Around 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 merit and about which our readers should know.

Black Magic M-66. © Manga Entertainment.

Black Magic M-66
OAV, 1987. Directors: Masamune Shirow, Hiroyuki Kitakubo. 48 minutes. Price & format: DVD bilingual $24.95. Distributor: Manga Entertainment.

Black Magic was artist/writer Masamune Shirow's first manga novel, originally self-published while he was a 22 year-old college student in 1983. Shirow began professionally creating cartoon-art science fiction novels two years later, in parallel with starting what was to be his real career (under his actual name: Masanori Ota) as a high school teacher. The former drew him into a brief association with a group of young animators setting up companies to take advantage of the new direct-to-video market's need for cheap productions. (Namely, two animation studios, Animate Film and A.I.C., coordinated through the Movic production company. All three have prospered as the OAV market has grown.) They picked a dramatic chapter from Shirow's Black Magic as one of their first projects. Shirow himself wrote the script from his story, drew the storyboards, and co-directed with Hiroyuki Kitakubo, who did story layout and character design from Shirow's art. This was Shirow's only direct foray into animation; his teaching career occupied him full-time for a while, then in the 1990s he concentrated on his artistic sci-fi novels. The best-known of these, Appleseed and Ghost in the Shell, have also been animated but Shirow was not involved in the production.

Black Magic M-66 was released as an early OAV short feature (48 minutes) on June 28, 1987. One suspects that the animators and their backer/distributor (Bandai Visual) chose that particular chapter because of its close resemblance to The Terminator (1984), although almost all of Shirow's works branch off from Philip K. Dick's and A. E. van Vogt's sci-fi explorations of expanded intelligence in both humans and artificial brains.

A military helicopter carrying two "anti-personnel android" (human-looking assassin robot) prototypes toward a Top Secret test site crashes just outside a Bladerunner-esque futuristic city. The M-66s have not yet been programmed; their memories are still loaded with their developer's test-image -- his teen granddaughter Ferris's photo. The androids activate and set out to kill their target, decimating the Special Forces commandos sent to retrieve them. Sybel, a headline-seeking journalist, is drawn to the action, but she ends up with the hysterical Ferris fleeing ahead of the remaining M-66 slashing and blasting its way toward them through the city and the remaining commandos trying to protect them.

This was one of the first productions of Anime Film and A.I.C. The animation is crude, but the direction is solid and suspenseful and the action is well choreographed. (Shirow has acknowledged studying the direction of Hayao Miyazaki's films very closely.) It shows the early promise, which has matured in the later works of all concerned. Black Magic M-66 has been popular with American anime fans almost from its original Japanese release, first as a bootleg-copied import, then as one of the first licensed American anime videos in December 1991, and now on DVD.