Video Backlog: “Golden Time”

Publisher: Sentai Filmworks (USA)
Format: Region A Blu-ray, NTSC, Japanese Dialogue with optional English Subtitles
Length: 24 episodes x 24 minutes
Production Date: 2013 - 2014
Currently in Print (as of writing): Yes

Banri Tada has moved all the way from a small town in Shizuoka prefecture to Tokyo in order to study law in a university specialising in the industry. Late for the entrance ceremony, Banri follows two fellow female students from the auditorium in order to get to orientation, but looses them as they exit a convenience store. Outside he runs into Mitsuo Yanagisawa, another first year student who is also lost. The pair form a camaraderie between themselves and make their way to what they think is the way to orientation. Along the way a taxi stops right next to them and a young woman dressed to the nines steps out with a large bouquet of roses. She congratulates Mitsuo for getting into university, but much to the surprise of everyone the woman smacks him in the face with the bouquet and promptly leaves. Mitsuo explains that the woman, Koko Kaga, daughter of owner of a large private hospital, is his childhood friend and since they were children has wanted to marry him. Unfortunately for Koko the feelings aren’t mutual. Much to Mitsuo’s horror, he finds that during orientation that Koko has also been accepted into the same university as well.

Later in the crush of student clubs trying to recruit first year students, Banri is saved from pushy club members by a second year student called, Nana Hayashida, Linda to her friends, from the Japanese Festival Culture Research Club. Over the next few days Banri is feels compelled to help out Mitsuo who is being perused by Koko. Banri soon realises that Koko hasn’t really made any friends and without Mitsuo seems lonely. But despite suggesting to Mitsuo that he shouldn’t be so harsh to Koko, he remains steadfast in refusing to make any contact with her. Later Banri encourages Koko to join a club when a student overhears them and ropes both of them into an overnight trip with a small group of students including Mitsuo in tow.

Unfortunately when they arrive at their destination it becomes apparent that the club is just a front for a Kofuku no Kagaku (Happy Science) like religious cult to recruit students. Once the penny drops, the students demand that their luggage be brought to them and they be let go. Selflessly Banri pretends that he has been persuaded to join and that due to his amnesia brought upon an accident days after he finished high school, that they could help him. He manages to convince the cult members to let everyone go, however Koko decides to stay with him. After escaping into the forest (after convincing the dim witted cultists they need the key to the storage room in order to put away Koko’s luggage), the pair rest after being pursued by the cult members after they twigged as to what was going on. Banri explains to Koko that what he told the cultists about his amnesia was true. Banri fears that he will lose his current self if his memories return and dreads his memories returning. The pair return to civilisation with Linda finding them. The Japanese Festival Culture Research Club are practicing their dancing on the edges of the forest.

Days later Linda asks Banri and Koko to come to the Festival Club to practice the dance for an upcoming local festival, in order to recruit them. She manages to get Banri to join which has Koko seriously considering. Meanwhile Mitsuo decides to confront Koko I order to stop her harassing him and also in order to try his luck with Chinami Oka, a cute first year student in the Film Club. The very public break up, in the student cafeteria with Banri and the pair’s other friends, doesn’t end on amicable terms as you can imagine. The depressed Koko ends up going to a punk concert with Banri to drown her sorrows, but is thrown out by bouncers and ends up spending the night at Banri’s apartment. Koko admits to Banri that she needs him and he confesses his love to her. This is the final push for the couple to officially start dating. Koko later texts Banri telling him not to forget about his memories. This in turn inspires him to return to his home and go though the boxes relating his old life. In a yearbook of his final year in high school, a photograph of him and Linda at high school falls onto the floor. He looks at it in shock.

You may look at the promotional artwork for this series and even the opening animation and incorrectly assume that it’s a shoujo anime focusing on a female protagonist (Koko). It’s nothing of the sort. It’s actually based on a seinen light novel series and as you can tell from the synopsis, while Koko plays a large role in the show, Banri is the key to everything, and the cornerstone in the story. What makes the show so interesting to me is his condition, his retrograde amnesia. And this plot device is not handled in a clichéd way either. In “Golden Time” the condition is explored through the eyes of the protagonist in what seems to be a very believable way. The way Banri’s confusion and anxiety of his position comes across clearly and realistically. He’s built up a new life for himself, but is rightly worried that the return of his old memories will wipe out his new relationships and he’ll be left to start all over again. That doubt about if his memories will return and snuff out his new life are interestingly portrayed as a “ghost” from the past who not only plans to completely possess him, but also scuttle his current plans in his new life.

Koko is also a great character. In the beginning she seems a typical “ojousama”, a rich, flighty, slightly stuck up, always dressed to the nines young woman whom Mitsuo runs away from. A complete cliché of a character. However as the series unfolds it’s a little bit hard to pin her down as a stereotype. Well, maybe a bit of the stuck up rich girl. However it’s portrayed as caring character, if a little needy and naïve, and you can’t feel anything but empathy for her. She’s not the spoiled, bratty, self centred person she often projects in her persona, possibly in self preservation. It seems to me very brave to take on a new relationship (admittedly on the rebound after a nasty breakup) where the man you love might never remember you ever again the next day.

The secondary characters are a bit of a mixed bag. Mitsuo seems rather shallow. He seems to move on from one girl to the next eventually settling on wooing Linda who won’t have a bar of him. Another male character called 2D-kun, nicknamed because of his sudden confession to preferring 2D women over real ones at a party, is equally shallow. The women fare a lot better. Linda deeply cares for Banri and despite her past feelings for him, she has the maturity to understand that he’s not his old self anymore, and he should be free to have other relationships. We also have Chinami, who maybe a ditzy doe-eyed stereotype but shows some real depth with her self-portrait documentary made for the school festival. Another interesting character is Nana, a punk rocker who lives next door to Banri. From her character design it’s plainly obvious that she is based on the same Nana in Ai Yazawa’s manga of the same name. However she’s no one off gag. Often she will give advice to Banri, Koko and Linda, though she usually puts up a gruff, confrontational persona to hide her kindness. Also note that Linda’s real name is also Nana and both the Nanas occasionally hang out together, just like the Nanas in Yazawa’s manga.

You may think all of this interpersonal drama may make this show as melodramatic and awful as hell. Not so. When clashes and misunderstandings happen, the characters actually talk to each other and smooth out things. There’s none of that “lots of misunderstandings, no explanations or actually talking to the other person” melodramatic shoujo bullshit just to ramp up the tension. I find that stuff cheap and clichéd. Instead in “Golden Time”, people actually act like people. The other important element in this how is the humour. While it certainly breaks up a lot of drama, it’s also genially hilarious at times. A lot of that humour centres around Koko. In one memorable sequence Koko tries to seduce and have sex with a very surprised Banri and ends up injuring herself in the process. Another scene has her embracing Banri, bawling her eyes out profusely apologising to him and confessing her love to him, not realising her father is standing behind her.

However this show isn’t prefect by a long stretch. Towards the end there are few scenes which I thought weren’t all that well handled. Certainly the seemingly strange actions of some characters are explained later, but I wish it was done a bit better. Like a lot of anime some of the secondary and occasional characters have some really bland designs, especially the members of the Japanese Festival Culture Research Club. I know that some of these characters are one offs, but a little consistency design wise goes a long way. I stupidly read some reviews on the series before writing mine. God, I don’t understand modern anime fans. Deriding this show as being clichéd while praising the new Kyoto Animation show. You know the one, set in a high school after school club made up mostly of girls with musical instruments and/or members who have magical powers. Yeah, 100% original and most definitely not a slight variation on the other similar shows Kyoto Animation has shat out year after year. I suppose obscenely detailed animation and character designs that can be made into otaku-ready figures trump everything else now days. A lot of the criticism of “Golden Time” seemingly has to do with the director’s previous work. However I’m watching this show, not her others, so I don’t care about that.

I fully admit that I am a hopeless romantic, though you wouldn’t know this if you met me. But if a woman I loved asked for my hand in marriage, I couldn’t get the words “I do” out fast enough. So I’m a real sucker for genuine romantic stories like this one. Add in the fact this show has an intriguing premise, likable (young) adult leads, which is pretty rare in anime now, I really enjoyed this show. The humour balances out the drama really well and I even loved the opening and closing songs, which is rare because I’m not really a fan of J-Pop. The drama is amped up towards the end and a lot of the humour disappears, but considering where the story was heading this was a given. All things considered, this was probably ones of the best anime I have seen in quite a while. 8 out of 10. By the way the title “Golden Time” seems to refer to the pub the characters frequent.

Remaining Backlog: Eight series, one movie, also waiting for second parts for two shows to be released before viewing them.

Kicking the Black Dog in the Guts (Not an Endorsement of Cruelty to Metaphorical Animals)

Looking back to my last post on this subject, what a difference two weeks make. Rewind back to nine and a half weeks back and I was utterly desperate to get on type of anti-anxiety drug  to stop feeling so crap and to get some sleep. As I may have mentioned before the cancellation of the trip was the final straw in a completely shitty 12 or so months. I was teary a lot of the time, loud noises set off the anxiety. I was in real bad shape. I took the drugs (a variation on Paxil), prescribed by someone who wasn’t my normal doctor, and the side effects were almost as bad as the symptoms.

Talking with my psychologist (whom I hadn’t seem for 7 years), she advised me straight away to get off the Paxil. I went down from a full tablet to half for a week, then a quarter for the following week. To be honest, the Paxil never fully settled me down while I was on it. It did help a lot, but the anxiety was still there, making an appearance late at night. Weaning myself off the drug wasn’t too bad. I felt a lot better for it. The “downstairs” problem fixed itself, and even though the anxiety was still there to small degree, It started to subside. It was only on Wednesday this week that I realised that I hadn’t had that anxious feeling in my throat at any point that day.

I think the thing which really helped me was getting back into some sort of normal routine. Apart from work, there was a concerted effort to get me back into my normal hobbies and outings. I had pretty much abandoned a lot of those due to the fact I was saving for my trip. Admittedly on the day I was meant to fly out I did order a ton of Blu-rays, books and other stuff. I suppose I had felt I had suffered enough and deprived myself for too long. And as you can see I have begun to write again and resurrected the blog (not the other one I was working on though), and I’m updating one of my old websites with a ton of info. This was a website I hadn’t done anything with for about two years. I’m also planning a couple of local trips and some visits to the local cinema.

Even as early as the beginning of this week I felt I was still having to push myself a bit. However in the last couple of days I have felt a lot more proactive and wanting to get a lot of stuff done. With the budget out of the way and seemingly my job being safe for at least another 12 months, I have decided to start planning my holiday for late November/early December. Once I work out which cities and areas I’ll be going to, the hotels (and a bit of Airbnb) I’ll be staying at and the transportation logistics, I think should be able to start booking stuff in the next two weeks, if not sooner. It’s a far cry from my mood in mid March (a couple days after I was meant to fly out) when in a depressive funk I threw everything related to the trip, maps, guides, my laptop etc into my suitcase and stored it high in my cupboard to try and forget what happened.

The sunny weather, though a tad winterish already, plus the fact I’ve been exercising everyday (just a half hour or more walk) has contributed greatly to my mood and well being. Even though I do still feel a twinge of anxiety from time to time and I have my ups and downs occasionally, but even so I am utterly surprised at how positive and well I feel (maybe eating a tad too much). Hopefully I can keep this up for a while. I mean, I haven’t needed to resort to anti-depressants or counseling for around 7 years, so I hope now I won’t have to for a very long while. It’s good to know that even when you’re predisposed to depression and anxiety there is a way out. It doesn’t have to drag on and on for years. You can feel like a normal human being.

Video Backlog: “Black Jack”

Publisher: Anime Sols (USA)
Format: Region 1 DVD, NTSC, Japanese Dialogue with optional English Subtitles.
Length: 26 episodes x 24 minutes
Production Date: 2004 - 2005
Currently in Print (as of writing): Yes (but for not much longer)

Black Jack is a mysterious unregistered doctor who charges exorbitant fees in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to cure the incurable. But his fees are often warranted as he can almost cure anyone and is rightly considered by his clientele and other doctors to be a genius. He is almost always accompanied by a young girl called Pinoko who acts as his assistant. Though she claims to be Black Jack’s wife and 18 years old, she’s clearly neither of these. Like the OVA directed by Osamu Dezaki mostly in the 1990’s, this adaptation of Osamu Tezuka’s work is mostly in self contained episodes. There isn’t an ongoing storyline as such, hence the reason why I’m not going to do a synopsis and therefore this will be one of my shorter reviews in a while. Most stories involve Black Jack getting involved in person’s life, that person either gets sick or needs a cure to a pre-existing condition that other doctors can’t provide, then Black Jack cures them, usually waving, deferring or passing on to a third party his usual fee. Often the patient will learn some valuable life lesson as well. There are some reoccurring characters. Sharaku, who also appeared in the previously reviewed “Buddha 2: The Endless Journey” as Asaji. Of course as I mentioned in that review he is  based upon Hosuke Sharaku from “The Three-Eyed One”. The other major recurring character is Largo, a stray female dog seemingly with precognitive abilities that Black Jack saves and keeps due to Pinoko’s insistence.

And of course Tezuka’s “Star System” is in full swing here with plenty of characters you know and love making cameo and regular appearances. However the problem is that none of these characters appeared in the same way as they did in the manga. For instance Largo and Tetsu (seen irregularly as a coffee shop owner in the show) have only very minor parts in the manga and Sharaku doesn’t even appear anywhere in the manga at all. The DVD copy proclaims that this is the definitive version of “Black Jack”. Seeing as whole sections of the manga are ripped out, rejigged to include characters that never appeared in the stories and in a completely different sequence when compared to the manga, that claim seems a bit of a stretch.

Really, I wouldn’t mind the changes and additions to the original source material if it wasn’t done so bloody badly. They certainly haven’t pitched this show to an older audience as the OVA or even to the original shonen demographic. Instead it seem to be aimed at a family audience and really feels childish and silly. The animation bears the brunt of this. I know that this show is from 2004, but even so it’s colours look oversaturated, the animation lacks details, is overly simple and rather cheap looking. Adding to the overall feel of the show (i.e. the cheapness) is the horrible CG, in particular the aerial shots of Black Jack’s residence sitting atop a sea cliff. They really do look like something out of a cheap late 1990’s OVA.

If I had any standing in the anime community (luckily I don’t), I’d probably be branded a heretic as I really am not much of a Tezuka fan. However as I have pretty much abandoned reading manga, I can’t really tell if the problem with (posthumous) anime adaptations of his material is due to the actual adaption or source material. A lot of the stories are just so damn hokey. Putting aside the slow and daft opening episode (finishing with a court case of all things), you’ve got some really bizarre and stupid plot lines which stretch suspension of disbelief to breaking point. One plot line involves a sushi chef having his arms being amputated due to a negligent truck driver. The negligent truck driver than agrees to become the chef’s “hands”, but then ends up dying with dying wish to have his hands transplanted onto the chef’s stumps. Another episode follows a conceited teenage genius gymnast who loses one arm due to a disease. Black Jack replaces his arm with a crude claw which ends up talking to him and convincing him to take up shogi instead. Eventually the boy becomes a master in shogi and then he accidentally discovers that there is a speaker inside the claw. The girl who always loved him, but he ignored, had been the voice comforting him and telling him to take up shogi. Then we have the episode where a young scientist asks Black Jack to transplant his childhood pet deer’s brain inside its abdomen in order to make it super intelligent. Of course it goes on a rampage killing humans.

It’s really hard to take any of this seriously at all. A lot of it is just straight up laughable. That’s the problem with the “Black Jack” franchise as whole. Medicine is a science. It’s not fiction. Everybody has at least some knowledge of medical science and what is plausible in that field. If you asked a person on the street if transferring your brain to your abdomen would increase intelligence or would full arm transplants actually work (remember, the manga was published in the mid 1970’s), they’d say "No, what are you, an idiot?”. Tezuka famously got his medical degree in the 1950’s, so he certainly knew about what was possible and what wasn’t. Veering off into silly fantasy when the subject is deeply rooted in reality (and understood to a degree by the audience) and is set in the modern day world (not some future or fantasy world), is disappointing to say the least. What’s worse is that a lot of the stories are really predictable. The endings are practically telegraphed to the audience long before you reach the eyecatch.

Putting aside the problems with the stories, what also shits me is the staff’s instance to cram as many Tezuka characters into frame as humanly possible. I mean, why do it? It’s distracting and not clever at all. It reeks of desperation.

Now having trashed this show to hell and back, I thought it might be interesting to talk about how this show came to DVD in the US. In recent years quite a number of anime releases have been funded by crowd funding sites such as Pozible and Kickstarter. A couple of years back translator Sam Pinansky started Anime Sols, a crowd funding where people watched shows for free, then ponied up the cash to get the shows onto DVD. There were a number of problems with this set up. First was the fact almost all of the shows were “classics” (I believe the young people refer to these anime as “old” and “shit”). This didn’t bother me one iota as I love a lot of this material. However the big hurdle was that the streaming service and the ability to fund titles for DVD release was limited to people living in the US. Now I can understand that licensing issues would complicate matters, but seriously now, would companies like Madman, Hanabee, Siren Visual, Anime Limited/All the Anime, MVM et al want to distribute sub only DVDs of 20 to 40 year old anime? Luckily the DVDs were later sold at the Right Stuf, but I had no opportunity to fund these titles. Others outside the US like me also had the same problem.

Apart from some non-English speaking countries in Europe (namely Italy, Spain and France) and some Latin American countries, no one is really interested in distributing these titles. It’s baffling why Japanese licensors restrict this material so much, especially since it’s decades old. In the last few weeks Anime Sols shut down permanently. The problem was they were struggling to meet target funding goals. “Black Jack” for instance only managed to get funding for two 13 episode sets (only 26 episodes out of the 62 episodes were released on DVD). In addition two other series were fully funded, making a grand total of nine DVD sets released over the two years of Anime Sols’ operation. One can only wonder if they would have continued operations and funded more sets if fans outside of the US were able to pledge money towards the site.

Back the show, to be blunt, it’s not all that good. I don’t really understand why this one got funding when there were much better shows on Anime Sols you could put your money towards. I can only give it 5 out of 10. Yeah, I’m not having  much luck with the Tezuka stuff recently…

Remaining Backlog: Nine series, one movie, also waiting for second parts for two shows to be released before viewing them.

Video Backlog: “Buddha 2: The Endless Journey”

Publisher: Deltamac (Hong Kong)
Format: Region A Blu-ray, NTSC, Japanese Dialogue with optional Cantonese Dub and English and Traditional Chinese Subtitles.
Length: 85 minutes
Production Date: 2014
Currently in Print (as of writing): Yes

Following on from the first film (released in 2011, but never on any home video format in English), the second film in the “Buddha” trilogy follows Siddhartha as he renounces his royalty and become s a monk as he is shocked by the poverty in the kingdom. The initial scenes in the film, set 2,500 years ago in India, recount Siddhartha’s birth to the Shakya queen, Maya, and king, Bimisara. Soon after childbirth Maya dies and is seen ascending to the afterlife where she continues to watch over her son. We are also shown the battles between Kosala Kingdom and the Magadha Kingdom near the Ganges River and the Shakya Kingdom attacking the Kosala Kingdom. As you can imagine the resulting battles take a heavy toll on the civilian population. Siddhartha continues to wander the countryside, horrified by the poverty and suffering. He is gaining a reputation amongst the civilians as a man of peace.

We catch up with Tatta, seen as a young child in the first film and Migaila, who we last saw being taken away to have her eyes burnt out as a punishment for scheming to marry King Bimisara. Both are now leaders of a group of bandits. After robbing a group of wealthy traders, Tatta and Migaila come across a monk named Dhepa whom Migaila initially mistakes for Siddhartha. Dhepa believes in and promotes a form of Asceticism where the more you suffer the better your next life will be, a philosophy that Migaila despises as she believes she has suffered enough in her short life. She challenges him to stick a torch in one of his eye and blind himself like she had been blinded. Both are shocked when Dhepa complies.

A little while later we find Siddhartha wandering past a local village when a local huntsman takes him and offers a fresh set of robes and a place to wash himself. Dhepa has also been taken by the huntsman. As they are about to leave, the huntsman asks if either of them would take his young son, Asaji, as their disciple. Both refuse, however the happy go lucky Asaji continues to follow them for days on end until he slips in a swamp and badly injures his leg. Despite Dhepa advising Siddhartha to abandon Asaji, but he cannot and continues to carry him to the pair’s agreed destination; the Forest of Uruvela where they will both take on gruelling forms of self-deprivation to order to reach new levels of enlightenment as part of their ascetic training.

At a small village, the monks meet Tatta and Migaila who help the pair with Asaji’s wounds. While Siddhartha sucks the pus of his Asaji’s leg wound in order to save him, Asaji has a near death experience. Maya tells Asaji to return to his body as he cannot die yet. The following morning Asaji awakes and warns the villagers about an impending devastating whirlwind that will hit. Tatta and Siddhartha are confused as it is a clear day. However as predicted, the whirlwind hits suddenly, flattening the village. Asaji reveals he can prophesise events and predicts King Bimisara’s murder in 30 years’ time by his son’s own hand and his own death in four years. Despite this, the trio of Siddhartha, Dhepa and Asaji continue on to the Forest of Uruvela, where Siddhartha and Dhepa begin their Ascetic training. However Siddhartha believes there must be more to life than endless suffering.

Meanwhile Prince Virudhaka, son of King Prasentnajit, ruler of Kosala, banishes his own mother to the slave quarters when it is discovered she hid her own caste from the King in order to marry him. She becomes a surrogate mother to Yatala, a six metre giant who despite being a slave plays a prominent role in the Kosala army. Yatala may be a little intellectually disabled, but can easily see the injustice in keeping the prince’s mother locked up. He decides to plead with Prince Virudhaka in order to have her released, but is severely punished for it and ends up going AWOL. A tragedy inside the slave quarters and its repercussions forces Prince Virudhaka’s true feeling for his mother to the surface.

This is the second film in a trilogy based upon Osamu Tezuka’s manga of the same name which ran for 8 volumes from 1972 to 1983. Since Tezuka’s death in 1989, Tezuka Productions made quite an effort to get as much of his work made into anime. “Buddha” seems to be one of the last works to get an anime adaption.  Annoyingly there is no English language home video release of the first film in the trilogy available anywhere. It did get an English subbed 35mm print which has been touring the world at film festivals and the like for a number of years. I saw it at the now sadly defunct Arc Cinema which was part of the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra, back in March 2012. Presented by the Embassy of Japan and the Japan Foundation, the audience mostly consisted of Buddhists who brought their children along. Unlike the second entry into the trilogy, the first was quite violent with more than couple of disturbing scenes. Parents were shielding their children’s eyes when overly violent scenes came on. As a result I sort of felt a bit uncomfortable watching the film.

Having said that all that, this film is just as hokey as the first. Now look, I am not a Buddhist. In fact I do not subscribe to any religious ideology. I know little about Buddhism. I am viewing this film just as a piece of entertainment, nothing more and nothing less. However from what I have read from Buddhists in regard to the film, either Tezuka or the makers of the film have taken some liberties in telling the story of Siddhartha Gautama’s life, have rearranged sequence of events and added characters not in the original story. This I can understand as the original story may not fit the narrative or the flow when trying to adapt it into a comic book or film.

The main problem I personally have with the film is that like all religious films it hammers it’s points home about morality about as subtlety as a brick through a glass window. Like Christian films, namely “The Passion of the Christ”, this film also has its fair share of suffering (both the characters and the audience), but as I previously mentioned it doesn’t have the violence of the same film (such animal death, beatings, graphic depictions of war etc.). Instead the worst we are treated to here is the scene where Dhepa burns his eye out, which is done off camera and isn’t graphic at all. There’s also the scenes at the Forest of Uruvela where the monks take on ascetic training which involves mediation while sitting on thorny buses, being buried neck deep in the ground, being hung upside down etc. The monks also starve themselves to near death all the while they are doing this. While you’re supposed to feel sympathy for them, it just felt really silly, like some cheap B-grade schlock film, and sometimes it looked like one of those shitty “Mondo” fake documentaries from the 1970’s or 1980’s.

Speaking of terrible religious films, I couldn’t help make the comparison between this film and those awful Happy Science (Kofuku-no-Kagaku) anime films. Both look really workman-like in terms of animation quality. It’s not that the animation is bad or anything. It’s more than competent. But there’s no love in the animation. You can tell the animators were just doing their jobs. Like the Happy Science films, the overall look of the animation is quite flat. The CG is pretty average too. Well OK, to be honest, most the time it’s not noticeable. The scene where Prince Virudhaka challenges Siddhartha Gautama with a battalion of troops on horseback is pretty bad. While Virudhaka is animated traditionally (i.e. pencil to paper), all of his troops are CG and it looks pretty substandard to say the least. The other big bone I have to pick with this film is the character designs. None of them look like Tezuka’s. The only one which really looks like his designs is Asaji, who is based upon Hosuke Sharaku from “The Three-Eyed One”. Tezuka’s “Star System” strikes again.

So the final word on this film is that’s pretty flat and dull, and at times unintentionally funny. The saving grace is its short run time. Unlike the first film there is little time spent on battles, which for me was a highlight (and there wasn’t that many) of the first film. The other big problem is that there is no home video release anywhere in English of the first film, so unless you caught the first film in its film festival run, it’s unlikely you’d go seeking out this rather obscure disc. Like the ascetic training as depicted in this film. “Buddha 2” is a bit torturous. 5 out of 10.

Remaining Backlog: Nine series, one movie, also waiting for second parts for two shows to be released before viewing them.

Video Backlog: “Zyuranger”

Publisher: Shout! Factory (USA)
Format: Region 1 DVD, NTSC, Japanese Dialogue with optional English Subtitles.
Length: 50 episodes x 20 minutes
Production Date: 1992 - 1993
Currently in Print (as of writing): Yes

In the year 1992, the planet Nemesis returns to pass near Earth on its 170 million year orbit. Two adult astronauts and two child astronauts are sent to explore the planet in a space shuttle. Once on the planet, the two adult astronauts make a discovery, a large round man made structure approximately a metre and half in diameter. Unbeknownst to the astronauts sealed inside the structure is the evil witch Bandora (played by Machiko Soga) and her small band of minions. Sealed by five ancient human tribes, with the help of their of the Guardian Beasts, Bandora has been imprisoned for 170 million years (the last time Nemesis was near Earth) in a time when human tribes coexisted dinosaurs. With Bandora free, she and her minions thank the astronauts who accidently freed them by blasting them away and abducting the children and the space shuttle.

Bandora arrives back on Earth with a crashing thud, appropriating a skyscraper as a base for her palace which sits atop. There she threatens humanity with destruction. However in a nearby apartment complex, an elderly man who is the manager of the apartments, is actually a wizard named Barza (Jun Tatara) in disguise. He is Bandora’s arch enemy and has been lying in wait just in case she returned. Hidden below the apartments, some 2,000 meters below lies five holy warriors in hibernation, the Zyurangers. After some trouble in trying to resurrect the members, the entire team; Yamato Tribe Prince Geki (Yuuta Mochizuki), Sharma Tribe Knight Goushi (Seiju Umon), Etoffe Tribe Knight Dan (Hideki Fujiwara), Dime Tribe Knight Boi (Takumi Hashimoto) and Lithia Tribe Princess Mei (Reiko Chiba) fight Bandora and her minions and eventually manage to save the children trapped inside the space shuttle which Bandora has shrunk.

Bandora and her massive palace retreat to the moon where she launch various attacks against the Earth, in particular ones that involve harming children (“I hate children!” she gleefully cries). Most of the time the attacks involve sending various Dora monsters, which are evolved from golems created out of clay by her offsider leprechaun craftsman Pleprechuan. Occasionally she will also send out Grifforzar, a lion faced griffin creature to stop Zyuranger from foiling their plans. Lamy (Ami Kawai), Grifforzar’s wife, later shows up and can turn into a giant scorpion creature in order to attack Zyuranger. Rounding out Bandora’s minions are Totpat and Bookback who are nothing more than comic relief bumbling henchmen.

Of course Zyuranger has a number of items at their disposal to fight back against Bandora. The main one is the Dino Buckler so that the five of them can transform into Tyranno Ranger (Geki), Mammoth Ranger (Goushi), Tricera Ranger (Dan), Tiger Ranger (Boi) and Ptera Ranger (Mei). Over the course of the show they obtain special hand weapons and the Guardian Beasts return. These are essentially giant robotic animals; Tyrannosaurus, ZyuMammoth, Triceratops, SaberTiger and Pteranodon, who can also combine to form a larger robot called Daizyuzin and variants with other Guardian Beasts who make latter appearances. About a quarter way through the series, team leader Geki’s older brother, Burai, the Dragon Ranger is resurrected. Due to grievances from 170 million years ago, jealousy and vengeance cloud Burai’s feelings towards Geki. Burai aligns himself initially with Bandora but comes disillusioned and forgives Geki after he is confronted by a small childlike figure in white robes who relays a shocking truth to him. Zyuranger along with Burai fight Bandora together with his guardian beast Dragon Caesar, but a tragedy will soon strike down Zyuranger.

Yes, this is the show used as a basis for the very first “Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers” which was broadcast just about everywhere from 1993 onwards. While I was aware of the “Power Rangers”  phenomenon in the 1990’s, I have never really followed any TV tokusatsu. I did take a mild interest in all things tokusatsu in the late 1990’s, but unlike anime at the time, the fandom was miniscule and finding like minded people or resources on it was incredibly difficult. Plus actually acquiring it, in English (and not in terrible condescending English edited dubs) was pretty much impossible. Today it’s still quite difficult. You could count the amount of English subbed releases of tokusastu TV shows on two hands, and that’s over the course the last decade.

I suppose the problem is that the material does itself no favours in terms of engaging with an English language fandom, especially when compared with anime. I mean it is made for children in order to sell tons of toys. “Zyuranger” is no different. Super Sentai (of which “Zyuranger” is the 16th of this series) by this point was a well oiled machine. It’s pretty much the same formula each year, juts a new cast and new mecha. Watching this show as an adult, it does become obvious that the selling point is the mecha (guardian beasts), monsters and the fights. Zero time is dedicated to fleshing out the main cast. The actors playing the five Zyurangers are pretty wooden most of the time, but then again they don’t really have anything to play off of as the dialogue is pretty bog standard and aimed at children. As you’d expect in a show like this, there are plenty of kids in the show (almost entirely in one off roles). Unfortunately most couldn’t act their way out of a pre-torn wet paper bag. Worse is the fact that even when consider these types of shows are solely dedicated to sell toys to children, some of the robots and the various combinations of them are as ugly as sin. The worst example is the final combination of all the robots in the show, including the almost never used brontosaurus robot. The resulting robot, a combination of the three main robots, looks utterly absurd and barely moves in action scenes.

This segues into the other big problem; especially in the first half of the show is a fair wack of the effects are kind of rubbish and cheap looking. One commonly used effect is the use of forced perspective. For example if the crew want to show a giant monster fighting the Zyurangers, they’ll shoot it from a cherry picker with the guy in the monster suit close to the camera, and the Zyuranger actors on the ground in the distance. It sort of works and there’s no need for a blue screen shot. However it doesn’t work at all when doing the same thing at ground level trying to create the illusion of a monster trying to stomp on the Zyurangers as the real distance and scale is quite apparent.

However a lot of the cheapness (and there’s some REALLY cheap looking monsters early on in the show) disappears for the most part a little before the half way mark. It’s as if the budget was upped a little mid way though the show. Although the actors playing the Zyurangers are a little wooden, not every actor is. Machiko Soga who plays Bandora who steals the show. The child hating witch has some great lines and Soga hams it up brilliantly. She’s everything a villain should be in a kids show and more. Apart from the action sequences, the humour of the show is also one of the great aspects of “Zyuranger”. Certainly a lot of the humour and tone of the show is childish, but the absurdity of it (and staff are absolutely aware of this and play it up) and slapstick do make it a joy to watch. It does get a bit more serious half way though, but the writers always make sure the overall tone is light hearted, most of the time. Another surprising thing about the show was how emotional the climax was. I won’t give away what happens, but it does humanise Bandora and makes the audience far more empathetic towards her cause. The tone of the show also veers from childish playfulness to strange creepiness and back. For example Burai is practically abducted and harassed by a small creepy child in white make up and robes who is for all intents and purposes death itself. The other thing which struck me is the seemingly dangerous situations that the child actors in particular seem to be placed in on set. Especially in early episodes we see children hovering from great heights in the air (hanging from wires obviously) and explosions galore. Sure, it was over 20 years ago, but one wonders what these kid’s parents were thinking and how the producers got away with some of this stuff.

Shout! Factory have done a decent job on the set. I would have liked some liner notes, and there is an episode which could have has some additional subtitles to convey the meaning of a some Japanese puns, but all in all I had no real problems with how things were handled. For a show like this, you’d expect pretty much no special features. However I was really surprised to find one extra on the disc; “Power Progenitors: Super Sentai Zyuranger Power Morphicon 2014 Panel”. Not knowing exactly what it was, I rather cynically thought it’d be some woefully mediocre panel with Shout! Factory staff ignorantly crapping on about the show. In fact it turned out to be a panel from a biannual Power Ranger convention and featured three Japanese guests;  Yuuta Mochizuki who played Geki, stuntman Hiroshi Maeda who played suited up as Tyranno Ranger and a second stuntman, Yasuhiro Takeuchi, who suited up as Dragon Ranger. The panel is entertaining on many levels. Not only do we learn quite a lot about the shows and actors/stuntmen (for instance Mochizuki is also a stuntman, did all of his own stunts on the show and it is customary if you’re acting in a sentai show as Mochizuki did, to don the ranger outfit for at least the final episode), but watching the gaffes misunderstandings and mistranslations as the panel progresses is hilarious, especially with the subtitles put in after the fact. Mochizuki and Maeda have a habit of half saying things in English and Japanese in the one sentence (Maeda also appeared in various Power Rangers series made in the US and New Zealand) and combined with the translator who looked a little ill, well the outcomes at times looked to be confusing for both the panel and the attendees.

All in all, this is a pretty good set and the show itself is decent for what it is; a children’s show. The absurdity and humour as well as the action do make up for a lot of the silliness. The final episode in the set promotes the next sentai series which followed this show; “Dairanger”. It’s a terrible tease and I really do hope that Shout! Factory release it as well, but somehow I doubt they will. 6.5 out of 10.

Remaining Backlog: Nine series, two movies, also waiting for second parts for two shows to be released before viewing them.