© Kensei Date / Phoenix / NEP21.

Princess Nine. V.1, First Inning! V.2, Double Header! V.3, Triple Play! V.4, Strike Zone! V.5, Bases Loaded! V.6, Grand Slam!
TV series (26 episodes), 1998. Director: Tomomi Mochizuki. V.1 & V.6, 5 episodes/125 minutes; V.2-5, 4 episodes/100 minutes. Price & format: DVD bilingual $19.98. Distributor: A.D. Vision Films.

The anime subject genre least represented in America is the teen school sports drama. Princess Nine was a 26 episode TV serial, broadcast from April 8 to October 14, 1998, which combined girls' sports with adolescent romantic melodrama.

15-year-old Ryo Hayakawa is a tomboy about to graduate from junior high school. Her father, a pro baseball pitcher, died ten years ago. Ryo is an ace pitcher on the local amateur team, but she plans to leave school to help her poor mother run an old-fashioned neighborhood diner. But Mrs. Himuro, the feminist Chairman of the Board of Trustees at elite Kisaragi Girls' High School, wants to start a girls' baseball team to prove that women can compete in the traditional male "hard" sports. She has a scholarship sent to Ryo, who enters Kisaragi to find herself out of her league socially. The idea of competing in mens' sports is ridiculed by pompous Principal Mita, who supports the school's girls' tennis team which is dominated by Himuro's proud daughter Izumi. Ryo accepts the challenge to help cynical Coach Kido create a girls' team good enough to win its way to the National High School Baseball Championship at famous Koshien Stadium. This involves finding eight more girls with latent sports talent; helping them to bond emotionally into a team of loyal friends; and overcoming condescending male dismissal by the established baseball sports world. Additional melodramatic subplots include Izumi's discovery that her mother may have loved Ryo's father rather than her own father in their youth; Izumi's emotional struggle over whether to sabotage the baseball team or join it and dominate it; Ryo's romantic involvement with two rival handsome and supportive boys, Seishiro and Hiroki; and the revelation that Ryo's father may have been involved in a scandal before his death.

The limited animation by Phoenix Entertainment is uninspired at first glance. However, the viewer quickly becomes engrossed in the story and the characters instead of consciously thinking about the cinematography; thus the animation accomplishes its purpose effectively. The DVD has some surprisingly helpful Extras such as a history of baseball in Japan, and a social history of neighborhood udon bars like Ryo's mother's including recipes and a glossary of the Japanese food names heard in the drama. Princess Nine is excellent as a sample of a type of animation rare in America, and for adolescents interested in modern Japanese school and sports sociology.

Psychic Force.
OAV (2 episodes), 1998. Director: Fujio Yamauchi. 64 minutes. Price & format: video dubbed $19.98; DVD bilingual $24.99. Distributor: Image Entertainment.

Psychic Force is a popular Japanese video arcade game. This is a "movie" compilation of two half-hour OAVs, animated by the Triangle Staff studio, released on February 25 and May 25, 1998. The video is just a bad movie, but the extras on the DVD turn it into a fascinating case study of anime dramatizations of video games.