned from Peacemaker Kurogane that gushing fountains of blood are not cool, and only get in the way. But PMK managed to prove itself a good show despite the fans it lost with the gore in ep. 1. Afro Samurai is just a stinker.

(originally written 17.7.07: 'Anime impressions' refers to label on old site)