A round 1995, Japanese animation (anime) began pouring into North America, Europe and across the globe in video form. Most of these titles were unknown outside of Japan and never covered by animation journals. Whether a title is highly popular or very obscure, a high-quality theatrical feature or a cheap and unimaginative direct-to-video release, they all look the same on a store shelf. Therefore, Animation World Magazine will regularly review several new releases (including re-releases not previously covered) that have some merit and about which our readers should know.

The first three volumes of the sci-fi Western series Trigun distributed by Pioneer. © Pioneer Entertainment.

Trigun. V.1, The $$60,000,000,000 Man. V.2, Lost Past. V.3, Wolfwood. V.4, Gung-Ho Guns. V.5, Angel Arms. V.6, Project Seeds. V.7, Puppet Master. V.8, High Noon. TV series, 1998. Director: Satoshi Nishimura. V.1 & V.8, 100 mins.; V.2 - V.7, 75 mins. Price & format: video $29.98 subtitled/$24.98 dubbed; DVD $29.98 bilingual. Distributor: Pioneer Entertainment.

Trigun is an excellent representation of anime TV series that are plotted as a cohesive story; in this case, 26 weekly episodes (April 2 - September 30, 1998). Trigun began with the look of an action-comedy combining parodies of science-fiction and Western movie stereotypes. A parched desert is populated with scattered small towns, usually centered around a "Wild West" saloon. Hints that this is not Earth are the twin suns in the sky, cowboys riding ostrich-like birds rather than horses and the wreckage of futuristic technology scattered across the landscape. Everyone is frightened of a legendary outlaw, Vash the Stampede, reported to leave whole towns in rubble in his wake. Meryl Strife and Millie Thompson, two young insurance investigators, are ordered to find Vash and stop his destruction. Their search initially doesn't turn up anything but a clownish young drifter (think of the early Jerry Lewis) who continually stumbles into the operations of outlaws and defeats them, apparently through sheer bumbling good luck. As the series evolves from slapstick comedy to serious drama, it is revealed that this buffoon is Vash and that the world is slowly dying due to the failure to terraform an alien planet. Vash has a personal mission that is somehow connected with the long-dead technicians from Earth whose project failed 150 years earlier. He is also carrying on a bizarre secret war with a group of sadistic killers, the Gung-Ho Guns, who dress like Western villains but employ the latest deadly sci-fi technology and have been conducting the destruction and mass murders in Vash's name to discredit him. Most of the episodes could not be shown in any other order without sabotaging the carefully planned shift in atmosphere from light comedy to desperate drama. Yet there is some well-integrated humor throughout to keep the mood from becoming too despairing, and the dialogue is intelligent and gripping, especially the philosophical debates between Vash and gunman-turned-preacher (or is it the other way around?) Nicholas D. Wolfwood, which keeps hinting at secrets in both men's pasts.

The production, by director Satoshi Nishimura (based on a popular comic book serial by Yasuhiro Nightow) at the Madhouse studio, takes advantage of the parodic Western setting to pace limited animation skillfully for lots of dramatic camera angles and slow pans, tense confrontations with no motion but shifting eyes, and then a sudden burst of action either too frantic to clearly show details or shown in a quick-cutting montage of motionless freeze-frames.

[Note: The two dollar signs in V.1 are deliberate. It means "sixty billion double-dollars."]