New from Japan: Anime Film Reviews
Just in case any viewer might mistake the exaggerated melodrama of the first episode for serious action (hardly likely, since Yohko needs to drop ¥100 into her "real starfighter" to take off), the second episode is an over-the-top burlesque of sports video games. Yohko and her teammates are celebrating their victory at Funky Bubble Hot Spring, an outer-space parody of a traditional Japanese vacation spa. They run into their Red Snappers rivals, and an instant grudge match develops. The action quickly escalates from ping-pong ("I pray to the ping-pong ball to destroy evil with this racket!") to space billiards (using their starfighters as cuesticks to carom planetoids off each other).
The original Let's Go! Starship Girl Yamamoto Yohko OAV series, produced by J.C. Staff, consisted of three half-hour videos released between March and June 1996. It proved popular enough that three more were released as Yamamoto Yohko II between August and December 1997, produced jointly by J.C. Staff and Tee Up studios. These introduce Sylvie Dread, a spoiled-brat former champion starfighter who tries to pit the Terra and Ness teams against each other and ends up uniting them against her. The episode "Nightmare of Legends" opens with the girls crashlanding on a planet dominated by a haunted castle. "This is just like a horror adventure game," one points out, to Yohko's dismay since her expertise is only in the space battle games. (For no apparent reason, the three mad monks setting the deathtraps in the castle are named Balzac, Pushkin and Swift.) The final episode, "Cinderella of the Cherry Blossom Moonlight," puts the tomboyish Yohko into a romantic video game scenario where she seems hopelessly out of place. Crazy teen comedy with some witty repartee, in a pleasing design style by Kashiro Akaishi & Kazuto Nakazawa, and smoothly enough directed that you have to look closely to realize how limited the animation is.
Saint Tail. V.1, Thief of Hearts. V.2, It's Show Time! V.3, Spring Love! V.4, Moonlight. V.5, Girl of Justice. V.6, Integrity. V.7-11, titles to come.
Kaito Saint Tail (Saint Tail, the Mysterious Thief) was a 43-episode TV series; October 12, 1995 to September 12, 1996. It is a particularly bizarre variant in the "magical little girls" genre. These all (Sailor Moon and dozens of others) feature girls who gain temporary magic powers, usually from a benevolent fairy or space alien. This one is set in a Japanese Roman Catholic parochial school, and it is God Himself who turns young Meimi into the magically uncatchable ponytailed thief (in a costume based upon a Las Vegas magician's stage-assistant).
The students in Class 2-A at St. Paulia Catholic School include Meimi Haneoka, daughter of a stage magician; her best friend Seira Mimori, a novitiate nun; and (Daiki) Asuka, Jr., the son of one of the city's police detectives. The city has been plagued in the last few weeks by Saint Tail, a cat-burglar who the police are desperate to catch even though it always turns out her victims are criminals and she gives the loot to the innocents from whom it was stolen in the first place. The secret is that when parishioners confide their troubles to Sister Seira while asking her to pray to God to help them (do 14-year-old nuns-in-training hear Confessions?), Seira then prays to God for the answers (where a stolen necklace is hidden; how to help a girl avoid a marriage that her social-climbing parents are forcing her into). Seira gives the information to Meimi, who chants the magic prayer ("Forgive me, Lord, for the tricks up my sleeves"), which sets off the stock-footage magical transformation that turns her into Saint Tail, with the ninja-like power to leap from rooftop to rooftop (in high heels?) and steal the most closely-guarded treasures. The police's constant failure to catch her has embarrassed Detective Asuka, and his son vows to personally succeed where Dad has failed. Since Meimi and Junior are already rivals in class, she taunts him with notices of where she will strike next, confident that she will be able to guess his traps and avoid them. The audience is of course aware that this "Girls -- ugh!" "Boys -- who needs 'em?" attitude is the beginning of a first romance.
The classmates are all described as 14 years old, but (as with Cardcaptors) look and act more like 10 or 11. That is more likely the target age of the audience; preadolescent girls just old enough for fantasy romantic adventures about young lovers. Meimi's burglary gimmicks are supposedly based upon her father's stage tricks, but like such plot devices as a schoolboy who can order uniformed police about because his father is a detective, this does not really pretend to be anything other than juvenile wish-fulfillment fantasy. The character art style based upon the Saint Tail comic book by Megumi Tachikawa (also being published in America by TOKYOPOP) is attractive. It is probably not a coincidence that the animation is by TMS Entertainment, the same studio that has produced the mega-popular Lupin III animated TV and movie adult series about a good-guy master thief.
Fred Patten has written on anime for fan and professional magazines since the late 1970s.
TV series, 1995-1996. Chief Director: Osamu Nabeshima. V.1, 3 episodes/75 minutes; V.2-11, 4 episodes/100 minutes. Price & format: DVD $29.99 bilingual; video $19.99 dubbed. Distributor: TOKYOPOP Anime.
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