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ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE - ISSUE 5.11 - FEBRUARY 2001
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New from Japan: Anime Film Reviews
Phantom Quest Corp. Perfect Collection. This humorous supernatural thriller, roughly a cross between Kolchak: The Night Stalker and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, demonstrates the allure of mixing familiar Western popular mythological elements with their exotic counterparts from the East. Ayaka Kisaragi comes from an ancient family of demon-fighting Shinto priests. Because her personality is too flamboyant to fit a religious vocation, she has set up a commercial ghost-busting business, Phantom Quest Corporation, aided by a few regular outside consultants such as Madame Suimei, a European-style fortune-teller, and Rokkon, an Oriental exorcist (lots of Buddhist, Taoist and Shinto chants and slapping demons in the face with printed prayers). She is also helped by friendly police detective Karino who lets her know when some mysterious crime involves the paranormal. In the first of four half-hour episodes, a series of nighttime slayings of beautiful virgins is clearly the work of a vampire. Ayaka discovers a hidden fight between two vampires, a "good" one who is able to control his addiction to blood, and Dracula himself who was brought to Tokyo when a collector of international art treasures bought his coffin in Transylvania. Ayaka and the good vampire team up to rid Japan of the deadly predator. The other three "Incident Files" similarly keep the audience guessing whether the supernatural element will be beneficent, malign or both. Ayaka is irresponsible when not on a case, and there are running gags at the end of each episode about the scramble between Mamoru, her young secretary who needs their client's payment to pay their bills, and Ayaka, who wants to go on a shopping binge or an all-night drunken karaoke spree. (The opening credits theme song, a nice bit of cocktail-lounge blues by Junichi Kanezaki, is repeated on the DVD as a music video without the overlaid credits.) The stories are slight but quick-paced with witty dialogue, and much of their appeal is due to the interplay of the main casts' likeable personalities. The main complaint is that there is no plot progress among the four episodes, which could be watched in almost any order, and no real conclusion. Animation production by Madhouse.
Gasaraki. V.1, The Summoning. V.2, The Circle Opens... V.3, Betrayal. The Sunrise Studio gained a reputation for dramatic "giant robot" science-fiction anime starting with its Mobile Suit Gundam series in 1979. Takahashi, one of Sunrise's top directors in this genre (Dougram, Votoms, Gundam 0083), has returned with Gasaraki, a 25-episode TV serial (October 4, 1998 - March 28, 1999), that is unusual in its very near-future setting. The story opens with an extremely realistic military test of a Tactical Armor (TA) battle suit. As plot elements slowly fall into place, we realize that the test is being performed by the Japanese Self Defense Force on an experimental prototype developed by Gowa Digital Systems, a Japanese-owned powerful multi-national corporation. Meanwhile an international situation modeled upon Operation Desert Storm (complete with "SNN" newscasts) is developing between the U.S.-dominated United Nations and "Belgistan" (Iraq). The Gowa family sees this as an opportunity to field-test the TA suits. They pull strings to have the JSSDF unit testing their suits included with the multi-national force sent into Belgistan, officially as observers since the Japanese Constitution forbids the Self Defense Force to engage in warfare, but with secret orders to station in a combat zone. But the U.N. forces are almost wiped out by hitherto-unknown similar TA suits operated by a clandestine international organization that has been supporting the Belgistan government. This is barely the beginning of the plot, which involves the maneuvering of the Gowa family and their mysterious Symbol rivals to control the international weapons market, Gowa's attempt to subvert the Japanese government, and the internal machinations among both Gowa and the Symbol group. And this is before the story gets overtly "science-fictional!" There is a hero, Yushiro, the "good" member of the Gowa family, but he spends most of the first seven episodes in a daze; understandable, since he was apparently killed nine years earlier... The main problem with Gasaraki (unless you consider complex plots a problem) is that the characters and military hardware are in a very realistic art design, which makes the limited TV animation painfully obvious. Still, this Sunrise program (written by Takahashi and Hajime Yatate, with screenplay by Toru Nozaki) will be a winner with fans of realistic high-tech science-fiction and military action.
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