Anipages

Capricorn (1991) was the next OVA produced by Aubeck after Garaga. This time it's a real OVA, only 47 minutes long. I just watched this for the first time, and can report that it is not worth revisiting. It has nothing of the quality or charm of Garaga. It's just a sloppy, quickly made adaptation of a manga that doesn't work as a story and has virtually no animation of interest to rescue it. The only reason I write about it here is because it involves Anime R, and the reason why it turned out so crappy is more interesting than the OVA itself.

Due to the relative success of Garaga, the production company Aubeck had intended to use the same staff to produce their next project, an adaptation of the mangaka Joji Manabe's Capricorn. Hidemi Kubo was scheduled to be the director and Anime R was to do the animation again. After Hidemi Kubo drew the storyboard, though, for some reason he had to duck out of the project. That was the first blow. Then, due to scheduling problems, Anime R was not able to devote their full energy to the project. In the end, aside from being headlined by animation director Moriyasu Taniguchi and mecha animation director Toru Yoshida, there are just a few second-tier R animators (none of the stars like Hiroshi Osaka or Hiroyuki Okiura) and the rest of the animator team was apparently thrown together in a rush.

After Hidemi Kubo left, Taniguchi took on the job of animation director on the condition of being able to choose who was to direct the project. The person he chose is Takashi Imanishi, whom Taniguchi had worked under recently on the Sunrise projects Votoms, City Hunter and Armor Hunter Mellowlink. Imanishi was still young but Taniguchi was impressed with his work on these projects. Taniguchi also apparently chose Shinichiro Watanabe, who had begun to make the transition to director, but the credits do not show any trace of his presence if he was indeed involved. Imanishi wound up re-drawing the storyboard based on Kubo's storyboard, so sadly there is probably only scant trace of Kubo's touch left. Perhaps another major reason the project feels rushed is that Takashi Imanishi, Toru Yoshida et al. were concurrently putting most of their effort into the big OVA project Gundam 0083. Rather than being a big effort on their part, it feels like they were just pinch hitters brought in to bring the project to completion.

The results really show that this project was made in a rush. The animation is TV quality for the most part. Even the few bits where the animation is somewhat lively, like the scene in the house at the beginning, where the animator draws the character going through some fun posing, and the scene where the dragon girl escapes her captors a little later, don't really feel that impressive. The very loose drawings reminiscent of Urusei Yatsura show that they were trying for a looser style of animation that would enable more playing around, but even in this department the animation does not feel particularly nice. Any random episode of Urusei Yatsura did that kind of animation better. The drawings don't look bad in the same way as Good Morning Althea. They don't feel like they look wrong because of bad inbetweening. They just feel like the animators didn't have time to draw the animation.

The animation doesn't even feel like it bears the very strong imprint of a sakkan, much less one with such an identifiable style as Moriyasu Taniguchi. Either by this time he wasn't drawing things in such an idiosyncratic way as he did on Votoms many years earlier, or he just didn't actually do that many corrections here. Similarly, I don't feel the very strong impression of Toru Yoshida in the mecha. The only times when I feel his imprint are in a few shots of the grub-looking ships flying by. They were clearly his design and probably drawn by him. So all in all, it's pretty disappointing from an Anime R anime. Not the best showcase of Anime R's style. But then again, they were involved in a ton of projects, and I'm sure that most of them are not that impressive.

I'd be inclined to give the show a pass despite the lackluster animation because I'm actually kind of partial to this style of lighthearted, gag-filled, playful anime. But it just doesn't work. The story is too compressed, first of all, so it doesn't work as a film. But more importantly, even the character animation and drawing aren't that great. The characters just aren't funny or fun to watch they way they are supposed to be. Normally I love this kind of fun and playful character designs, with its many wacky characters based on animals with chicken, frog, cat heads, etc. I love shows like Kaiketsu Zorori that have simple kiddie designs that allow the animators to have more fun moving them. But somehow that equation didn't work in favor of Capricorn. They seem to have set out to make it a simple carefree romp giving the animators room to fill it out with playful animation, but perhaps because of the short schedule, it just wound up feeling cheap, without the playfulness that would have been necessary to make the simple design aesthetic work. Incidentally, the show seems to have ripped off another with the same aesthetic, Spaceship Sagittarius, which is also a lighthearted science fiction romp populated by anthropomorphic animals featuring an anthropomorphic frog character who speaks in Osaka-ben.

Incidentally the mangaka Joji Manabe is NOT the same person as the Oh Pro animator Joji Manabe. They are two different people. For a long time I was confused about this and thought they were the same person, assuming the animator had eventually given up animating and switched to drawing manga or something. The name is actually spelled slightly differently: Joji Manabe spelled 真鍋譲治 is the mangaka who debuted in 1984, whereas Joji Manabe spelled 真鍋譲二 is the Oh Pro animator from the 1970s who worked on such things as Lupin series 1 (1971) and 2 (1977-80), Dokonjo Gaeru (1972-74), Heidi (1974) and Galaxy Express 999 (1978-1981).

When I saw the animation of Capricorn, it made me think of Urusei Yatsura, so the first person that came to mind was Yuji Morikawa, the guy whose name is synonymous with pioneering the wildly exaggerated reaction animation with huge mouth and eyes that defines Urusei Yatsura. There are several shots with huge-mouthed reactions in that style here. But no, surprisingly, he isn't involved. I think I've also long found myself mixing up Yuji Morikawa and Joji Manabe, too, for some reason.

A note about the credits: I've done something novel this time and placed a note by the key animators identifying which studio they belonged to. I thought it would be an interesting way of showing how the key animation credits (in Capricorn and generally) are a mix of animators from different studios. Whereas in Garaga the only studio credited with "Production Assistance" (which is a credit that is often used to credit the subcontracting studio that produced the actual animation), in Capricorn about a dozen studios are mentioned, so with a little research I was able to figure out who belonged to which one.

The first person listed, Ayaka Gun, is probably a pen name. The only other place the name appears is in Pop Chaser, which also featured one other Anime R animator, Kazuaki Mouri, so obviously it's one of the better Anime R animators. I understand why s/he used the name in Pop Chaser - everyone was doing it almost as a joke - but I don't know why they felt the need to use a pen name here. I wonder if it might not be Toru Yoshida himself, because he's from Kagawa prefecture, which contains a district called Ayaka-gun.

---

Capricorn カプリコン (OVA, 1991, 47mins, Aubeck)

Planning:	谷田部雄次	Yuji Yatabe
Director:	今西隆志	Takashi Imanishi
Created by & Structure:	真鍋譲治	Joji Manabe
Script & Storyboard:	今西隆志	Takashi Imanishi
	真鍋譲治	Joji Manabe
Char. Design & Anim. Director:	谷口守泰	Moriyasu Taniguchi
Mecha Design & Mecha A.D.:	吉田徹	Toru Yoshida
Key Animation:	綾歌軍	Ayaka Gun	(Anime R)
	吉本拓二	Takuji Yoshimoto
	井上哲	Tetsu Inoue
	能地清	Kiyoshi Noji
	河野利幸	Toshiyuki Kono
	村中博美	Hiromi Muranaka	(Studio Mu)
	山本佐和子	Sawako Yamamoto
	大島康弘	Yasuhiro Ojima
	井藤誠	Makoto Ifuji	(Animation 501?)
	飯飼一幸	Kazuyuki Igai
	福島豊明	Toyoaki Fukushima
	小倉康治	Yasuharu Ogura	(Atelier Fukuro)
	川島達矢	Tatsuya Kawajima
	大城勉	Tsutomu Oshiro	(Studio Emu)
	安藤義信	Yoshinobu Ando
	阿部正実	Masami Abe
	木村光雅	Mitsumasa Kimura	(D.A.S.T.)
	中平晴也	Haruya Nakahira

Garaga (1989) is an interesting obscurity from the late 1980s. I had never heard of it before looking into it recently while pursuing Anime R's filmography, but it's a rather interesting project for a number of reasons.

Initially planned as an OVA, it was extended to movie length and had a limited theatrical run before being released on video - so in a way it's both a movie and an OVA. The texture of the film is indeed a mix between the two - it has the pacing of a film, but the quality feels more like an OVA.

It is one of the few big theatrical projects that brought together the Anime R animators of the Votoms-Layzner period (or most of them; Kazuaki Mouri and Fumiko Kishi are missing) in one place, headlined by Moriyasu Taniguchi handling the characters and Toru Yoshida handling the mecha.

Garaga was based on a manga by Satomi Mikuriya, who had previously directed (and written and storyboarded and designed) an adaptation of her manga Nora in 1985. She earned a place in anime history for a different reason as the director of the CGI part of the Golgo 13 movie.

The director was Hidemi Kubo, whose career prior to this consisted almost entirely of animation work on the classic Topcraft co-productions like The Last Unicorn and The Hobbit. Hidemi Kubo is actually the younger brother of Tsuguyuki Kubo, the lead character designer during the Topcraft era. I wrote a bit about Topcraft previously here.

By 1985, when Topcraft had disbanded after the production of Nausicaa (1984) and been replaced by Ghibli, many of the ex-Topcraft staff moved to a company called PAC (Pacific Animation Corporation). It's here that Hidemi Kubo, as one of the directors of Thundercats (1985), switched tracks to directing.

Garaga from a few years later was Hidemi Kubo's first big job as a director of an entire project. It's his directing that actually makes me like this project. His directing is very different from anything I've seen in anime before. You sense that there's something 'foreign' about it, something alien to the rhythms and conventions of anime film language. The pacing is more leisurely and relaxed. Scenes of character interaction unfold in a way that catches you by surprise. Watching anime, you come to know how certain characters will respond in certain situations. Kubo's directing is one of the few places I've seen a Japanese director who undermines those expectations, probably quite unintentionally. It's clear that his training at Topcraft is what forms the basis for this unique rhythm.

Even the action doesn't feel like typical anime. In anime you typically have set-pieces that arrive at a set point, and suddenly the program switches gears into 'action scene' mode. That's not the case here. Here everything unfolds as a seamless whole. Occasionally there will be a moment of action that goes on for 30 seconds, but is then subsumed back within the unfolding narrative without any particular shift in rhythm.

The choreography and layout also doesn't have the visuals-centric feeling of most anime. What sets anime apart from commercial productions in the rest of the world is its sense of style and edginess in the presentation of the images. Topcraft was unique for evolving in a vacuum, as it were, uninfluenced by, for example, the very tightly controlled drawing and timing of the A Pro animators in the 1970s. With virtually no limitation on the number of drawings they could use, they didn't develop that very image-based approach to animation that was the result of those limitations that most animators working on Japanese TV shows had to work within. The downside to this is that the storytelling could equally well be criticized for being somewhat bland and monotone and sluggish. It's true that it lacks somewhat in dynamism. But it's such a refreshing change that I think it offers an interesting counter-argument to the typical anime style.

One thing I particularly like about this show is how the frailty of life is well expressed. Often in anime people will receive blow after blow and be fine in a way that would not be possible in real life, or fall from a great height without incurring almost any injury because it would inconvenience the plot for an injury to occur at that point. In Garaga at one point a character is bear-hugged by a bad guy and winds up dying. In any other anime he would have been fine. In another scene, a character falls from his aircraft and another character goes out of her way to pad his fall with a psychic beam. In any other anime, he would have fallen to the ground and been stunned temporarily but gotten up afterwards as if nothing had happened, whereas in reality that fall would have resulted in death or broken bones.

The story itself is rather pleasant story about how a group of space travellers crash-land on a planet and find themselves caught in the middle of a power struggle between three sides - two indigenous populations and a foreign power. The dynamics of manipulation between the different powers were compelling and believable and the film kept me interested the whole time. I liked how the character dynamics felt different from the usual anime. One downside is that there wasn't a very strong single main character for the audience to invest in, but I personally liked that. I like group-based movies like this.

I haven't seen Thundercats since it aired (I watched it in real time) but I suspect if I had a chance to re-watch it I would notice a similarity to the pacing. The only criticism I might have was that in the second half I got very confused and had a hard time following what was going on because there were so many different sides to the conflict and it was difficult keeping them all straight with their similar-sounding names. (well, that, and the big reveal at the end that the android was the bad guy was a little disappointing)

On the animation side of things, the film is almost 100% Anime R. 18 out of the 23 key animators are Anime R people, and the two sakkans are the usual Anime R sakkans. The films does have a very strong Anime R vibe, with many scenes of exciting action, good mecha and effects animation, and character drawings that are clearly identifiable as Taniguchi. Taniguchi designed the characters presumably based on the manga, but he made them his and the designs are pleasing to look at, although they're not as stylized as his Layzner designs. Taniguchi also receives the novel credit of "Total Visual Director" (in English). I'm not sure what it means, but it clearly suggests that Taniguchi had a role that went beyond merely that of a face corrector. Perhaps he did something in the vein of the more holistic work that Tomonori Kogawa did on Ideon, in which Kogawa also designed the colors of the characters, among other things.

Toru Yoshida designed the mecha as well as acting as the mecha sakkan, and his mecha are very cool. The designs are very different from the designs of, say, Kunio Okawara, who was behind most of the Sunrise shows on which Toru Yoshida acted as mecha sakkan. His designs feel slightly more futuristic and realistic, with sleek and minimalistic and curvy shapes as opposed to the showy and flamboyant designs of many Sunrise shows. The mecha aren't animated with quite as much verve as they were in Yoshida's episodes of Layzner, but there are moments where you can see his great sense of stylized effects work, like the elegantly arced smoke trail pictured above.

The only caveat is that for some reasons the drawings feel a little flimsy. The inbetweening was not done by Anime R, so maybe this is part of the reason. It's not nearly as bad as Althea, but it's still noticeable that the drawings are not quite up to the level that the should be considering how much effort has clearly been put into the animation, and that it's not the sakkan's fault.

There are several nice action scenes, but I can't attribute them to a particular animator. The chase with the helicopter seems to have the style of character drawing I noticed during the arcade scene in Sukeban Deka, though since Kazuaki Mouri isn't credited, if it's the same animator, that would mean it's someone other than Mouri who had that style. The good action animators at Anime R at this period would be Hiroshi Osaka from the generation that debuted on Votoms and Takahiro Kimura and Takahiro Komori from the slightly younger generation that debuted a few years later. I suppose the heli scene was of the hand of one of these guys.

The only scene I was able to identify with certainty is Hiroyuki Okiura's. He almost certainly drew the scene in the ruined building (the first pic atop). Everything including the timing, the acting and the drawings point to Okiura. The style of the gestures seems clearly influenced by Akira, which Okiura had just worked on, while the drawings have a vague Takashi Nakamura influence, and the movement has a richness and a style of movement that is simply the pure product of Okiura's genius. The animation in this scene feels wonderful, but it's a little disappointing because it's a pretty low-key scene and doesn't show off his talent for action very well. There are only about two or three action shots and the rest is mostly talking heads. But even in the talking heads shots, Okiura's unique style of timing and drawing is unmistakable.

There were only five non-Anime R animators involved in the film. They are credited in two separate groupings at the bottom below the big Anime R grouping, suggesting two different studios. The Soichiro Matsuda and Shunichi Matsumoto grouping I suspect to have been Studio Mark (which also once featured Yoshiharu Ashino). The Isamu Utsuki, Kenichi Ishimaru and Toyoaki Fukushima grouping I'm not so sure about, but I suspect to be Animation 501. Yuji Yatabe, who is here responsible for the 'structure', was the head of Animation 501, and Isamu Utsuki is credited under Animation 501 in pink jacket Lupin. I've noticed that Hidemi Kubo worked together with Kenichi Ishimaru and Toyoaki Fukushima together on Wataru the year before in 1988, so perhaps he brought them on himself.

Incidentally, I was wondering how the combo of Hidemi Kubo + Anime R came about. It's an odd combination I wouldn't have expected. It seems Moriyasu Taniguchi worked as an animation director on Thundercats and likely met Hidemi Kubo there.

---

HYPER-PSYCHIC-GEO GARAGA ギャラガ (movie/OVA, 1989, 100min, Aubec/Anime R)

Director, Script, Storyboard:	窪秀己	Hidemi Kubo
Based on:	御厨さと美 「惑星ギャラガ」	"Planet Garaga" by Satomi Mikuriya
Total Visual Director:	谷口守泰	Moriyasu Taniguchi
Structure:	谷田部雄次	Yuji Yatabe
Character Design, Animation Director:	谷口守泰	Moriyasu Taniguchi
Mecha Design, Mecha Anim. Director:	吉田徹	Toru Yoshida
Key animation:	木村貴宏	Takahiro Kimura
	小森高博	Takahiro Komori
	吉田徹	Toru Yoshida
	柳沢まさひで	Masahide Yanagisawa
	逢坂浩司	Hiroshi Osaka
	加瀬政広	Masahiro Kase
	沖浦啓之	Hiroyuki Okiura
	糸島雅彦	Masahiko Itojima
	大島康弘	Yasuhiro Ojima
	尾林幸男	Yukio Ohayashi
	井上哲	Tetsu Inoue
	志村直美	Naomi Shimura
	能地清	Kiyoshi Noji
	藤井満	Mitsuru Fujii
	上井康宣	Yasunobu Kamii
	岩村幸子	Sachiko Iwamura
	有本大作	Daisaku Arimoto
	谷口守泰	Moriyasu Taniguchi
	宇都木勇	Isamu Utsuki
	石丸賢一	Kenichi Ishimaru
	福島豊明	Toyoaki Fukushima
	松本俊一	Shunichi Matsumoto
	松田宗一郎	Soichiro Matsuda

I tend to write about the good OVAs, but they're in the minority. Most OVAs are justly forgotten. The 1987 OVA Good Morning Althea is a prime example of an OVA misfire boasting terrible storytelling and animation. Colony Drop just recently did a write-up on exactly why this show is so bad, so I won't go into the details here, but I thought I'd write my own thoughts as I just had a look at it.

It's not the worst thing I've seen, but it doesn't have much to recommend it. The poor directing and hackneyed and jumbled story weren't even the worst part of it to me. it's the drawings. They're awful. It looked like fan anime to me. It was impossible for me to take most of the scenes seriously because the character drawings consistently had the amateurish quality of fan art, with the features of the faces and the body proportions drawn all wrong, and clumsy linework.

The directing is admittedly pretty weak. Hideki Tonokatsu doesn't do a particularly great job of making the story flow interestingly, making it coherent, making the action exciting, or making us invest in the characters and their situation. A show with a stupid story can be saved by good animation, and vice-versa. Althea boasts a lethal combination of bad drawings and bad directing.

It's not that the animation is bad, though most of the animation is lackluster. There are actually a few shots of decent mecha action, like this one. The mecha look pretty cool, and there's competently drawn most of the time. The fact is, the OVA has some pretty good staff in the credits, which makes it hard to understand why the show turned out so bad. Anime R is a strong presence: Moriyasu Taniguchi is the animation director and Hiroshi Osaka is the mecha animation director. There are a few talented people in the credits including Yasuchika Nagaoka, Hideaki Sakamoto, Atsushi Yano and Hiromitsu Ota, but for the most part it's a mixed bag. It feels like one of those shows where there were issues behind the scenes at the last minute that led to some sudden drastic staff changes. It feels like it was produced in a big scramble.

The mecha drawings are usually OK, but there's something fundamentally wrong with the character drawings here. I had a hard time placing my finger on why the drawings in this OVA feel 'off', but I've come to the conclusion it's because of the inbetweens. I have a hunch Althea is a case of animation ruined by bad inbetweening.

Most of the names in the credits of Althea are Japanese, but but presumably due to time or budget constraints, the inbetweening alone was outsourced to a South Korean studio. Anime is known for using South Korea for its inbetweens. I'm not sure when this began, but it was probably in the 1980s. Althea was made at an early stage in the industry when the quality was far worse than it is today, and even today it's common knowledge that there are tremendous limitations on what inbetweeners can or will do.

Animation drawings of a high caliber like those of Okiura or Ohira apparently require very talented inbetweeners to get the drawings right. If their keys were outsourced to a cut-rate studio, the animation would be ruined. They simplify lines and subtle actions, as you can see if you closely compare the animation of this shot by Bahi JD with the final product.

I've long heard that the inbetweening stage is a surprisingly important stage that, beyond merely being there to 'fill out' the movement drawn by the key animators, can actually kill the animation if done wrong. Inbetweening is a skill that requires talent in its own way, like key animation, and it has its share of hacks doing lackluster work. To many people, inbetweening is (understandably) a paycheck far more than it is a labor of love. At the same time, if you outsource something for very little money and want it back the next day, don't expect good quality.

In anime, you never see the lines drawn by key animators (or you do only in special cases). What you are seeing in most anime is the lines drawn by the inbetweeners. The inbetweeners re-trace the key animation drawings. They don't just shoot the key animation drawings interspersed with inbetweens; they re-draw the keys and draw the inbetweens from scratch (or from reference drawings).

I've been examining Anime R in detail over the last few weeks because in a way they embody the anime paradigm, something that has been lost in today's atomized and outsourced and freelance age: the master-student relationship of inbetweener and key animator - an animator beginning at a studio as an inbetweener, learning the ropes under talented animators, and eventually working his way up to key animation. The inbetweeners and the key animators worked together under the same roof. Anime R's episodes were always inbetweened by Anime R. Hiroyuki Okiura and Hiroshi Osaka were inbetweeners inbetweening Toru Yoshida and Kishi Fumiko's animation before they acceded to drawing key animation.

With a very small team that knew each other's skills very well, they achieved beautiful results in those Sunrise (and other) shows of the 1980s. That has been the traditional situation in Japan, and it fosters a more deep knowledge about the process, but with inbetweens more likely to be outsourced today, it feels like the unique paradigm of the craftsman-student relationship has become a victim of progress. If I'm right about Althea, it shows the perils of corrupting that relationship.

Althea was apparently pitched by Ichiro Itano, and perhaps even initially planned to be directed by Itano. After starting out as a groundbreaking mecha animator, he went on to direct or otherwise back a number of OVAs in the 1980s, starting with Megazone 23. He created a number of overweening adult epics filled with violence and action that sound cool on paper and shine briefly technically but wind up being pretty disappointing and forgettable. The thing I've noticed is that the quality of the OVAs he was involved in is consistently uneven. There are occasional moments of strong animation that bring alive the concept, but often his projects feel rushed and awkward somehow or other, not to mention being in poor taste sometimes. Good Morning Althea is the prototypical Itano production in that sense.

---

Good Morning Althea (OVA, Dec 1987, 50min, Animate Film)

Concept:	板野一郎	Ichiro Itano
Storyboard & Director:	殿勝秀樹	Hideki Tonokatsu
Character design:	菊池みちたか	Michitaka Kikuchi
Settei Design:	池田一成	Kazuya Ikeda
	亀垣一	Hajime Kamegaki
Animation Director:	谷口守泰	Moriyasu Taniguchi
Assistant A.D.:	柳沢まさひで	Masahide Yanagisawa
Mecha A.D.:	逢坂浩司	Hiroshi Osaka
Key animation:	浜川修二郎 Shujiro Hamakawa	垪加等 Hitoshi Haga
	山下悟 Satoru Yamashita	佐藤雄三 Katsuzo Sato
	坂本英明 Hideaki Sakamoto	長岡康史 Yasuchika Nagaoka
	品田広志 Hiroshi Shinada	大平直樹 Naoki Ohira
	矢野淳 Atsushi Yano	和田浩一 Koichi Wada
	溝呂木浩章 Hiroaki Korogi	塚田明 Akira Tsukada
	土屋幹雄 Mikio Tsuchiya	太田博光 Hiromitsu Ohta
	福島豊明 Toyoaki Fukushima	奥村四郎 Shiro Okumura

After Armor Trooper Votoms (1983-1984), Ryosuke Takahashi continued making robot shows at Sunrise, although from what I've seen none of them were quite the same as Votoms and tended to adhere more closely to the Sunrise robot template. The next show he did after Votoms was Panzer World Galient (1984-1985), which seems to mix fantasy with sci-fi. Then came SPT Layzner (1985-1986). I just had a chance to watch Layzner for the first time and enjoyed it, though it's very flawed and far from a classic like Votoms.

What Layzner has going for it is some tremendously strong animation from Anime R. Essentially, the animation of Lazyner was provided by three studios: Anime R, Dove and Bebow, in descending order of importance.

Anime R is by far the most important presence on the show. This is perhaps the show with the highest concentration of Anime R animation. 21 out of the show's 38 episodes were entirely (or mostly) animated by Anime R. The opening and ending were animated by Anime R animators Kazuaki Mouri, Toru Yoshida and Fumiko Kishi. The character designer was Anime R founder Moriyasu Taniguchi, who was invited back to design his own characters because of his great work as sakkan on Votoms. Taniguchi would also go on to be character designer of Mellowlink, in which Anime R provided about half of the animation. The other half was provided by Dove.

The story

Layzner is an odd show. I want to like it, but the story is too cliched and too much of a mess, largely due to circumstances beyond the control of the writers and director. When it works, it works well, and comes across as a more realistic version of the alien invasion story. The writing is fairly strong thanks to the sci-fi anime masters Hiroyuki Hoshiyama, Yoshitake Suzuki (AKA Fuyunori Gobu), Yasushi Hirano and Tsunehisa Ito. The characters feel individual and the urgency of the situation is convincing. The biggest problem is that it isn't consistent to the initial premise. To be more blunt, SPT Layzner jumps the shark big time. The last half of the show is a classic example of a show jumping the shark. It feels like two shows crammed into one, neither of them very happy about being forced to abide one another.

Part one begins as your typical Sunrise show: An alien army is coming to invade the earth, but a mixed alien-human named Eiji defects from the army to warn the earth of the impending danger. Along the way he saves a group of children visiting the Mars base, and enlists them to pilot giant robots and fight their way back to Earth. Sunrise was apparently so pleased with the setup of Round Vernian Vifam, in which a group of children visiting space one day suddenly find themselves caught in the middle of a war, that they decided to copy it almost verbatim in SPT Layzner. Anime advances by small variations on successful formulae.

The setup is hardly original, and it tested my patience for a while, but eventually I got into it on the strength of the animation and the fact that the story is told in a fairly hard-boiled and no-nonsense way. It proceeds very slowly, meticulously depicting each step of the way as the kids battle their way back to earth. By the time we get to episode 24, the story has gotten fairly interesting, taking on a bit of sociopolitical commentary. The protagonist Eiji is interrogated by a suspicious U.S. army rather than welcomed with open arms as he expected, and a lot of the drama comes across as an angry satire about the atmosphere of international suspicion during the Cold War. The writers do a good job with this material. I was starting to like the show by this point.

Then bam. Right when the story seems poised to finally start coming to a head after such an extended and even plodding setup, suddenly things do a 180. All of the many character interrelation and plot element threads that had been patiently built up and interwoven over the course of two dozen episodes are peremptorily dropped without any warning. Part two begins abruptly after a recap episode in episode 25. Suddenly all the characters are grown up and we're in a post-apocalyptic future in which the earth as been taken over by the aliens and everyone has big hair, shoulder pads and hockey masks straight out of Mad Max, or more relevantly, Fist of the North Star. Masked police go around burning books just like in Farenheit 451. (Oddly, some animator drew Katsuhiro Otomo's Highway Star as one of the books being burned. Otomo's influence apparently extends into the post-invasion future.)

Fist of the North Star is the appropriate comparison. It was airing simultaneously, and was likely copied intentionally. It seems that sales of the kind of toys the show was advertising had begun to drop across the industry, and so at midpoint into the series they decided to completely change the show's story and opt for the popular post-apocalyptic formula in a desperate attempt to increase ratings and hence boost toy sales. The story is now about Eiji leading a resistance against the occupying aliens. It's basically Fist of the North Star meets Gundam, without the exploding heads.

The change in tone and style is so radical and without warning that it's difficult to take the show seriously from this point on. And not long after they begin the second part, suddenly the show gets cancelled, and they have to rush the ending. Part 2 was probably planned as two seasons, but was reduced on short notice to one, so they had to suddenly skip ahead in episode 35 and jump right to the ending in episode 38, without explaining how we got there. The Ideon movie was famously released to complete the story after the TV series was unexpectedly canceled just short of completion. So it went with Layzner. After the show ended, two 60-minute recap OVAs were released (one for part one and one for part two) followed by an OVA telling what happened between episode 37 and 38. Many shows during the ensuing years did the same, but in the OVA rather than theatrical format, and Layzner was one of the first.

If anything, the show is an interesting case study of the way in which forces greater than the director and his staff have historically controlled the length and content of TV anime. Seasons are added and canceled capriciously and on short notice, causing the staff to scramble and come up with ad-hoc solutions. Ironically enough, this sometimes produces a happy ending. The final Ideon movie and final SPT Layzner OVA wound up bringing their stories to a conclusion in better quality than could have been expected within the originally anticipated TV schedule. But it should be remembered that both were made only at the insistence of their directors, who felt compelled to give their audience their rightful catharsis.

Episode 26: Hiroyuki Okiura

Anime R in SPT Layzner

If there's one reason to watch the show despite the story's flaws, it's because Layzner is in a way the summum opus of Anime R.

Moriyasu Taniguchi's characters have never gotten such a grand stage, and they've never been so appealing. Taniguchi's characters are pleasingly stylized, with elongated heads and angular features. This dude in episode 37 is the most extreme character design in the show, but gives a quick sense of his style. I like his designs far more than Norio Shioyama's, which seem bland and old-fashioned. Taniguchi had verve and his characters felt more cutting edge for the time, although he was clearly influenced by Tomonori Kogawa, and by Masami Suda of Fist of the North Star by the time of part 2.

The real star of the show, though, is of course the mecha and the mecha animators. Designed again by Kunio Okawara as in Votoms, the robots are brought alive with energy by the young animators of Anime R. Just about every episode of the show has some pleasing mecha animation, and a handful of the episodes have some of the best mecha animation of the entire period. Layzner is one of the feasts of mecha animation of the 1980s.

Basically the Anime R staff is the same as Votoms, except that everyone has been bumped up a notch in the hierarchy. Toru Yoshida is now a mecha sakkan and Hiroyuki Okiura is now a genga man.

The Anime R episodes of Layzner are split into three teams, each headed by a different animation director, to enable them to cover the whole show:

Sakkan	Key Animators
谷口守泰 Moriyasu Taniguchi	逢坂浩司 Hiroshi Osaka 沖浦啓之 Hiroyuki Okiura 山田香 Kaoru Yamada 浜川修二郎 Shujiro Hamakawa
貴志夫美子 Fumiko Kishi Mecha sakkan: 吉田徹 Toru Yoshida	加瀬政広 Masahiro Kase 井上哲 Tetsu Inoue 岩村幸子 Sachiko Iwamura 野中幸 Koh Nonaka 小森高博 Takahiro Komori
村中博美 Hiromi Muranaka	中島美子 Miko Nakajima 山本佐和子 Sawako Yamamoto 黄瀬和哉 Kazuchika Kise 大島康広 Yasuhiro Ohjima

There is some variation in the arrangement early on, but this is the basic arrangement they settled into. There's one strong mecha animator in each group who was usually in charge of the mecha in their team's episodes, with the rest handling the characters: Hiroyuki Okiura under Moriyasu Taniguchi, Toru Yoshida under Fumiko Kishi, and Sawako Yamamoto under Hiromi Muranaka.

Note that, soon after this, the Hiromi Muranaka group split into a separate but affiliated sister studio called Studio Mu. At this point in time the Muranaka team is still credited as Anime R, but Studio Mu has shown up in the inbetweening credits.

Episode 17: Toru Yoshida

Toru Yoshida was involved in episodes 1, 6, 11, 17, 21, 28, 34, 38. He apparently did some of his best work on Galient between Votoms and SPT Layzner, but sadly I skipped over that one, so I'm missing an important piece in the evolution of his style, but I will get to that show eventually. Episode 17 with the unmanned robots attacking the kids on the moon is one of his best episode, with very stylish and exciting mecha drawings and effects. As impressive as Yoshida's work was on Votoms, you can see significant improvement here. The mecha animation is among the most powerful and detailed of the era. I like that by this point Yoshida has gone beyond his Kanada-school influence and developed his own style: more realistic but still extremely exciting and thrilling, with a focus on densely packing the screen with effects and movement.

Sawako Yamamoto was involved in episodes 7, 14, 19, 24, 29, 36. I wasn't familiar with this animator prior to watching Layzner, but she apparently went on to do a lot of mecha work later in her career, a rarity for a female animator. Sawako Yamamoto was the mentor of another of R's many alumni, Asako Nishita, who was one of the more prominent female animators of the 1990s and 2000s. Yamamoto was one of the mecha sakkans on Ryosuke Takahashi's recent Gasaraki, which was apparently his ultimate attempt to do a 'real robot' show and do it right. Episode 36 of Layzner in particular features some great mecha fighting in the streets presumably of Yamamoto's hand. Episode 29, meanwhile, doesn't feature any mecha animation and is all focused on character animation, showcasing what the Mu team was better known for.

Hiroyuki Okiura was involved in episodes 12, 16, 20, 26, 33, 38. He actually acted as mecha sakkan in his episodes from episode 20 onwards even though he is not credited as such. Okiura had similarly actually drawn key animation on Votoms (1983-1984) and Galient (1984-1985) even though he was still being credited with inbetweening. His official debut as a genga-man came on Bismark (1984-1985), in which he drew all of the mecha action scenes in the episodes in which he is credited. So technically Layzner is his sakkan debut, although his official sakkan debut only came with Black Magic M-66 a year later.

Okiura is the star mecha animator of Layzner. If you watch nothing else of the show, Okiura's scenes are worth seeking out on their own merits, especially episode 26. What made people sit up and pay attention still comes through loud and clear almost 30 years later. Even amidst all of the great work by Yoshida et al. on the show, there is something fundamentally different when Okiura's work comes on the screen. First of all, it just moves more. Okiura was inspired by Takashi Nakamura, and his goal was to create the richest and most dense animation he could. Due to the restrictions on the number of drawings (about 6000 in Layzner, still way more than the average episode today), Okiura had to work closely with his fellow animators to calculate the number of drawings in each shot. He had them use less drawings for the character scenes so that he could use more drawings on the mecha scenes. On top of this, the mecha animation feels more realistic in its movement. The movement is more detailed and weighty, and more precisely calculated. Whereas many mecha animators just threw their mecha about in whichever way - whatever looked coolest - Okiura had a patently more methodical way of moving his mecha. The camera angles feel more realistic and have more variety. You already sense that Okiura is one of those animators who animates like a director. Okiura had apparently convinced the director of Bismark to re-storyboard the last episode of Bismark so that it had more action scenes because Okiura felt it did not have enough action. He wanted to be challenged, not given an easy way out.

His work on episode 26 in particular is one of the classics for the ages. His scene starts from the point where Layzner comes out of the water. The maniacal level of detail in the fragments should immediately remind of his mob scene in Akira. I recommend watching some of the other mecha scenes first for comparison purposes so you can see how different Okiura's animation is, but even if you don't, I think it should still come through loud and clear how impressive Okiura's animation is. It was this episode that first revealed his true powers to the world and showed that he had some uncommon skills that surpassed even those of the many other great Anime R animators who inspired and taught him. Episode 33 is also notable for being the only episode with mecha action from start to end. The animation isn't as powerful as episode 26, but the sheer amount of movement packed into the episode is impressive.

The remarkable thing: he was aged only 19 when he worked on Lazyner. He turned 20 during Black Magic M-66. Anime had a lot of early bloomers, but Okiura is one of the most memorable.

Bebow

The other episodes are all decent, with some good animation here and there, but nothing that equals the best R episodes. Bebow's good work was mostly done in the character animation. Bebow handled episodes 23, 32 and 37. Notable names in their episodes include Akihiko Yamashita, Masahiro Yamane and Masanori Shino. Episode 32 was actually Masahiro Yamane's debut. He is one of the best mecha animators of the 1990s, during which time he did a lot of work with Masami Obari on Sunrise 'yuusha' shows, helping define their mecha animation as mecha designer and mecha sakkan. The best Bebow episode is probably episode 32, which features the bad guy you love to hate, Gostero, who seemed to die several times in the series only to keep coming back, hamming it up with a whole episode of his outrageous antics. The drawings all feel patently Bebow, and they show how good they are at drawing the body and face in various poses.

There is one oddball episode in the bunch: episode 15. It was sakkan'd by the Studio Z5 team of Hideyuki Motohashi and Chiharu Sato. It stands out for the more Kanada-style effects work and mecha posing and the way the characters are drawn in a more 'bikei' character style that is obviously the work of Hideyuki Motohashi.

On the directing side of things, the series features episode storyboarding/ directing work by Tetsuro Amino early in his career, prior to debuting as a series director. Other storyboarders/directors include Takashi Imanishi, who I mentioned in my post on Votoms, and Katsuyoshi Yatabe, who went on to direct many of the same Sunrise 'yuusha' shows I mentioned earlier. Toshifumi Takizawa pays a brief surprise visit in episodes 12 and 17 as storyboarder, and as usual, his episodes stand out for their more cinematic feeling. Episode 12 in particular is a very fine Takizawa episode, while in episode 17 the combination of Takizawa's storyboard and Toru Yoshida's fantastic mecha animation makes for riveting viewing. I think the series would have benefited from his more serious style of directing, but obviously he was busy with other projects.

The final OVA

The final OVA is a combination of footage from the last TV episode with new footage interspersed to flesh out the scenes that they had not had enough time to elaborate upon. The character animation appears to have been re-drawn, but the mecha animation was re-used.

For the new bits, there are some impressive mecha action sequences. Okiura surprisingly didn't animate any mecha scenes, although some of the footage he animated for the final TV episode (the part where Layzner is flying through space surrounded by a halo at the very end) was re-used in the OVA. He animated the fistfight in the cylinder. This is because he was too busy at the time working on Black Magic M-66. The mecha sequences were presumably animated primarily by Toru Yoshida, Sawako Yamamoto, Hiroshi Osaka and perhaps some others including Hiroshi Koizumi of Dove. Toru Yoshida is only credited as an animation director alongside Moriyasu Taniguchi and Kishi Fumiko, but this presumably means mecha sakkan.

I'll close by noting that you can see future director and producer Shinichiro Watanabe and Masahiko Minami here in the credits as animation runners. Both started out as runners at Sunrise before evolving in their respective directions.

---

Blue Comet SPT Layzner 蒼き流星SPTレイズナー (TV series, 38 eps, 1985-1986)

Storyboard		Director	Sakkan	Key Animators
1	あかい星にて			アニメ・アール Anime R 井上哲 Tetsu Inoue 岩村幸子 Sachiko Iwamura 加瀬政広 Masahiro Kase 貴志夫美子 Fumiko Kishi
谷田部勝義 Katsuyoshi Yatabe			谷口守泰 Moriyasu Taniguchi Mecha sakkan: 吉田徹 Toru Yoshida
2	彼の名はエイジ			スタジオ・ダブ Studio Dove 古泉浩司 Hiroshi Koizumi 高橋幸治 Koji Takahashi 佐久間信一 Shinichi Sakuma
網野哲郎 Tetsuro Amino			八幡正 Tadashi Yahata
3	その瞳を信じて			長崎重信 Shigenobu Nagasaki 布告文 Tsugefumi Nuno 杉山東夜美 Mayami Sugiyama 臼田美夫 Yoshio Usuda
川手浩次 Hirotsugu Kawate		加瀬充子 Nobuko Kase	伊東誠 Makoto Ito
4	心のこしての脱出			谷口守泰 Moriyasu Taniguchi 横山健次 Kenji Yokoyama アド・コスモ Ad Cosmo 直井正博 Masahiro Naoi
網野哲郎 Tetsuro Amino		今西隆志 Takashi Imanishi	谷口守泰 Moriyasu Taniguchi
5	まもられても、なお…			スタジオ・ダブ Studio Dove 古泉浩司 Hiroshi Koizumi 高橋幸治 Koji Takahashi 藁谷均 Hitoshi Waratani 遠藤栄一 Eiichi Endo 山内貴美子 Kimiko Yamauchi
谷田部勝義 Katsuyoshi Yatabe			八幡正 Tadashi Yahata
6	とり残されて			アニメ・アール Anime R 貴志夫美子 Fumiko Kishi 加瀬政広 Masahiro Kase 井上哲 Tetsu Inoue 岩村幸子 Sachiko Iwamura
川手浩次 Hirotsugu Kawate		加瀬充子 Nobuko Kase	谷口守泰 Moriyasu Taniguchi Mecha sakkan: 吉田徹 Toru Yoshida
7	血はあかかった			アニメ・アール Anime R 中島美子 Miko Nakajima 山本佐和子 Sawako Yamamoto 黄瀬和哉 Kazuchika Kise
網野哲郎 Tetsuro Amino			村中博美 Hiromi Muranaka
8	彼の叫びに応えて			寺東克己 Katsumi Terahigashi 佐藤千春 Chiharu Sato 杉山東夜美 Mayami Sugiyama 臼田美夫 Yoshio Usuda
網野哲郎 Tetsuro Amino		今西隆志 Takashi Imanishi	谷口守泰 Moriyasu Taniguchi
9	生きる道を求めて			長崎重信 Shigenobu Nagasaki 遠藤栄一 Eiichi Endo 布告文 Tsugefumi Nuno 山内貴美子 Kimiko Yamauchi
谷田部勝義 Katsuyoshi Yatabe			桜井美知代 Michiyo Sakurai
10	エイジ！？と呼んだ			スタジオ・ダブ Studio Dove 古泉浩司 Hiroshi Koizumi 高橋幸治 Koji Takahashi 藁谷均 Hitoshi Waratani
川手浩次 Hirotsugu Kawate		加瀬充子 Nobuko Kase 江上潔 Kiyoshi Ekami	八幡正 Tadashi Yahata
11	地球の艦が来た！			アニメ・アール Anime R 貴志夫美子 Fumiko Kishi 加瀬政広 Masahiro Kase 井上哲 Tetsu Inoue 岩村幸子 Sachiko Iwamura
網野哲郎 Tetsuro Amino			貴志夫美子 Fumiko Kishi Mecha sakkan: 吉田徹 Toru Yoshida
12	さよならの赤い星			アニメ・アール Anime R 逢坂浩司 Hiroshi Osaka 沖浦啓之 Hiroyuki Okiura 山田香 Kaoru Yamada 浜川修二郎 Shujiro Hamakawa
滝沢敏文 Toshifumi Takizawa		今西隆志 Takashi Imanishi	谷口守泰 Moriyasu Taniguchi
13	宇宙にむなしく			スタジオ・ダブ Studio Dove 古泉浩司 Hiroshi Koizumi 藁谷均 Hitoshi Waratani 佐久間信一 Shinichi Sakuma 中野美佐緒 Misao Nakano 西村誠芳 Nobuyoshi Nishimura
谷田部勝義 Katsuyoshi Yatabe			八幡正 Tadashi Yahata
14	異星人に囚われて			アニメ・アール Anime R 村中博美 Hiromi Muranaka 中島美子 Miko Nakajima 山本佐和子 Sawako Yamamoto 黄瀬和哉 Kazuchika Kise
網野哲郎 Tetsuro Amino			村中博美 Hiromi Muranaka
15	蒼き流星となって			遠藤栄一 Eiichi Endo 寺東克己 Katsumi Terahigashi 佐藤千春 Chiharu Sato 杉山東夜美 Mayami Sugiyama 山内貴美子 Kimiko Yamauchi 臼田美夫 Yoshio Usuda
川手浩次 Hirotsugu Kawate		今西隆志 Takashi Imanishi	本橋秀之 Hideyuki Motohashi 佐藤千春 Chiharu Sato
16	月よ！こたえて			アニメ・アール Anime R 逢坂浩司 Hiroshi Osaka 沖浦啓之 Hiroyuki Okiura 山田香 Kaoru Yamada 浜川修二郎 Shujiro Hamakawa 青鉢芳信 Yoshinobu Aohachi 長崎重信 Shigenobu Nagasaki
網野哲郎 Tetsuro Amino		江上潔 Kiyoshi Ekami	谷口守泰 Moriyasu Taniguchi
17	群がる殺人機			アニメ・アール Anime R 貴志夫美子 Fumiko Kishi 加瀬政広 Masahiro Kase 井上哲 Tetsu Inoue 岩村幸子 Sachiko Iwamura
滝沢敏文 Toshifumi Takizawa		加瀬充子 Nobuko Kase	貴志夫美子 Fumiko Kishi Mecha sakkan: 吉田徹 Toru Yoshida
18	そして地球へ			スタジオ・ダブ Studio Dove 古泉浩司 Hiroshi Koizumi 藁谷均 Hitoshi Waratani 佐久間信一 Shinichi Sakuma 中野美佐緒 Misao Nakano 西村誠芳 Nobuyoshi Nishimura
網野哲郎 Tetsuro Amino			八幡正 Tadashi Yahata
19	とどかぬ想い			アニメ・アール Anime R 村中博美 Hiromi Muranaka 中島美子 Miko Nakajima 山本佐和子 Sawako Yamamoto 黄瀬和哉 Kazuchika Kise 遠藤栄一 Eiichi Endo 杉山東夜美 Mayami Sugiyama 山内貴美子 Kimiko Yamauchi 臼田美夫 Yoshio Usuda
谷田部勝義 Katsuyoshi Yatabe			村中博美 Hiromi Muranaka
20	レイズナーの怒り			アニメ・アール Anime R 逢坂浩司 Hiroshi Osaka 沖浦啓之 Hiroyuki Okiura 山田香 Kaoru Yamada 浜川修二郎 Shujiro Hamakawa 青鉢芳信 Yoshinobu Aohachi 寺東克己 Katsumi Terahigashi
川手浩次 Hirotsugu Kawate		今西隆志 Takashi Imanishi	谷口守泰 Moriyasu Taniguchi
21	我が名はフォロン			アニメ・アール Anime R 貴志夫美子 Fumiko Kishi 加瀬政広 Masahiro Kase 井上哲 Tetsu Inoue 岩村幸子 Sachiko Iwamura 長崎重信 Shigenobu Nagasaki 佐藤千春 Chiharu Sato 長谷川浩司 Hiroshi Hasegawa
加瀬充子 Nobuko Kase			貴志夫美子 Fumiko Kishi Mecha sakkan: 吉田徹 Toru Yoshida
22	フォロンとの対決			スタジオ・ダブ Studio Dove 古泉浩司 Hiroshi Koizumi 藁谷均 Hitoshi Waratani 佐久間信一 Shinichi Sakuma 中野美佐緒 Misao Nakano 西村誠芳 Nobuyoshi Nishimura
網野哲郎 Tetsuro Amino		江上潔 Kiyoshi Ekami	八幡正 Tadashi Yahata
23	奇跡を求めて			ビーボォー Bebow 沢田正人 Masato Sawada 筱雅律 Masanori Shino 南伸一郎 Shinichiro Minami 山下明彦 Akihiko Yamashita 山本正文 Masafumi Yamamoto 遠藤栄一 Eiichi Endo 寺東克己 Katsumi Terahigashi 佐藤千春 Chiharu Sato 山内貴美子 Kimiko Yamauchi 臼田美夫 Yoshio Usuda
川手浩次 Hirotsugu Kawate		谷田部勝義 Katsuyoshi Yatabe	中村悟 Satoru Nakamura
24	光になったエイジ			アニメ・アール Anime R 村中博美 Hiromi Muranaka 中島美子 Miko Nakajima 山本佐和子 Sawako Yamamoto 黄瀬和哉 Kazuchika Kise スタジオ・ダブ Studio Dove 古泉浩司 Hiroshi Koizumi 藁谷均 Hitoshi Waratani
網野哲郎 Tetsuro Amino			村中博美 Hiromi Muranaka
25	駆けぬけた宇宙
		高橋良輔 Ryosuke Takahashi
26	時は流れた！			アニメ・アール Anime R 逢坂浩司 Hiroshi Osaka 沖浦啓之 Hiroyuki Okiura 山田香 Kaoru Yamada 浜川修二郎 Shujiro Hamakawa
加瀬充子 Nobuko Kase			谷口守泰 Moriyasu Taniguchi
27	華麗なるル・カイン			スタジオ・ダブ Studio Dove 古泉浩司 Hiroshi Koizumi 藁谷均 Hitoshi Waratani 佐久間信一 Shinichi Sakuma 中野美佐緒 Misao Nakano 西村誠芳 Nobuyoshi Nishimura
谷田部勝義 Katsuyoshi Yatabe		江上潔 Kiyoshi Ekami	八幡正 Tadashi Yahata
28	クスコの聖女			アニメ・アール Anime R 貴志夫美子 Fumiko Kishi 加瀬政広 Masahiro Kase 井上哲 Tetsu Inoue 野中幸 Ko Nonaka
今西隆志 Takashi Imanishi			貴志夫美子 Fumiko Kishi Mecha sakkan: 吉田徹 Toru Yoshida
29	再会・謎の招待状			アニメ・アール Anime R 村中博美 Hiromi Muranaka 中島美子 Miko Nakajima 山本佐和子 Sawako Yamamoto 黄瀬和哉 Kazuchika Kise 大島康広 Yasuhiro Oshima
網野哲郎 Tetsuro Amino			村中博美 Hiromi Muranaka
30	ベイブル奪回作戦			青鉢芳信 Yoshinobu Aohachi 遠藤栄一 Eiichi Endo 寺東克己 Katsumi Terahigashi 佐藤千春 Chiharu Sato 杉山東夜美 Mayami Sugiyama 山内貴美子 Kimiko Yamauchi 臼田美夫 Yoshio Usuda
網野哲郎 Tetsuro Amino		藤本義孝 Yoshitaka Fujimoto	谷口守泰 Moriyasu Taniguchi
31	仕組まれた聖戦			スタジオ・ダブ Studio Dove 古泉浩司 Hiroshi Koizumi 佐久間信一 Shinichi Sakuma 宇津木勇 Isamu Utsuki 阿部和彦 Kazuhiko Abe 山田浩嗣 Hirotsugu Yamada
谷田部勝義 Katsuyoshi Yatabe			八幡正 Tadashi Yahata
32	ああ、ゴステロ			ビーボォー Bebow 矢木正之 Masayuki Yaki 辻清光 Kiyomitsu Tsuji 筱雅律 Masanori Shino 河上裕 Yutaka Kawakami 山根理宏 Masahiro Yamane 山下明彦 Akihiko Yamashita 佐藤敬一 Keiichi Sato 小曽根正美 Masami Kosone 沢田正人 Masato Sawada
加瀬充子 Nobuko Kase			沢田正人 Masato Sawada
33	死鬼隊の挑戦			アニメ・アール Anime R 逢坂浩司 Hiroshi Osaka 沖浦啓之 Hiroyuki Okiura 山田香 Kaoru Yamada 浜川修二郎 Shujiro Hamakawa
網野哲郎 Tetsuro Amino		江上潔 Kiyoshi Ekami	谷口守泰 Moriyasu Taniguchi
34	狙われたアンナ			アニメ・アール Anime R 貴志夫美子 Fumiko Kishi 加瀬政広 Masahiro Kase 井上哲 Tetsu Inoue 野中幸 Ko Nonaka 小森高博 Takahiro Komori
知吹愛弓 Ayumi Tomobuki		今西隆志 Takashi Imanishi	貴志夫美子 Fumiko Kishi Mecha sakkan: 吉田徹 Toru Yoshida
35	グラドスの刻印			スタジオ・ダブ Studio Dove 古泉浩司 Hiroshi Koizumi 佐久間信一 Shinichi Sakuma 遠藤栄一 Eiichi Endo 山内貴美子 Kimiko Yamauchi 臼田美夫 Yoshio Usuda 加藤義貴 Yoshitaka Kato
川手浩次 Hirotsugu Kawate		藤本義孝 Yoshitaka Fujimoto	八幡正 Tadashi Yahata
36	敵V-MAX発動			アニメ・アール Anime R 村中博美 Hiromi Muranaka 中島美子 Miko Nakajima 山本佐和子 Sawako Yamamoto 黄瀬和哉 Kazuchika Kise 大島康広 Yasuhiro Oshima
網野哲郎 Tetsuro Amino		加瀬充子 Nobuko Kase	村中博美 Hiromi Muranaka
37	エイジ対ル・カイン			青鉢芳信 Yoshinobu Aohachi 寺東克己 Katsumi Terahigashi ビーボォー Bebow 矢木正之 Masayuki Yaki 沢田正人 Masato Sawada 河上裕 Yutaka Kawakami 山根理宏 Masahiro Yamane
谷田部勝義 Katsuyoshi Yatabe			谷口守泰 Moriyasu Taniguchi
38	歪む宇宙			アニメ・アール Anime R 貴志夫美子 Fumiko Kishi 吉田徹 Toru Yoshida 井上哲 Tetsu Inoue 逢坂浩司 Hiroshi Osaka 山田香 Kaoru Yamada 浜川修二郎 Shujiro Hamakawa
高橋良輔 Ryosuke Takahashi		江上潔 Kiyoshi Ekami	谷口守泰 Moriyasu Taniguchi Mecha sakkan: 沖浦啓之 Hiroyuki Okiura

---

Blue Comet SPT Layzner ACT-III: The Seal 2000
蒼き流星SPTレイズナー ACT-III 刻印2000
(OVA, October 21, 1986)

Director:	高橋良輔	Ryosuke Takahashi
Character Design:	谷口守泰	Moriyasu Taniguchi
Mechanical Design:	大河原邦男	Kunio Okawara
Storyboard:	網野哲郎	Tetsuro Amino
	加瀬充子	Nobuko Kase
Technical Director:	加瀬充子	Nobuko Kase
Animation Directors:	谷口守泰	Moriyasu Taniguchi
	吉田徹	Toru Yoshida
	貴志夫美子	Fumiko Kishi
Key animators:	山田香	Kaoru Yamada
	野中幸	Ko Nonaka
	沖浦啓之	Hiroyuki Okiura
	逢坂浩司	Hiroshi Osaka
	浜川修二郎	Shujiro Hamakawa
	井上哲	Tetsu Inoue
	糸島雅彦	Masahiko Itojima
	佐々木一浩	Kazuhiro Sasaki
	小森高博	Takahiro Komori
	村中博美	Hiromi Muranaka
	中島美子	Miko Nakajima
	山本佐和子	Sawako Yamamoto
	黄瀬和哉	Kazuchika Kise
	大島康広	Yasuhiro Ohshima
	古泉浩司	Hiroshi Koizumi
	西村誠芳	Nobuyoshi Nishimura
	中野美佐緒	Misao Nakano

In the shadow of Gundam, one of the most successful and long-lived of Sunrise's real robot shows has been Armored Trooper Votoms. I finally had the opportunity to watch Votoms for the first time just recently, and find it still holds up very well after all these years, especially as a contrast with the overwrought style of Yoshiyuki Tomino. Where Yoshiyuki Tomino's Gundam is filled with flamboyant intergalatic drama and angst and robotic heroics, Ryosuke Takahashi's Votoms is earthy and dark and anti-heroic.

Watching Votoms made me realize what I found tiresome about Sunrise's shows: they're always full of kids, and the drama is hence full of puerile antics and melodrama. Votoms is refreshing because all of its characters are adults, and the drama is for the most part cool and restrained and intimate rather than grandiose and theatrical. It's one of the great classics of hard-boiled realistic sci-fi in anime.

The protagonist of Votoms is a cold-hearted soldier by trade, not a kid forced against his will into battle. Where the kid protagonists of the various Gundam outings are against war initially but eventually seem to succumb to the temptation of glory and become heroes, the protagonist of Votoms, Chirico Cuvie, is an anti-hero from the outset: a stone-faced soldier with blood on his hands who finds himself most alive in the heat of battle. Rather than the violence-glorifying heroic action of a Star Wars, the world of Votoms seems closer to the inglorious mud and blood of a Vietnam war film like Apocalypse Now. Flag is one of the best anime of recent memory, with its realistic style and believable geopolitical drama, and the roots of the war documentary style of Flag go back to Votoms.

What I like about the show is that it's one of the most original amid the huge crowd of 1980s robot shows. The characters are all adults, and are for the most part relatable without behaving in an unduly exaggerated way. The story is a refreshing change from the cliched Sunrise formula. Rather than being a grandiose space opera filled with philosophical banter, the essence of the show is a small-scale story about the dirty everyday life of soldiers. The eternally defiant protagonist embodies a kind of anarchic heroism out to destroy all hegemony. There is a lot of good animation throughout the show's various outings. It's a pleasure to finally be able to discover this gem of a saga.

The story of Votoms is simple in outline: The mercenary Chirico seeks the truth behind why he was betrayed by his comrades, and eventually this transforms into a quest to discover the truth of his own identity. Many people have written about Votoms in more insightful detail about the show's political overtones and story intricacies than I possibly could, so I'll skip over the details of the story focus on what really interests me, and that's the technique.

Initially broadcast as a one-off TV show from 1983 to 1984, Votoms spawned a nearly overwhelming number of sequels, prequels and offshoots of various lengths and styles, making it a daunting show to dig into, since unlike Gundam most of these actually take place on the same continuum and feature the same characters. I didn't know where to start initially, since a number of the followup OVAs take place before the TV series, but I found it best to go in production order to appreciate how the staff's technique and approach to the material evolved over the years.

The style changes dramatically over the years, since the show has been in production almost continually since 1983 right on down to last year with the most recent outing, Alone Again. Initially it was all hand-drawn, but starting with Pailsen Files in 2007 they switched to using CGI for the robots. This post will focus on everything that was done in the hand-drawn period:

- The TV series (1983-1984)
- The three ensuing one-shot OVAs:
      The Last Red Shoulder (1985)
      Big Battle (1986)
      The Roots of Ambition (1988)
- The 5-episode OVA series The Radiant Heresy (1994-1995)

The only thing I haven't watched from this period is Mellowlink, produced 1988-1989, as it's a side-story not involving Chirico. The CG outings starting with Pailsen Files appear to have been produced by the same team that did Flag.

The animation subcontractors behind Votoms

There are two basic stars of the animation of Votoms: Anime R and Studio Dove. Although other subcontractors worked on the show, these were the two studios whose animators provided the most impressive animation in the series.

In the TV series, Anime R is the real star. Studio Dove is present, but they don't start shining until the later OVAs. The Last Red Shoulder featured good animation from Anime R, Studio Dove, Bebow and Magic Bus. Big Battle and The Roots of Ambition were mostly animated by Studio Dove. Mellowlink was animated by Anime R and Studio Dove. The Radiant Heresy from several years later features a completely different animation staff, so its animation looks and feels distinct within the Votoms saga. The next outing came more than a decade later with Pailsen Files, which had CG mecha.

The escalating quality of the mecha animation in Votoms is a beautiful thing to behold. You can see with each passing year the animators becoming stronger at their craft. Anime R shines in the TV series, Studio Dove shines in the last two one-shot OVAs, and Mellowlink was evenly divided between Anime R and Studio Dove. I have yet to see Mellowlink, but I assume it is the culmination of these respective studios' work on the show.

I've written about Anime R many times in the past (Black Magic M-66, Dragon Slayer, Sukeban Deka), and their work on Votoms is one of their defining moments. It was their work on robot shows like Votoms and then Bismark and SPT Layzner that propelled Osaka-based Anime R to fame as one of the best mecha animation subcontractors in Japan, and THE best animation subcontractor outside of the Tokyo region.

Anime R was one of big supports of Ryosuke Takahashi's Sunrise robot shows. They were involved right from the start with his first 'real robot' show Dougram (1981-1983). They worked on his Votoms (1983-1984), Galient (1984-1985) and SPT Layzner (1985-1986). Incidentally, it was after having proven their mettle on all these Ryosuke Takahashi robot shows that Anime R was called in to work on Black Magic M-66 in 1987.

Founded near the end of the 1970s by Moriyasu Taniguchi 谷口守泰 and Harumi Muranaka 村中博美, the studio initially featured talented animators like Kazuaki Mouri 毛利和昭 and Fumiko Kishi 貴志夫美子 on shows like Ideon and Dougram. It was right around the time of Votoms that many of the names that went on to propel Anime R to fame joined the studio: Hiroyuki Okiura 沖浦啓之, Kazuchika Kise 黄瀬和哉, Hiroshi Osaka 逢坂浩司, Toru Yoshida 吉田徹 and Masahiko Itojima 糸島雅彦. Their work was so impressive that many of these animators left Osaka for Tokyo because they were in such demand. Although Anime R is in the distant past for them, without Anime R we might not have gotten some of our best animators.

The Votoms TV series (1983-1984)

The defining characteristic of the show is of course the unusual mecha. Rather than one-shots like a Gundam, the scope dog in Votoms is a mass-production model. So although some might be customized with different weapons, they're all essentially just mass-production bipedal armed military vehicles. Hence they don't have the heroic nuance of a Gundam. The unique scope design is also quite interesting and refreshing, as I always found robots with faces ludicrous.

This doesn't change the fundamental fact that this show was a commercial to sell robot toys, but at least the robots were a refreshing change from the typical humanoid robots. The various details of the mecha such as the pivoting action and camera lens-inspired eyepiece were clever and made the mecha feel like a military weapon where each part had a practical use, rather than a hero robot whose parts were just there to look cool. The scary-looking infrared goggles the pilots have to wear also added to the impression of utilitarian accuracy in the paraphernalia, not to mention creating a sort of emotional distance appropriate to the more emotionally stark atmosphere.

The irony is that the toys saved the show. Ratings were low, but strong toy sales saved the show from being canceled. I would have thought they wouldn't have sold because they're not the kind of cool toys I wanted as a kid - I loved transforming toys like the Autobots and Transformers.

The TV series is roughly divided into three arcs: episodes 1-13, 14-26, and 28-52. Each arc has a different tone and setting. The first is a Blade Runner-esque story set in a future overrun by motorcycle punks, the second is a Vietnam war movie-style story, and the third is in more of a conventional Sunrise space opera style reminiscent of Ideon.

My favorite by far is the second arc, the Vietnam arc, and that's where I feel the show shows its true potential and intent. I feel like this is what Ryosuke Takahashi really wanted to do with this material. I wish the entire series had been like this arc. The other arcs we've seen done to death in other shows, but there's nothing quite like the Vietnam arc of Votoms in any other anime. Rather than a space opera or post-apocalyptic action movie, it's a realistic and gritty war movie.

Episode 16 I think is the exemplary episode in the Vietnam arc. It tells a story similar to what we've seen in Vietnam war movies like Apocalypse Now, and focuses on the whole guerrilla war aspect in a way that none of the other episodes do sufficiently. The team is going upriver when they run across a small village and decide to investigate. The complexity and pathos of the situation comes through well in this episode, with the locals being brutally threatened with execution by the military outsiders because they're suspected of hiding guerrillas. Episode 21 touches on this again with an incident where they investigate a temple and find it to be an arms stockade. It's in the moments inspired by reality like this that the conflict at issue in this arc comes alive the best.

When I feel the show works its best is when the side-characters are absent and we're focused on Chirico and his army platoon. There are three side-characters who show up on and off throughout the show. I never got used to them and continued to find them immensely distracting and annoying. It's the moments in the show that they were absent, particularly during the Vietnam arc, that I liked the show the best. These characters felt like a mindless concession to the convention of comic relief, when this show didn't need any such thing.

The first arc is my least favorite because the post-apocalyptic situation is cliched and the side-characters are particularly annoying. The last arc building towards the climax starts out somewhat boring, but gets interesting eventually despite feeling like it cops out on being a hard-boiled military series in favor of becoming a grand space opera with supernatural overtones.

The sub-plot involving romantic interest Fiana didn't wreck the atmosphere as I thought it would. I thought their relationship worked rather well, especially in episode 29 where it's just Chirico and Fiana. They made an odd but interesting couple, drawn to one another for a reason that is never entirely made clear, and both equally emotionally distant.

The mecha star of Votoms TV: Toru Yoshida

Toru Yoshida was a mecha/fx animator in episodes 14, 22, 29, 33, 39, 46, and 52

With remarkable consistency, he was responsible for the most exciting mecha animation scenes in the show. Almost every episode that I had singled out as having particularly impressive animation I later discovered to have been of the hand of Toru Yoshida. The reason it wasn't immediately obvious to me was that he is not credited in many of the episodes he worked on.

Toru Yoshida had just begun as an inbetweener at Anime R in 1983 working under Kazuaki Mouri on the gag show Sasuga no Sarutobi. Anime R at the time was divided into two sections: one working on Sarutobi and another working on Votoms. Yoshida wound up being called over to work on the Votoms section because Yoshida had drawn some mecha in Sarutobi and Moriyasu Taniguchi suspected Yoshida might be of more use on Votoms.

Although he is credited as an inbetweener for a few episodes, and receives his first genga credit in episodes 33, 39, 46 and 52, Yoshida in fact drew key animation in several episodes prior to this. He drew uncredited key animation in episodes 14, 22 and 29. I had noted the effects animation in these episodes but couldn't for the life of me figure out who was responsible for it. Later on, I discovered that Yoshida confessed on his personal web site to having drawn key animation uncredited on these episodes, and it dawned on me that it was Yoshida who had drawn virtually all of the parts in the show that struck me as being particularly well animated.

Yoshida started out distinctly a Kanada-school animator in terms of his style of FX, presumably influenced by his mentor Kazuaki Mouri, but quickly developed his own very unique take on FX animation that would go on to influence the likes of Shinya Ohira. He is one of the great FX animators of anime history, one of the pioneers of a quasi-realistic approach to FX leavened by thrilling Kanada-style timing and forms.

Episode 14 features some of the earliest good mecha action work on the show, with an exciting scene in the forest at the end full of zippy movement and lively FX. This was Toru Yoshida's uncredited genga debut. Episode 22 features a great battle scene in the river at the climax. Episode 29 has some nicely drawn mecha in space at the end of the episode, though there isn't much action. The first half of episode 33 features the beautiful smoke FX that Yoshida was so good at. Episode 39 features a good battle in the second half with lots of angular effects and lush smoke. Episode 46 is the climax of the show's animation: it's the biggest bash of good animation in the show. If you only check out one episode for the animation, it's this one. It's packed head to toe with great mecha and fx shots.

Just about the only episode with good animation that I can't attribute to Toru Yoshida is episode 27, the climax of the Vietnam arc. It has a number of very cool shots of flowing smoke as well as nice mecha action. Although Bebow is not credited, this was clearly a Bebow episode going by the staff involved, none of whom was involved in any other episode.

In an interesting side-note, Toru Yoshida was apparently one of the inbetweeners of Daicon IV. Yoshida isn't part of the proto-Gainax group, so I didn't see how he could have gotten involved, but it makes a bit more sense knowing that Daicon IV was made as the opening film of the Japan Science Fiction Convention, which was held in Osaka that year.

The character animation star of Votoms TV: Moriyasu Taniguchi

Taniguchi's Chirico versus the standard Shioyama Chirico

Anime R founder Moriyasu Taniguchi acted as the sakkan on all of the Anime R episodes: 2, 9, 14, 22, 29, 33, 39, 46, and 52.

The remarkable thing is how much Taniguchi's drawings stand out. His episodes are one of the classic examples of how a good sakkan can elevate the quality of an episode. His drawings look very different from the original designs by series designer Norio Shioyama, but the funny thing is, they look better. Taniguchi actually upstaged the character designer. His drawings have a much more sharp and refined look in terms of the facial features, and he even invests his character animation with more subtelty and nuance than the other episodes. The characters look and behave in a more convincing way in Taniguchi's episodes than in any of the others. In many of the other episodes, the characters are quite badly drawn, and their acting and expressions don't match what is happening in the script. It's only under Taniguchi's hand that the characters come alive and become more expressive in a way appropriate to the given situation.

Episode 29 is one of the best episodes in the show, with some of the best Taniguchi drawings in the show. It's a superb episode all-over, probably my favorite in the show due to fantastically moody directing by Masashi Ikeda 池田成 that gives the episode real atmosphere and tension. I wish more of the episodes in the show had felt like this episode. I like that the episode features only the two protagonists. There are no other characters to ruin the atmosphere with hijinx or other distractions. On top of that, there are some Toru Yoshida mecha drawings at the end. Masashi Ikeda went on to become the director of the smash hit Samurai Troopers (again with character designer Norio Shioyama) as well as the latest entry in the Votoms saga from last year, Alone Again.

I sense the influence of Tomonori Kogawa in Taniguchi's drawings in such things as the way the eyes are drawn, and in the way he draws the face when looking up at an angle, something Tomonori Kogawa pioneered in Ideon. His drawings just feel better stylized than Norio Shioyama's. Evidence to how highly Ryosuke Takahashi thought of Taniguchi's work is the fact that Taniguchi sakkan'd the last episode, rather than the character designer, as is normal. The series closes with Taniguchi's radical interpretation of the characters, rather than the original character designer's own drawings. Ryosuke Takahashi wound up coming back to Taniguchi and appointing him character designer a few years later for one of his other triumphs, SPT Layzner, in which Anime R provided a tremendous amount of good animation (alongside Dove). Perhaps in honor of Norio Shioyama's generosity with Taniguchi's liberties on Votoms, Taniguchi apparently refused to act as chief animation director on the show to respect the individuality of the individual sakkans.

The directing star of Votoms TV: Toshifumi Takizawa

In addition to being the "chief episode director", Toshifumi Takizawa 滝沢敏文 drew the storyboard for no less than 13 episodes: 4, 6, 9, 13, 18, 27, 30, 33, 35, 38, 45, 51, and 52.

I wrote about Takizawa extensively before in my posts on Dirty Pair and Crusher Joe. I love his directing style, and Votoms is one of his biggest projects from his Sunrise period.

His work on the TV series comes between his early work on Ideon and his work on Dirty Pair. I'm not sure exactly what the nature of his work consisted in this show, but I presume it to have been something along the line of 'director of the episode directors'; maintaining a consistent tone to the episodes by guiding the episode directors. In the episodes he storyboarded you can clearly see his distinct approach to directing at work even though he did not do the actual processing of any of his episodes. The episodes are full of the focus on visual storytelling and forward momentum that made the last Ideon movie so powerful, not to mention the Dirty Pair and Crusher Joe OVAs.

Takizawa drew the storyboards for the climax of the three arcs of the TV series: 13, 27 and 51. Each of these is a great example of his directing style at its finest. He brings each arc to a conclusion in magnificent form with extended action sequences that unfold largely through visual storytelling without relying excessively on dialogue. Episodes 27 and 51 are particularly impressive in this regard.

Votoms OVA 1: The Last Red Shoulder (1985)

The first of the many OVAs to be released came out just a year after the TV series ended. Chronologically, it takes place between the end of the first arc (the Blade Runner-style Udo arc) and the beginning of the second arc (the Vietnam-style Kumen arc).

Story-wise, this is one of my favorite Votoms outings because it doesn't feature any of the annoying side-characters, and it's exclusively about Chirico and his soldier comrades on a mission. This is the episode where they introduce the character of Pailsen, who played a big role in Chirico's past. He just recently got an extensive prequel OVA series with 12 episodes in Pailsen Files, which chronologically is the earliest outing in the saga. It's all quite confusing to try to organize. Here in The Last Red Shoulder, Chirico and his former war buddies go after Pailsen to kill him for using and then discarding them when they were no longer needed.

This episode features some good action animation in the climax, which is presumably of the hand of Toru Yoshida, who here receives his sole Mecha Animation Director credit in the series. (if you don't count Mellowlink) The animation only credits Anime R as a studio without crediting any of the specific animators. Similarly, the credits list Studio Dove, Bebow and Magic Bus without listing who from these studios was involved. Studio Dove was involved in the TV series and went on to do the animation for the next two OVAs, and its star mecha animators were Hiroshi Koizumi 古泉浩司 and Hitoshi Waratani 藁谷均, so perhaps they were the ones involved here. Perhaps the Bebow animators were those in episode 27.

Unfortunately, the episode was not directed by Toshifumi Takizawa because he was busy directing Dirty Pair, but he would come back with the next OVA. It's not as exciting as the Takizawa-directed episodes, but still quite enjoyable.

The assistant technical director here was Takashi Imanishi 今西隆志, who started out as runner on Votoms. He switched career to directing with this episode, going on to become the technical director of Roots of Ambition, episode storyboarder/director of Mellowlink and finally full-fledged director of Radiant Heresy.

Votoms OVA 2: Big Battle (1986)

In the next OVA outing, Chirico and his sidekicks fight a maniac driving a gigantic tank. Chronologically, this episode depicts the events that transpired between the climax of the third arc of the TV series (the space opera-ish Quent arc) and the cold sleep depicted in the last episode as having taken place a year after the events of the TV series climax.

Takizawa comes back as the storyboarder and director of this episode, so this is probably the most thoroughly Takizawa outing in the whole Votoms saga. The directing is indeed fantastic. The scene where a minute goes by wordlessly as water floods in and the characters hold on for dear life is full of amazing tension, and I love the attention to little details such as where Chirico has to crawl backwards on his back with his shoulder when he's pinned to the floor, or Fiana's aghast reaction when her hand quickly jerks under the control of the machine. Takizawa also meticulously depicts how the time bomb is armed: twist two knobs, press them down, then press a button on the side. The climactic episode of the TV series was also a meticulously detailed depiction of Chirico going around pushing in rods to shut down a massive computer. I also like how when the bad guy gets shot in the head, his cyborg implant deflects the bullet and you can see the metal peeking through his skull.

The animation is really strong throughout, and this time it's not Anime R who's to thank, it's Studio Dove. This perhaps makes sense because Takizawa had since formed a close relationship with Studio Dove during the course of his work on Dirty Pair. Indeed, they provide excellent work here in no way inferior to Anime R. Norio Shioyama's drawings here are also far better than they ever were, and the characters look fantastic as a result, almost reminiscent of the style of Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, with great feature definition and more nuanced character acting. It feels like we're finally seeing Norio Shioyama's characters brought alive in a way that does them justice, as opposed to being re-invented through the lens of Moriyasu Taniguchi.

The scene where the protagonists drive up to the big tank are particularly impressive for the amount of detail packed into the shots and the precision with which effects are layered on top of one another. The scene feels very dense visually, with every little element being controlled carefully. It makes for an exciting scene that vividly conveys the speed at which things are happening.

The only problem with this otherwise excellent and supremely entertaining OVA is that it doesn't really feel like what I want to see from Votoms. It's too fun for that. I expect dark, bleak soldier action from Votoms, not the madcap action we're regaled with in this episode. The episode essentially feels more like a Crusher Joe episode than anything. That's not a bad thing per se; it's just different. This is essentially an entertainment side-story rather than a beefy story contributing to chronicling Chirico's past like the previous and next OVAs.

Votoms OVA 3: Roots of Ambition (1988)

The third of the one-shot OVAs following the TV series is chronologically the earliest in the saga. This is the starting point of the whole story. Here we find out how Chirico came to have a vendetta for Pailsen.

This is by far my favorite single outing in the Votoms saga. This OVA pins you to your seat, as well as digging into the nitty gritty of Chirico's sordid past. None of the previous Votoms are quite this bleak and intense. It delivers exactly the kind of story I want to see from Votoms: a hard-boiled story about Chirico and other soldiers told through tight dramaturgy and fierce mecha battles, without silly antics. Hard-boiled indeed, this is by far the bloodiest Votoms outing. Blood and death are depicted here more bluntly than ever before.

The quality is also the best of any of the Votoms OVAs. The animation this time is entirely done by Studio Dove, and this OVA singlehandedly proves that they are one of the criminally underappreciated subcontracting studios of the 1980s. With a mere five animators, they manage to provide a level of quality that is nothing short of stunning. The mecha and effects animation is far more intricate and nuanced than anything before. This is clearly the culmination of Dove's work on Sunrise mecha shows. The mecha animation here would have been the work of Hiroshi Waratani and Koji Takahashi, while in the previous OVA it would have been the work of Hiroshi Waratani and Koizumi Hiroshi. The other Dove animators listed would have done the characters.

By 1988, mecha animation was becoming more and more realistic. It was only a year later in 1989 that Mitsuo Iso drew his groundbreaking realistic animation for the opening scene of War in the Pocket. The speed of the evolution of mecha animation in the 1980s was remarkable. Just a few years earlier this level of detail would have been inconceivable.

Helping to give this amazing animation its impact is the fact that the episode was storyboarded by Toshifumi Takizawa. His storyboard creates a perfect balance between the drama and the episode's thrillingly choreographed action sequences. Takizawa didn't direct the episode; that was done by Takashi Imanishi, whom I mentioned before. This was one of his first steps towards the director's chair. Together they make this episode into a magnificently crafted piece of entertainment.

Votoms OVA series: The Radiant Heresy (1994-1995)

After The Roots of Ambition, the last Votoms outing the Dove and R team worked on would be Mellowlink, but I haven't seen that, so I'll leave that for another time. Several years later, this new 5-episode OVA series came out. This time the staff was pretty much completely different except for the leads of director Ryosuke Takahashi and character designer Norio Shioyama, so this outing feels quite different from everything that came before. There is a lot more connection with the present in terms of the staff. People like Jiro Kanai, Norio Matsumoto, Yutaka Nakamura, Yasushi Muraki, Akitoshi Yokoyama, Masami Goto, Isamu Imakake, Toshihiro Kawamoto and Akihiko Yamashita are all still very active in this or that production today.

Toru Yoshida is another element of continuity. He is the mecha animation director again. A few other Anime R names are scattered throughout the credits, including Takahiro Komori and Fumiko Kishi, while one or two Dove names are also to be seen, but for the most part it's new faces.

As the preceding list indicates, the genga staff is pretty impressive, although the animation isn't the extravaganza this would seem to suggest. The animation is rather strong at some fundamental level even when the animation isn't particularly impressive. I think that's due to one of the most surprising names in the credits: Hisashi Nakayama. None other than Hisashi Mori. He was involved in each episode doing key animation and/or layout assistance. I suspect it's his hand in maintaining the quality of the layouts that gives much of the animation its vague feeling of fundamental strength.

I'm not able to identify his animation with complete certainty this early on, but the scenes with Loccina in episode 3, for example, jumped out at me the first time I saw them, and feel like they might be of his hand. They're my favorite scenes in this series. There's a strange dynamism and roughness to the animation that doesn't look like any other scene in this OVA series. It was great seeing this character brought back from the TV series, as he's one of my favorite characters, and interesting to see him come back in the form of a half-crazed monastic scholar of all things Chirico. The gritty drawings in the scene combine with the gravelly, possessed voice-acting of Banjo Ginga to great effect. Of course, this doesn't jibe with the fact that Mori started out as a mecha animator, so maybe he just handled the mecha scenes. Some of the effects in the first half of episode 2, for example, feel like Mori, as do the gorgeous explosion and flame effects near the end of episode 1.

The character drawings of Chirico and Fiana here are a little disappointing. It feels like after the peak of Big Battle Norio Shioyama never quite managed to draw the characters as impressively again. They feel somewhat bland and expressionless. Some of the side-characters like Loccina are a notable exception.

The battle at the beginning of episode 5 has a really nice timing to it, though I can't pinpoint who it might be. Masami Goto maybe? It's the same with the other episodes. There are nice bits here and there, though it's hard to say which animator in the above list did them as this is still pretty early in most of their careers.

The mecha animation overall doesn't feel like it tops what was achieved by Studio Dove in The Roots of Ambition, even though there are moments were the mecha animation clearly shows a new and more modern take on FX and movement compared to the animation in that 1988 OVA. The animation of the Dove animators and Toru Yoshida just felt good to watch in a way that most of the mecha animation here doesn't, and it was done by way fewer animators.

The story of the episode is fairly interesting. Taking place many years after the events of the TV series, it places Chirico in a world in which he has come to be viewed with something approaching religious fear. The story makes some smart commentary on the political use of religion, a subject Ryosuke Takahashi came back to in Flag, but the directing is somewhat lacking in dynamism and it makes me long for the days of Toshifumi Takizawa's directing. Takashi Imanishi's directing isn't bad per se, it's just a little plodding. Even in the action scenes there's never a feeling of real tension.

The episode does benefit from impressive attention to detail in the spirit of the Sunrise productions of this era, with highly detailed backgrounds and stills of the mecha being packed with far more detail than pre-1990 mecha were.

The story ends on a real downer, I must say, and I wish they hadn't done what they do at the end.

In memoriam Hiroshi Koizumi

I'd like to take a moment to remember Hiroshi Koizumi. He will not be familiar to anyone over here because he died suddenly in 1988 not long after working on Big Battle. He was killed in a freak car accident when a truck rear-ended him while he was stopped at a red light on his motorbike on his way home from work.

Hiroshi Koizumi was one of Studio Dove's great animators, and certainly one of the best mecha animators of the 1980s in Japan. However, due to the fact that he worked at a small subcontractor and died so early into a short career (he only debuted in 1983), even in Japan among animation aficionados he is not very well known, to say nothing of over here.

Koizumi was responsible for drawing no less than 10% of the animation of that classic of mecha space operas, Char's Counterattack. That is an astounding amount of animation by any standard, especially by the standards of such a high-quality film. Apparently much of the climax of the film in this video is his work, including the magnificent hand-to-hand mecha combat at the beginning. He drew many shots in the first half of Five Star Stories, another movie from this era with impressive mecha animation. As the best animator in the studio, he was the only Studio Dove animator working on these two prestigious feature films. His last job was as mecha animation director of episodes 2 and 4 of Mellowlink, although he is not credited as such and only Studio Dove is credited as the mecha animation director for some reason. He was scheduled to be the mecha animation director for each Dove episode.

Here are some links to a few genga drawings by Koizumi that never got used. They were uploaded by Nobuyoshi Nishimura of Studio Dove.
Anna from Layzner
Kei from the Dirty Pair TV series
Doodles on a genga for Ninja Senshi Tobikage

Hiroshi Koizumi works:
Dougram (1981-1983)
Votoms (1983-1984) 8, 12, 18, 20, 23, 28, 31, 35, 41, 45, 49, 51
Dorvack (1983) 31
Vifam (1983) 30
Bismark (1984) 4, 26, 33, 37, 43, 47
El Gaim (1984) 22
Galvion (1984) 14, 21
Galient (1984) 5, 10, 14, 18, 21, 24
Tobikage (1985) 2
Z Gundam (1985) 8, 13, 17
SPT Layzner (1985) 2, 5, 10, 13, 18, 22, 27, 31, 35
Votoms: The Last Red Shoulder (1985)
Dirty Pair TV (1985) 8, 9, 25, 26
ZZ Gundam (1986)
Galient OVA (1986)
Votoms: Big Battle (1986)
El Gaim OVA (1986)
Dead Heat (1986)
Dragnar (1987)
Dirty Pair movie (1987)
City Hunter (1987) 7, 8, 16, 12, 19, 22
Kimagure Orange Road (1987) 5
Mister Ajikko (1988) 33
Gundam: Char's Counterattack (1988)
Mellowlink (1988) Mecha Sakkan 2, 4
Five Star Stories (1988)

I hope this can help in small part to get him some recognition, even if it's a little late after all this time.

---

Armored Trooper Votoms 装甲騎兵ボトムズ (TV series, 52 eps, 1983-1984)

Storyboard		Director	Sakkan	Key Animators
1	終戦 War's end			清水恵蔵 Keizo Shimizu 川筋　豊 Yutaka Kawasuji 牟田清司 Seiji Muta
京　春香 Kyo Haruka		加瀬充子 Nobuko Kase	清水恵蔵、塩山紀生 Keizo Shimizu, Norio Shioyama
2	ウド Udo			上井康宣 Yasunobu Inoue 貴志夫美子 Fumiko Kishi 河村佳江 Yoshie Kawamura 加瀬政広 Masahiro Kase
松野達也 Tatsuya Matsuno		知吹愛弓 Tomobuki Ayumi	谷口守泰 Moriyasu Taniguchi
3	出会い Encounter			森　安夫 Yasuo Mori 山中英治 Eiji Yamanaka 奥田万里 Mari Okuda
松野達也 Tatsuya Matsuno		川端蓮司 Renji Kawabata	鈴木英二 Eiji Suzuki
4	バトリング Battling			布　告文 Tsugefumi Nuno 加藤誠一 Seiichi Kato
滝沢敏文 Toshifumi Takizawa		谷田部勝義 Katsuyoshi Yatabe	神宮　慧 Hajime Jingu
5	罠 Trap			加藤　茂 Shigeru Kato 多賀一弘 Kazuhiro Taga 木のプロダクション Kino Production
加瀬充子 Nobuko Kase			上村栄司 Eiji Kamimura
6	素体 Protid			中村プロ Nakamura Pro 西城　明 Akira Saijo 西沢　晋 Shin Nishizawa
滝沢敏文 Toshifumi Takizawa		知吹愛弓 Tomobuki Ayumi	西城　明 Akira Saijo
7	襲撃 Raid			谷沢　豊 Yutaka Tanisawa 新田敏夫 Toshio Arata
川端蓮司 Renji Kawabata			谷沢　豊、新田敏夫 Yutaka Tanisawa, Toshio Arata
8	取引 Transaction			青鉢芳信 Yoshinobu Aohachi 八幡　正 Tadashi Yahata
谷田部勝義 Katsuyoshi Yatabe			鈴木英二 Eiji Suzuki
9	救出 Rescue			上井康宣 Yasunobu Inoue 貴志夫美子 Fumiko Kishi 河村佳江 Yoshie Kawamura 加瀬政広 Masahiro Kase
滝沢敏文 Toshifumi Takizawa		加瀬充子 Nobuko Kase	谷口守泰 Moriyasu Taniguchi
10	レッド・ショルダー Red Shoulder			多賀一弘 Kazuhiro Taga 加藤誠一 Seiichi Kato 金子紀男 Norio Kaneko
知吹愛弓 Tomobuki Ayumi			鈴木英二、塩山紀生 Eiji Suzuki, Norio Shioyama
11	逆襲 Counterattack			中村プロ Nakamura Pro 西城　明 Akira Saijo 西沢　晋 Shin Nishizawa
吉田　浩 Hiroshi Yoshida		桐野克己 Katsumi Kirino	西城　明 Akira Saijo
12	絆 Bonds			布　告文 Tsugefumi Nuno 八幡　正 Tadashi Yahata
吉田　浩 Hiroshi Yoshida		川端蓮司 Renji Kawabata	神宮　慧 Hajime Jingu
13	脱出 Escape			青鉢芳信 Yoshinobu Aohachi 二宮常雄 Tsuneo Futamiya 上村栄司 Eiji Uemura
滝沢敏文 Toshifumi Takizawa		谷田部勝義 Katsuyoshi Yatabe	鈴木英二、塩山紀生 Eiji Suzuki, Norio Shioyama
14	アッセンブルEX－10 Assemble EX-10			上井康宣 Yasunobu Inoue 貴志夫美子 Fumiko Kishi 河村佳江 Yoshie Kawamura 加瀬政広 Masahiro Kase
松野達也 Tatsuya Matsuno		加瀬充子 Nobuko Kase	谷口守泰 Moriyasu Taniguchi
15	疑惑 Doubt			中村プロ Nakamura Pro 西城　明 Akira Saijo 西沢　晋 Shin Nishizawa 奥野浩行 Hiroyuki Okuno
吉田　浩 Hiroshi Yoshida		桐野克己 Katsumi Kirino	西城　明 Akira Saijo
16	掃討 Search and destroy			谷沢　豊 Yutaka Tanisawa 新田敏夫 Toshio Arata 金子紀男 Norio Kaneko 笹木寿子 Masako Sasaki
知吹愛弓 Tomobuki Ayumi			鈴木英二 Eiji Suzuki
17	再会 Reunion			多賀一弘 Kazuhiro Taga 神宮　慧 Kei Jingu 加藤誠一 Seiichi Kato
高橋資祐 Motosuke Takahashi		川端蓮司 Renji Kawabata	神宮　慧 Hajime Jingu
18	急変 Turn of events			八幡　正 Tadashi Yahata 上村栄司 Eiji Uemura 布　告文 Tsugefumi Nuno
滝沢敏文 Toshifumi Takizawa		加瀬充子 Nobuko Kase	上村栄司、塩山紀生 Eiji Kamimura, Norio Shioyama
19	思惑 Anticipation			中村プロ Nakamura Pro 西城　明 Akira Saijo 西沢　晋 Shin Nishizawa 奥野浩行 Hiroyuki Okuno
康村正一 Seiichi Yasumura			西城　明 Akira Saijo
20	フィアナ Fiana			中村プロ Nakamura Pro アニメ・アール Anime R マジックバス Magic Bus 加藤　茂 Shigeru Kato 布　告文 Tsugefumi Nuno 八幡　正 Tadashi Yahata
-		高橋良輔 Ryosuke Takahashi	塩山紀生 Norio Shioyama
21	遡行 Upstream			青鉢芳信 Yoshinobu Aohachi 加藤　茂 Shigeru Kato 笹木寿子 Masako Sasaki 山崎享子 Ryoko Yamazaki 清島孝一郎 Koichiro Kiyoshima
谷田部勝義 Katsuyoshi Yatabe			鈴木英二、塩山紀生 Eiji Suzuki, Norio Shioyama
22	触発 Contact			上井康宣 Yasunobu Inoue 貴志夫美子 Fumiko Kishi 河村佳江 Yoshie Kawamura 加瀬政広 Masahiro Kase
池田　成 Masashi Ikeda		桐野克己 Katsumi Kirino	谷口守泰 Moriyasu Taniguchi
23	錯綜 Complication			八幡　正 Tadashi Yahata 多賀一弘 Kazuhiro Taga 谷沢　豊 Yutaka Tanisawa
知吹愛弓 Tomobuki Ayumi			神宮　慧 Hajime Jingu
24	横断 Crossing			中村プロ Nakamura Pro 西城　明 Akira Saijo 西沢　晋 Shin Nishizawa 奥野浩行 Hiroyuki Okuno
富沢雄三 Tomizawa Yuzo		川端蓮司 Renji Kawabata	西城　明 Akira Saijo
25	潜入 Infiltration			谷沢　豊 Yutaka Tanisawa 上村栄司 Eiji Uemura 布　告文 Tsugefumi Nuno 神宮　慧 Kei Jingu 金子紀男 Norio Kaneko
加瀬充子 Nobuko Kase		加瀬充子 Nobuko Kase	上村栄司 Eiji Kamimura
26	肉迫 Closing in			八幡　正 Tadashi Yahata 青鉢芳信 Yoshinobu Aohachi 神宮　慧 Kei Jingu 多賀一弘 Kazuhiro Taga 福井享子 Ryoko Fukui 清島孝一郎 Koichiro Kiyoshima
谷田部勝義 Katsuyoshi Yatabe			鈴木英二 Eiji Suzuki
27	暗転 Turn for the worse			寺東克己 Katsumi Terahigashi 所　智一 Tomokazu Tokoro 矢木正之 Masayuki Yaki 遠藤栄一 Eiichi Endo 坂本英明 Hideaki Sakamoto 詫　祐二 Yuji Tsuge
滝沢敏文 Toshifumi Takizawa		知吹愛弓 Tomobuki Ayumi	塩山紀生 Norio Shioyama
28	運命 Destiny			青鉢芳信 Yoshinobu Aohachi 八幡　正 Tadashi Yahata 二宮常雄 Tsuneo Futamiya マジックバス Magic Bus アニメ・アール Anime R 中村プロ Nakamura Pro
-		高橋良輔 Ryosuke Takahashi	塩山紀生 Norio Shioyama
29	二人 Two			上井康宣 Yasunobu Inoue 貴志夫美子 Fumiko Kishi 河村佳江 Yoshie Kawamura 加瀬政広 Masahiro Kase
池田　成 Masashi Ikeda		川端蓮司 Renji Kawabata	谷口守泰 Moriyasu Taniguchi
30	幻影 Illusion			中村プロ Nakamura Pro 西城　明 Akira Saijo 西沢　晋 Shin Nishizawa 奥野浩行 Hiroyuki Okuno
滝沢敏文 Toshifumi Takizawa		津田義三 Yoshimitsu Tsuda	西城　明 Akira Saijo
31	不可侵宙域 Forbidden zone			布　告文 Tsugefumi Nuno 谷沢　豊 Yutaka Tanisawa スタジオダブ Studio Dove
池田　成 Masashi Ikeda		加瀬充子 Nobuko Kase	鈴木英二 Eiji Suzuki
32	イプシロン Ipsilon			青鉢芳信 Yoshinobu Aohachi 神宮　慧 Kei Jingu 加藤誠一 Seiichi Kato 多賀一弘 Kazuhiro Taga 上村栄司 Eiji Uemura 清島孝一郎 Koichiro Kiyoshima 福井享子 Ryoko Fukui
知吹愛弓 Tomobuki Ayumi			上村栄司、塩山紀生 Eiji Kamimura, Norio Shioyama
33	対決 Showdown			上井康宣 Yasunobu Inoue 貴志夫美子 Fumiko Kishi 河村佳江 Yoshie Kawamura 加瀬政広 Masahiro Kase 吉田　徹 Toru Yoshida
滝沢敏文 Toshifumi Takizawa		谷田部勝義 Katsuyoshi Yatabe	谷口守泰 Moriyasu Taniguchi
34	惑星サンサ Planet Sansa			中村プロ Nakamura Pro 西城　明 Akira Saijo 西沢　晋 Shin Nishizawa 奥野浩行 Hiroyuki Okuno
池田　成 Masashi Ikeda		川端蓮司 Renji Kawabata	西城　明 Akira Saijo
35	死線 Near death			藁谷　均 Hitoshi Waratani 古泉浩司 Hiroshi Koizumi 八幡　正 Tadashi Yahata
滝沢敏文 Toshifumi Takizawa		津田義三 Yoshimitsu Tsuda	鈴木英二 Eiji Suzuki
36	恩讐 Love and hate			神宮　慧 Kei Jingu 谷沢　豊 Yutaka Tanisawa 上村栄司 Eiji Uemura
高橋資祐 Motosuke Takahashi		康村正一 Seiichi Yasumura	上村栄司、塩山紀生 Eiji Kamimura, Norio Shioyama
37	虜 Captive			多賀一弘 Kazuhiro Taga 加藤誠一 Seiichi Kato 青鉢芳信 Yoshinobu Aohachi
知吹愛弓 Tomobuki Ayumi			鈴木英二 Eiji Suzuki
38	暗闇 Darkness			中村プロ Nakamura Pro 西城　明 Akira Saijo 西沢　晋 Shin Nishizawa 奥野浩行 Hiroyuki Okuno
滝沢敏文 Toshifumi Takizawa		加瀬充子 Nobuko Kase	西城　明 Akira Saijo
39	パーフェクト・ソルジャー Perfect Soldier			上井康宣 Yasunobu Inoue 貴志夫美子 Fumiko Kishi 河村佳江 Yoshie Kawamura 加瀬政広 Masahiro Kase 吉田　徹 Toru Yoshida
池田　成 Masashi Ikeda		谷田部勝義 Katsuyoshi Yatabe	谷口守泰 Moriyasu Taniguchi
40	仲間 Friend			アニメ・アール Anime R 中村プロ Nakamura Pro オールプロダクション All Production
-		高橋良輔 Ryosuke Takahashi	塩山紀生 Norio Shioyama
41	クエント Quent			スタジオダブ Studio Dove 藁谷　均 Hitoshi Waratani 古泉浩司 Hiroshi Koizumi 八幡　正 Tadashi Yahata
谷田部勝義 Katsuyoshi Yatabe		川端蓮司 Renji Kawabata	八幡　正、塩山紀生 Tadashi Yahata, Norio Shioyama
42	砂漠 Desert			布　告文 Tsugefumi Nuno 上村栄司 Eiji Uemura 谷沢　豊 Yutaka Tanisawa 福井享子 Ryoko Fukui
津田義三 Yoshimitsu Tsuda		津田義三 Yoshimitsu Tsuda	鈴木英二 Eiji Suzuki
43	遺産 Legacy			青鉢芳信 Yoshinobu Aohachi 神宮　慧 Kei Jingu 木下ゆうき Yuuki Kishita 清島孝一郎 Koichiro Kiyoshima
知吹愛弓 Tomobuki Ayumi			鈴木英二 Eiji Suzuki
44	禁断 Forbidden			中村プロ Nakamura Pro 西沢　晋 Shin Nishizawa 奥野浩行 Hiroyuki Okuno 松下佳弘 Yoshihiro Matsushita 和泉絹子 Masako Izumi 時矢義則 Yoshinori Tokiya
加瀬充子 Nobuko Kase			西城　明 Akira Saijo
45	遭遇 Encounter			スタジオダブ Studio Dove 藁谷　均 Hitoshi Waratani 古泉浩司 Hiroshi Koizumi きのプロ Kino Pro 多賀一弘 Kazuhiro Taga
滝沢敏文 Toshifumi Takizawa		谷田部勝義 Katsuyoshi Yatabe	鈴木英二 Eiji Suzuki
46	予感 Intuition			加瀬政広 Masahiro Kase 吉田　徹 Toru Yoshida 貴志夫美子 Fumiko Kishi 糸島雅彦 Masahiko Itojima
池田　成 Masashi Ikeda		川端蓮司 Renji Kawabata	谷口守泰 Moriyasu Taniguchi
47	異変 Fortuity			布　告文 Tsugefumi Nuno 上村栄司 Eiji Uemura 谷沢　豊 Yutaka Tanisawa 加藤誠一 Seiichi Kato
津田義三 Yoshimitsu Tsuda		津田義三 Yoshimitsu Tsuda	鈴木英二 Eiji Suzuki
48	後継者 Successor			奥野浩行 Hiroyuki Okuno 柳沢哲也 Tetsuya Yanagisawa 石田　誠 Makoto Ishida
知吹愛弓 Tomobuki Ayumi			西城　明 Akira Saijo
49	異能者 They of special powers			スタジオダブ Studio Dove 藁谷　均 Hitoshi Waratani 古泉浩司 Hiroshi Koizumi 溝井裕二 Yuji Mizoi 多賀一弘 Kazuhiro Taga
康村正一 Seiichi Yasumura			八幡　正 Tadashi Yahata
50	乱雲 Thunderhead			波戸根良昭 Yoshiaki Hatone 松原徳弘 Norihiro Matsuhara 塚本　篤 Atsushi Tsukamoto 佐々木喜子 Yoshiko Sasaki 貴島優子 Yuko Takashima 河口俊夫 Toshio Kawaguchi 香川　浩 Hiroshi Kagawa
谷田部勝義 Katsuyoshi Yatabe			鈴木英二、塩山紀生 Eiji Suzuki, Norio Shioyama
51	修羅 Battle			青鉢芳信 Yoshinobu Aohachi 神宮　慧 Kei Jingu 上村栄司 Eiji Uemura 谷沢　豊 Yutaka Tanisawa スタジオダブ Studio Dove
滝沢敏文 Toshifumi Takizawa		川端蓮司 Renji Kawabata	鈴木英二 Eiji Suzuki
52	流星 Shooting star			加瀬政広 Masahiro Kase 吉田　徹 Toru Yoshida 貴志夫美子 Fumiko Kishi 糸島雅彦 Masahiko Itojima
滝沢敏文 Toshifumi Takizawa		加瀬充子 Nobuko Kase	谷口守泰 Moriyasu Taniguchi

---

The Last Red Shoulder ザ・ラストレッドショルダー (OVA, 54 mins, 1985)

Created by & Director:	高橋良輔	Ryosuke Takahashi
Character Design & Anim. Dir.:	塩山紀生	Norio Shioyama
Mechanical Animation Director:	吉田徹	Toru Yoshida
Script:	はままさのり	Masanori Hama
Storyboard:	加瀬充子 谷田部勝義	Nobuko Kase Masayoshi Yatabe
Technical Director:	加瀬充子	Nobuko Kase
Assistant Technical Director:	今西隆志	Takashi Imanishi
Key Animation:	アニメアール	Anime R
	スタジオダブ	Studio Dove
	スタジオビーボオ―	Studio Bebow
	マジックバス	Magic Bus
	福井享子	Ryoko Fukui
	清島孝一郎	Koichiro Kiyoshima

---

Big Battle ビッグバトル (OVA, 56 mins, 1986)

Created by & Director:	高橋良輔	Ryosuke Takahashi
Character Design & Anim. Dir.:	塩山紀生	Norio Shioyama
Script:	はままさのり	Masanori Hama
Storyboard & Technical Director:	滝沢敏文	Toshifumi Takizawa
Key Animation:	スタジオ・ダブ	Studio Dove
	西村誠芳	Nobuyoshi Nishimura
	藁谷均	Hitoshi Waratani
	中野美佐緒	Misao Nakano
	佐久間信一	Shinichi Sakuma
	古泉浩司	Hiroshi Koizumi
	服部真奈美	Manami Hattori
	福井享子	Ryoko Fukui
	加藤義貴	Yoshitaka Kato

---

Red Soldier Document: The Roots of Ambition レッドショルダードキュメント 野望のルーツ (OVA, 57 mins, 1988)

Director:	高橋良輔	Ryosuke Takahashi
Character Design & Anim. Dir.:	塩山紀生	Norio Shioyama
Script:	吉川惣司	Soji Yoshikawa
Storyboard:	滝沢敏文	Toshifumi Takizawa
Technical Director:	今西隆志	Takashi Imanishi
Key Animation:	スタジオダブ	Studio Dove
	中野美佐緒	Misao Nakano
	佐久間信一	Shinichi Sakuma
	高橋幸治	Koji Takahashi
	藁谷均	Hitoshi Waratani
	西村誠芳	Nobuyoshi Nishimura

---

The Radiant Heresy 赫奕たる異端 (OVA, 5 eps, 25 mins each, 1994-1995)

Created by & Chief Director:	高橋良輔	Ryosuke Takahashi
Director & Storyboard:	今西隆志	Takashi Imanishi
Episode Directors:	原田奈奈 中野頼道 大熊朝秀	Nana Harada Yorimichi Nakano Nobuhide Ookuma (Takashi Imanishi)
Character Design & Anim. Dir.:	塩山紀生	Norio Shioyama
Assistant A.D.:	横山彰利 (+小林利充	Akitoshi Yokoyama Toshimitsu Kobayashi in ep 2)
Script:	吉川惣司	Soji Yoshikawa
Mechanical Animation Director:	吉田徹	Toru Yoshida
Music:	乾裕樹	Hiroki Inui
Key animation:	(Episode 1)
	阿部邦博	Kunihiro Abe
	村木靖	Yasushi Muraki
	小森高博	Takahiro Komori
	舛館俊秀	Toshihide Masudate
	松本憲生	Norio Matsumoto
	松本文雄	Fumio Matsumoto
	加藤茂	Shigeru Kato
	中野美佐緒	Misao Nakano
	中山久司	Hisashi Nakayama
	馬場俊子	Toshiko Baba
	貴志夫美子	Fumiko Kishi
	スタジオダブ	Studio Dove
	吉田徹	Toru Yoshida
	塩山紀生	Norio Shioyama
	A.D. help:	小林利充 Toshimitsu Kobayashi
	Layout Assistant: 中山久司 Hisashi Nakayama
	(Episode 2)
	アニメロマン	Anime Roman
	スタジオダブ	Studio Dove
	安藤美行	Miyuki Ando
	金井次郎	Jiro Kanai
	尾形雄二	Yuji Ogata
	加藤茂	Shigeru Kato
	[Chinese names]
	横山彰利	Akitoshi Yokoyama
	中山久司	Hisashi Nakayama
	塩山紀生	Norio Shioyama
	Layout Assistant: 中山久司 Hisashi Nakayama
	(Episode 3)
	飯野泰造	Taizo Iino
	服部真奈美	Manami Hattori
	加藤茂	Shigeru Kato
	金井次郎	Jiro Kanai
	佐藤修	Osamu Sato
	永田正美	Masami Nagata
	[Chinese names]
	吉田徹	Toru Yoshida
	小林利充	Toshimitsu Kobayashi
	中山久司	Hisashi Nakayama
	中村豊	Yutaka Nakamura
	塩山紀生	Norio Shioyama
	京都アニ メーション	Kyoto Animation
	(Episode 4)
	服部真奈美	Manami Hattori
	門上洋子	Yoko Kadogami
	馬場俊子	Toshiko Baba
	鵜飼美樹	Miki Ukai
	岡田和久	Kazuhisa Okada
	江原仁	Jin Ehara
	川元利浩	Toshihiro Kawamoto
	入江泰浩	Yasuhiro Irie
	中田雅夫	Masao Nakata
	加藤義貴	Yoshitaka Kato
	塩山紀生	Norio Shioyama
	横山彰利	Akitoshi Yokoyama
	吉田徹	Toru Yoshida
	小林利充	Toshimitsu Kobayashi
	Layout Assistant: 中山久司 Hisashi Nakayama
	(Episode 5)
	門上洋子	Yoko Kadogami
	馬場俊子	Toshiko Baba
	中野美佐緒	Misao Nakano
	久行宏和	Hirokazu Hisayuki
	金田正彦	Masahiko Kanada
	服部真奈美	Manami Hattori
	加藤義貴	Yoshitaka Kato
	後藤雅己	Masami Goto
	山下明彦	Akihiko Yamashita
	牧野行洋	Yukihiro Makino
	小森高博	Takahiro Komori
	西村貴世	Takase Nishimura
	塩山紀生	Norio Shioyama
	横山彰利	Akitoshi Yokoyama
	吉田徹	Toru Yoshida
	中山久司	Hisashi Nakayama
	鈴木勉	Tsutomu Suzuki
	今掛勇	Isamu Imakake
	[Chinese names]
	アニメアール	Anime R
	スタジオダブ	Studio Dove

One of the classics of the golden age of OVAs is Black Magic M-66 from 1987. It was one of my favorites back when I was getting into anime, with its violent, exciting action and hard-boiled, no-nonsense story. It was a superb high-quality one-off - exactly what I wanted to see in an anime OVA - although in the end it felt a little slight and undeveloped.

I just re-watched it for the first time in many years, and the quality was far better than I'd remembered, probably because I didn't have the ability to appreciate good animation back then. The animation has impressive tension and energy.

As a film it's a bit problematic. It seems like it would make a strong film in theory, and it maintains interest at every moment due to the cinematic pacing and high-quality animation, but something about it feels off overall. But in the end it's a nice OVA with some uniquely detailed directing and animation, and is well worth re-visiting.

The film was co-directed by the author of the original manga, Shirow Masamune, and Hiroyuki Kitakubo. Shirow Masamune drew the storyboard himself, so this is probably the highest-grade Shirow Masamune anime. Later films like Ghost in the Shell bear the heavy imprint of their director.

I'm not sure exactly how the work was divided between the two directors apart from this, but perhaps Kitakubo was something of a line director on the project, Shirow Masamune providing the skeleton and details and Kitakubo putting them together, i.e. handling the technical matters of anime production about which the manga creator would have been ignorant. From Blood: The Last Vampire to Rojin Z, Kitakubo is unsurpassed at making highly dense short entertainment packages, and this film is no exception.

This was Shirow Masamune's first time ever drawing a storyboard, so he used the recently published storyboard for Miyazaki's Nausicaa as a reference on how to draw the storyboard. This certainly accounts for the film's unique feeling. His storyboard is extremely detailed, like his manga (see some examples here), so very little in the final product was left up to chance. No person acquainted with anime production would have storyboarded the film in the way he did; they would certainly have taken an easier way out, according to what they understood by experience could be achieved within the given deadline. The film apparently wound up many months over schedule, presumably due to the demands of the storyboard, resulting in its release being delayed by almost a year. The Gundress debacle is testament to how much of a generous concession this was on the part of the production company. But Masamune Shirow's direct input was simultaneously the film's liability and its greatest asset, because he brought an outsider's approach untainted by conventional anime thinking to the task of presenting the story.

But what was bad for the production company is good for us, as in the end it's because they were able to lavish such detail on the animation that the film still holds up after all these years. This unusually long production period resulted in a tight film in which each shot is highly worked, there is no wasted moment, and the action and effects animation is truly impressive. At around 45 minutes, it has the pacing and atmosphere of a film, but the length of a slightly longer-than-usual direct-to-video release. In that respect it's reminiscent of Hiroyuki Kitakubo's later Blood: The Last Vampire.

The narrative is satisfying because it's driven by visual storytelling rather than wordy explanations. They do an impressive job of visually conveying a future (yet familiar) world of believable cybernetic military sci-fi trappings. The storytelling is lean, the script is pleasingly serious and no-nonsense, consisting mostly of authentic-sounding terse and cryptic military exchanges. The action scenes are long and meaty, with each physical action depicted in convincing detail. The coloring palette of the film is toned down in a way that helps make it feel more realistic.

That's not to say it's dead serious. The films balances seriousness with fan-service. The film opens (predictably for an AIC production) with a nude scene that is saved from being in poor taste only by the fact that it's quite funny and isn't played up for lurid fetishism. The shot where Sibelle picks the sheet from the bottom of the pile and the pile topples over but she doesn't even notice because she's so intent gives the scene a pleasingly tongue-in-cheek tone. Kitakubo's only previous directing credit was Cream Lemon: Pop Chaser, which despite being the pioneering adult anime was more funny and exciting than titillating. Kitakubo also gives the film an edge of cleverness through directing tricks, for example when he cuts from a photo of the professor in the newspaper to the headlights of a vehicle where his eyes were. Rintaro did a similar gag in Download.

Despite the effort put into the details, the cumulative effect of the film is underwhelming for some reason. It feels sluggish and lacking in tension. But the serious-minded story, detail-oriented directing and powerful action scenes more than make up for this, and in the end, it may not be a Great Film, but it's closer to being one than most OVAs. At the very least, it's a damn sight better than the boring Appleseed OVA that came out one year later. It's a satisfying and entertaining little action film.

The animation

The quality of the film is strangely uneven. The animation is very high quality, but the backgrounds are not very good overall, and flat-out bad in some shots. Even the animation, which is quite strong, feels somehow rough. It feels in essence like highly polished TV animation, rather than the movie-caliber animation of Akira from the next year, for example. Despite striving for cinematic feeling, the film's layouts are fairly standard, without the careful simulation of camera lens focal length that is one of the subtle but important ways Akira and other films achieve a feeling of reality. To be fair, there aren't many OVAs that top this one in terms of animation quality. And most importantly, the animation is very satisfying. The action is good, and the drawings feel good at every moment.

Hiroyuki Okiua, Toru Yoshida and the other animators of Osaka subcontractor Anime R are to thank for the quality of the animation. Hiroyuki Okiura oversaw the characters and Toru Yoshida oversaw the mecha. This was Okiura's first job as sakkan. He had just debuted a few years before, mostly drawing impressive mecha animation on a few Sunrise shows like SPT Layzner (1985-1986), and very quickly made a name for himself at a very young age. Astoundingly, he turned 20 during production of Black Magic M-66. Toru Yoshida, meanwhile, had debuted not long before Okiura, first coming to prominence on Armor Trooper Votoms (1983-1984), on which Okiura worked as an inbetweener. Okiura drew what is one of his first genga in the last episode, uncredited, while Yoshida was still being credited as an inbetweener early on in the series despite the fact that he was drawing genga, so they debuted very close together.

The character animation is strong throughout thanks to Okiura's laborious work as sakkan. Despite having been pegged a mecha animator in his first few years, Okiura didn't view himself as such. He just wanted to draw detailed animation like one of his idols Takashi Nakamura, and in anime at the time the mecha animation was one of the places where there were fewer restrictions on the number of drawings you were allowed to use. That's the reason many 'mover' type animators like Okiura - and Shinya Ohira - started out as mecha animators. This was Okiura's first step towards becoming a character animator. Even at this early stage, you can sense Okiura's uncommon skills. The character animation feels unusually rich, even in throwaway shots like the shot at the beginning where Sibelle is writing something down, although this is no doubt also in part thanks to Shirow Masamune's detailed storyboard and Kitakubo's detail-oriented style of directing.

The key animation credits are divided between Anime R, Atelier Giga and AIC/freelance animators. I wrote about Atelier Giga before in my post on Cool Cool Bye and Relic Armor Legaciam. It was an informal gathering of ex-Bebow animators. Although Atelier Giga did not survive long past 1987, many of its animators stayed on at AIC for years to come. The impressive names in the AIC/freelance grouping are Shinya Ohira and Satoru Utsunomiya. I suspect Utsunomiya handled the scene in the restaurant, though I'm not positive.

Anime R receives a prominent spot in the credits, and its animators were responsible for many of the best parts in the film. This is in essence an Anime R film in terms of the actual drawings, although the production company was AIC/Animate. The big battle that is the highlight of the first half of the film was animated by Hiroyuki Okiura, Toru Yoshida and Kazuaki Mouri of Anime R. Okiura handled the beginning in the forest up until the impressive turning shot where the robot hurls the vehicle (pic 3 at top), and the rest was animated by Yoshida and Mouri. Mouri in particular did the impressive shots where the robot wields the metal pipe in beautiful acrobatic action (pic 4). Okiura also drew the climactic scene on the rooftop (pic 1). Shinya Ohira helped Okiura out with this section by animating a few shots where the building crumbles (pic 2). This is the same year that Ohira worked on the effects extravaganza that is the Captain Power home shooter game, and Toru Yoshida was the other big figure behind the animation of Captain Power, so Toru Yoshida may have been an influence on Ohira's development into an effects animator. This scene in Black Magic M-66 is also presumably what led to Ohira animating the smoke and building crumbling in Akira. Amusingly enough, right after Akira, Ohira animated another crumbling building in an episode of Peter Pan sakkan'd by Okiura. Ohira was an animator in Okiura's sakkan debut, and he is an animator in Okiura's latest film.

Black Magic M-66 came out a year before Akira, and in fact it feels reminiscent of Akira in various subtle ways. It almost feels like a dry run for Akira. The basic elements are similar - gruff general and crazy scientist after a rogue experimental subject with superhuman powers on a killing spree - and the military elements are depicted (visually and by the script) very realistically and methodically, and even the gestures sometimes feel similar. It's presumably seeing Okiura's work on Black Magic M-66 that prompted Katsuhiro Otomo to invite Hiroyuki Okiura to work on Akira. After working under Nakamura on Akira, Okiura went on to provide great animation under Nakamura again in Peter Pan and Catnapped, not to mention becoming one of the key figures behind the two Ghost in the Shell films alongside fellow (ex-)Anime R animator Kazuchika Kise, who is also present as an animator here (though he was technically at Anime R sister studio Mu).

Incidentally, the impressively nuanced animation in the elevator just before the climax was animated by two animators who aren't credited. It was animated by Yoshiyuki Ichikawa 市川吉幸 based on roughs by Yuji Moriyama 森山ゆうじ. Both were members of Studio MIN, formed by Hiroyuki Kitakubo himself in 1982. MIN was one of the many artist collectives euphemistically known as a studio that were formed in the 1980s. MIN disbanded in 1991, immediately after production of Kitakubo's Rojin Z.

---

Black Magic M-66 ブラックマジックM-66 (Animate Film/AIC, OVA, 1987, 47 mins)

Created by:	士郎正宗	Masamune Shirow
Director/Script/Storyboard:	士郎正宗	Masamune Shirow
Director/Structure/Character Design:	北久保弘之	Hiroyuki Kitakubo
Animation Director:	沖浦啓之	Hiroyuki Okiura
Mechanic Animation Director:	吉田徹	Toru Yoshida
Art Director:	本田修	Osamu Honda
Music:	片柳譲陽	Yoshiharu Katayanagi

Key Animation:	アニメアール Anime R

	吉田徹	Toru Yoshida	黄瀬和哉	Kazuchika Kise
	浜川修二郎	Shujiro Hamakawa	谷口守泰	Moriyasu Taniguchi
	貴志夫美子	Fumiko Kishi	毛利和昭	Kazuaki Mouri
	柳沢まさひで	Masahide Yanagisawa	寺田浩之	Hiroyuki Terada
	逢坂浩司	Hiroshi Ousaka	沖浦啓之	Hiroyuki Okiura

アトリエ戯雅 Atelier Giga

	宇佐美皓一	Koichi Usami
	岩瀧智	Satoshi Iwataki
	ところともかず	Tomokazu Tokoro
	小曽根正美	Masami Kosone
	さとうけいいち	Keiichi Sato
	仲盛文	Morifumi Naka

	林宏樹 Hiroki Hayashi
	田中正弘 Masahiro Tanaka
	宇都宮智 Satoru Utsunimiya
	橋本浩一 Koichi Hashimoto
	清水義治 Yoshiharu Shimizu
	大平晋也 Shinya Ohira

Animation subcontracting studio Oh Production is perhaps best remembered for their classic Gauche the Cellist (1982), although they were a prolific subcontractor who provided some great animation to many shows over the years while receiving little recognition for it. They later produced another in-house show called Little Twins (1992), which I wrote about before. Between these two there was one other major Oh Pro production that I only just recently had the chance to discover.

First adapted in 1972 by Toei (opening), Oh Pro re-made Go Nagai's classic manga Devilman into two high-quality OVAs released in 1987 and 1990. (Another Devilman OVA was released many years later, but it was made by Studio Live, not Oh Pro, and is in a completely different style.)

The most interesting and surprising thing about these OVAs is that the animation was in large part done by Ghibli animators, so it has a distinctly Ghibli inflection. Oh Pro had lent its animators to Miyazaki for years, and it seems he paid back the favor in this OVA.

These are well made OVAs with very nice animation and lush visuals. Especially the first volume features some of the most impressive sequences of animation of any production in that era, OVA or movie. The visuals are clean and refined and the directing measured and controlled in a way I wouldn't have expected for this material. It feels different from your typical OVA, in both directing and animation. It feels more cinematic. I don't even like Go Nagai that much, but I enjoyed these OVAs because of the good production quality.

The basic premise of Devilman is that demons inhabited the world in prehistoric times, but they were vanquished by the angels. Fast-forward to modern Tokyo, where the demons are trying to find their way back into our world. (Since when Tokyo isn't busy being blown up in anime, it's being taken over by demons.) The protagonist is enlisted to fight the demons by an old friend whose father was a demon researcher. He does so by channeling an old demon called Amon and becoming Devilman.

Most of the first episode is devoted to the buildup, as the protagonist learns about this secret history of the world, in the end finally becoming Devilman and killing a room full of demons who possess the body of a club full of revelers. But sprinkled between these basically realistic sequences are two sequences that depict the prehistoric monster world. These sequences are my favorite part of these OVAs. The monster world was a place where dinosaurs and demons inhabited the same hellish plane of reality, playing out an endless sequence of bloody battles, each more bizarrely horrific than the next. The sequences are masterfully animated and packed full of ideas. Rather than your typical goblins and ghouls, the monsters are horrible yet somehow believable mish-mashes of animals and insects living, ancient and imaginary, and their battles play out like a grotesque nature channel program.

The rest of the OVA apart from these sequences is nice, too, although I came away wishing the entire OVA had looked like those two sequences. The visuals are sleek and clean, and the scenes are carefully directed. The only problem is that the story structure is somewhat odd, with a huge proportion of episode 1 being devoted to buildup, and the second episode completely abandoning any kind of theme or story and going with long, drawn-out monster battles.

The first episode is more satisfying than the second in part because the animation feels a little better, but also because of the material. The first episode has a dramatic arc that builds to a surprise ending. The protagonist starts as a regular boy, and with the arrival of his mysterious friend, the tension builds and builds until the climax, which explodes into an orgy of violence as the protagonist transforms into Devilman. By the second episode, the premise has been established, and all that remains is for Devilman to battle one opponent after another. Episode 2 is split evenly in half between two opponent battles, and other than this doesn't really feature any dramatic tension.

I wouldn't say that I think this is the most faithful adaptation of Go Nagai in style and spirit, though I'm not exactly an expert on his work. I would think something with a more rough and graphic touch would be needed to do him justice. But this OVA works in its own way, and Go Nagai was apparently supervising the project, so he obviously approved.

Even though the material here is inherently gory, the tasteful drawings and understated directing make it seem less gratuitously so than it might have been in the hands of a lesser director. Even at its most violent, this OVA remains somehow restrained and polite. It's an interesting contrast with the contemporary Go Nagai OVA adaptations of Violence Jack, which felt much more authentically exploitative.

These OVAs are impressive perhaps because they are strong as pieces of visual directing. The opening sequence of episode 1 is a good example. The first few minutes are entirely wordless, depicting the early struggle between the demons and the angels. This sequence is epic in tone and quite lovely. It reminds of the opening of Nausicaa. Even the music, by a young Kenji Kawai, sounds like it was influenced by Joe Hisaishi's score for Nausicaa. (By the time of episode 2 in 1990, his score had acquired that patented Kenji Kawai sound.) Episode 2, meanwhile, features a long battle in the air that is almost entirely wordless - pure visual directing.

I also like that the battles are actual physical battles, not just two Super Saiyans blasting each other with psychic beams. Usually this kind of monster battling in anime is boring because when someone is finally cornered, they just power up and make up some new, even stronger psychic power to blast away the opponent. At least here, there's no powering up or other cheap tricks: it's just straight physical battling, with the same set of powers they started out with.

Oh Pro's Devilman was the directing debut of Tsutomu Iida, who later changed his name to Umanosuke Iida. Devilman benefits from the attention to detail that helped make his later Space Miners (1994) such a delight. The pacing is quite slow, even sluggish, yet it holds your interest because every shot feels clean and deliberately presented. The pacing is slow because it's grounded in reality, and that gives it more impact when supernatural things occur in this otherwise realistically paced story. There are no shots that feel like throwaway shots between important scenes. What the film lacks in dynamism it makes up for in unflagging tension and assiduously pleasing drawings.

Attention to detail is one of the things that makes it feel cinematic. The protagonist's father's house is a stately and high-class estate with expensive furniture and paintings on the wall. In one shot, in the middle of all the opulence, a corner of the wall bears the scar of a shotgun blast, testament to the father's descent into madness. It's nice because it's totally understated. No mention is actually made of it. It's a higher level of storytelling than the usual OVA when they put little touches like this in the background as a subtle way of augmenting the narrative.

I appreciated the little innocuous details like the way each of the bikes was individuated in the following shot of an ordinary sidewalk in the city (in front of the suspiciously named Iida Bookstore). It's not flamboyant and passes by unnoticed while watching, but it helps make the film feel more authentic and believable. Everyday nuance like this is something you associate with the Ghibli films. This OVA has many examples of nice details like this.

The lighting is another aspect showing the unusual level of attention to detail that Iida brought to his work. There's one particular shot that impressed me for its stylish and creative presentation. While the protagonists are driving in a car, at one point they stop at a red light. The camera is positioned as if it was facing the driver of the car, just above the hood. The windshield of protagonists' car is bathed in the red light of the taillights of the truck in front of them, obscuring the driver. After a few seconds, the truck driver steps off the brake pedal, turning the taillights off, and the red cloak disappears and the protagonist becomes visible.

In a later shot, we see the facade of the protagonist's father's home shown at an oblique angle. After a few seconds, headlights appear behind the bushes in the distance. We can't see the car, only the mansion and the big tree in the courtyard, but we know the car is moving off screen because the shadows of the tree's branches run across the face of the mansion in a believably rendered play of black shapes. Only after the shapes stop moving does the camera slowly pan right towards the driveway, where the car has stopped in front of the gate. It's an innocuous and unimportant shot, but it's so satisfying and interesting to watch.

The staging of the shots also feels cinematic. Shots are positioned in such a way that the action moves through the shot in a creative and unexpected way, the way it does in Miyazaki's films. It's quite possible that Iida was in fact directly influenced by Miyazaki's style in this regard, because just after his involvement in the Oh Pro episodes of Lupin III Part 3 (1984-1985), he served as assistant director on Laputa (1986).

The Ghibli connection

The animation fully backs up Tsutomu Iida's cinematic directing, and it's no surprise why: the animators almost all just came from Laputa. It seems that having worked as the assistant director of Laputa gave Iida the leverage to be able to invite many of the animators who worked on Laputa to work on Devilman. That, and Oh Pro's long history of having worked with Takahata and Miyazaki, ever since the days of Heidi. Miyazaki's previous film, Nausicaa (1984), featured Oh Pro animators Tadashi Fukuda, Kitaro Kosaka and Toshitsugu Saida. Tsutomu Iida's very first job in animation was as an inbetweener on Nausicaa. Before that, Future Boy Conan (1978) featured Oh Pro animators Koichi Murata, Toshitsugu Saida, Joji Manabe, and Toshio Yamauchi.

The character designer/animation director of Devilman is Oh Pro co-founder Kazuo Komatsubara. Komatsubara himself had of course been animation director of Nausicaa, as well as having been the planner of Gauche, so there are many ties between Oh Pro and Ghibli. At a deeper level, Komatsubara had started out at Toei Doga in 1964, just one year after Miyazaki, although the two never wound up working together on the same projects there. After Komatsubara left Toei, he worked on the famous Go Nagai productions of the 1970s for Toei, most notably Devilman, which is presumably what led Go Nagai to choose Komatsubara and Oh Pro for this remake.

There is no other OVA that features an animator list like this: Katsuya Kondo, Shinji Otsuka, Makiko Futaki, Yoshinori Kanada, Toshio Kawaguchi, Masaaki Endo. And that's just the first episode. This is probably the reason why many of the drawings have a distinctly Miyazaki-esque feeling.

The second episode came several years later in 1990, and features many of the animators who worked on the intervening two Ghibli films, Totoro (1988) and Kiki (1989) - Yoshiharu Sato, Shinji Otsuka, Masaaki Endo, Toshio Kawaguchi, Yoshinori Kanada, Katsuya Kondo, Makiko Futaki, Hiroomi Yamakawa, Sachiko Sugino, Hiroshi Watanabe. Oh Pro animator Hiroshi Shimizu, who worked on episode 2, became a regular in Ghibli films starting the year after with Only Yesterday (1991). The second episode features a few other impressive outside names: Yasuomi Umetsu, Hiroyuki Okiura, Norimoto Tokura.

Apart from the animation, there are other Ghibli connections that help account for the Ghibli feeling. The color designer of the first episode is Michiyo Yasuda, who has been the color designer of every Miyazaki film since Nausicaa. I think this is one of the few non-Miyazaki films she's worked on. The art director of the first episode is Takamura Mukuo, a veteran art director from the early days of anime who was the art director of Gauche the Cellist. He was art director of many a classic anime, from Galaxy Express 999 to Harmageddon, to say nothing of the classic Takahata/Miyazaki TV series Heidi and 3000 Leagues in Search of Mother. Anido released a retrospective book of his art.

The animation

There's something about the drawings in this OVA that I really love. Just as every age has its distinguishing style of drawing that eventually disappears, the drawings in these OVAs have a certain quality that you don't find in anime anymore. Komatsubara's drawings are graceful and clean, the girls cute without going overboard with the cuteness like people do today. Even when the animation isn't particularly interesting, the drawings maintain your interest because they're consistently pleasing to the eye.

The most impressive scene in terms of the animation is the 4-minute segment in episode 1 after the protagonist puts on the monster mask, where he sees a vision of world of the demons, pictured above. This segment is a beautiful standalone piece of animation, obviously done by one person, depicting a slyly humorous sequence of monsters eating one another. One monster devours another, only to be devoured by another bigger monster, only for that one to be devoured by an even bigger monster, etc, etc, ad infinitum - the demon version of what happens in the natural world.

The designs in this segment are beautiful and well drawn. The animation isn't impressive in an obvious way, but it's incredibly nuanced and well executed. The only equivalent I've seen is animation in the Ghibli films, so it's obvious this segment was done by one of the Ghibli animators - I'm guessing either Katsuya Kondo, Shinji Otsuka or Makiko Futaki.

Episode 1 features plenty of other very nice segments. Yoshinori Kanada obviously animated the delectable disco scene at the end of the first episode, with its riotous rainbow colors and wild dancing by nubile bacchantes in leotards and panties. The drawings in this scene look like they came straight out of Birth. There are some nice Kanada-school effects where the protagonists are attacked by the car monster, perhaps by Kanada associate Osamu Nabeshima. The scattered shots of the monsters in the mansion early on are each quite well done.

Episode 2 is less impressive in terms of the animation, but is still quite solidly animated. The episode is capped by a tour-de-force 15-minute-long extended aerial combat sequence. It's consistently well drawn and creatively choreographed, although the only disappointment is that it is somewhat lacking in dynamism and is a little boring. What is impressive is how consistently well drawn the characters are from various angles as they grapple with one another mid-air. It's also nice how the sequence evolves naturally according to the surroundings, first in the city, flying around and bouncing off buildings, then zooming over a river past a bridge out to the forest on the outskirts of the city, then using the trees in the forest to attack the opponent either as projectiles or camouflage.

The animation highlight in episode 2 is the segment in the house where the protagonist saves the nude girl from the monster. This sequence was obviously drawn by Hiroyuki Okiura. It's easily identifiable by comparing it with the great segment he animated in episode 1 of The Hakkenden the same year, which is one of my favorite sequences ever. Okiura's animation changed a lot in later years, becoming much more impressively nuanced, but there's something about the raw power and excitement of his early work at this period that I find I miss. I prefer the more dynamic and expressive early Okiura at the tail end of his Anime R period, and this scene is a great example of his work from this period.

Tsutomu Iida

Sadly, Tsutomu Iida passed away two years ago from lung cancer. It cut short a career that I was always hoping would take off. After Devilman, he was involved in a number of projects, but none of them seemed to me to quite provide him with the opportunity to show just how great a director he was. Space Miners is perhaps the best showcase of his talent. I think he was one of the few people out there with the instincts of a director. He was detail-oriented, able to create fun and engaging stories and characters, good at world-building. I wanted to see him get the chance to do that in a feature context. He was directing the Towa no Quon (2011) movie series for Bones when death interrupted him, but I haven't seen these yet. Ironic that when he finally got to direct a movie, he should die in the middle of it.

It seems to me like he got side-tracked with fluff projects after Devilman. First there was the Chibi Go Nagai World OVAs. He directed 3 45-minute OVAs for this series. Apparently it all came about when Go Nagai saw his chibi drawings for the Devilman characters during production of Devilman and Go Nagai so loved them that he asked for an anime version to be produced. The anime is certainly entertaining and well made, with animation from Oh Pro animators, helmed again by character designer/animation director Kazuo Komatsubara. But it feels like nothing so much as a waste of his talent. He later did a similar side-show for the main event of Giant Robo in the Gin-Rei OVA.

Iida also directed one of the episodes of Oh Pro's Little Twins, which I mentioned above, as well as one of the short segments in a two-volume OVA series made by Oh Pro adapting traditional Japanese horror stories, in the more cartoony style of Manga Nihon Mukashibanashi. His major projects of later years Gundam: The 08th MS Team (1996-1999), Hellsing (2001-2002), Tide-Line Blue (2005) and Towa no Quon (2011).

Finally, Iida directed a pilot for a movie called Spirit that obviously never got beyond the pilot stage. I haven't been able to find any information about this. Hopefully some day this can be released so we can see everything this talented director left us. Alongside Mahiro Maeda's R20 Galactic Airport, this is another pilot for a feature-length film that I wish would have gotten off the ground.

---

Devilman: Birth (Oh Pro, 1987, OVA, 50min)

Director:	飯田つとむ Tsutomu Iida
Script:	永井豪 Go Nagai
	飯田つとむ Tsutomu Iida
Character Design:	小松原一男 Kazuo Komatsubara
Animation Director:	安藤正浩 Masahiro Ando
Art Director:	椋尾篁 Takamura Mukuo
Music:	川井憲次 Kenji Kawai
Color Design:	保田道世 Michiyo Yasuda

Key Animation:		安藤正浩 Masahiro Ando
		金田伊功 Yoshinori Kanada
		鍋島修 Osamu Nabeshima
		松原京子 Kyoko Matsubara
		森友典子 Noriko Moritomo
		矢吹勉 Tsutomu Yabuki
		川崎博嗣 Hirotsugu Kawasaki
		東京モモンガ Tokyo Momonga
		二木真希子 Makiko Futaki
		遠藤正明 Masaaki Endo
		近藤勝也 Katsuya Kondo
		河口俊夫 Toshio Kawaguchi
		大塚伸治 Shinji Otsuka
		小松原一男 Kazuo Komatsubara

Devilman: Demon Bird (Oh Pro, 1990, OVA, 57min)

Director:	飯田つとむ Tsutomu Iida
Character Design & A.D.:	小松原一男 Kazuo Komatsubara
Animation Director:	安藤正浩 Masahiro Ando
Art Director:	宮前光春 Mitsuharu Miyamae
	海老沢一男 Kazuo Ebisawa
Music:	川井憲次 Kenji Kawai

Key Animation:		清水洋 Hiroshi Shimizu
		遠藤正明 Masaaki Endo
		沖浦啓之 Hiroyuki Okiura
		佐藤雄三 Yuzo Sato
		梅津泰臣 Yasuomi Umetsu
		河口俊夫 Toshio Kawaguchi
		鍋島修 Osamu Nabeshima
		松原京子 Kyoko Matsubara
		金田伊功 Yoshinori Kanada
		近藤勝也 Katsuya Kondo
		杉野左秩子 Sachiko Sugino
		練木正宏 Masahiro Neriki
		諸橋伸司 Shinji Morohashi
		渡辺浩 Hiroshi Watanabe
		宮本英子 Eiko Miyamoto
		大竹紀子 Noriko Otake
		加藤茂 Shigeru Kato
		佐藤好春 Yoshiharu Sato
		黒沢守 Mamoru Kurosawa
		山川浩臣 Hiroomi Yamakawa
		戸倉紀元 Norimoto Tokura

The first Lupin III TV special from 1989 Bye Bye Lady Liberty had nice elongated designs harkening back to the more stylized designs of Mamo-era Yoshio Kabashima, who did way less work on the series than he should have.

Noboru Furuse was the designer. In looking into his filmography I didn't find much else as pleasingly designed as Bye Bye Lady Liberty, but I did discover a different facet of him that I wasn't aware of: racing anime maestro.

Turns out he was behind some of the nicest racing anime OVAs of the high OVA era between 1985-1990:

Bari Bari Densetsu (1986, 2x50min)
  Character Designer, Animation Director
Kaze wo Nuke! (1988, 40min)
  Director, Character Designer, Animation Director
Goddamn (1990, 2x30min)
  Director, Character Designer, Animation Director

His designs are easily identified by the sleek, elongated faces, which are a constant from project to project.

Each of these is about a different kind of racing: Motorcycle racing in Bari Bari Densetsu, motorcross in Kaze wo Nuke! and rallying in Goddamn. Apparently he couldn't get enough: he returned to racing in 1995 with Initial D, about street racing.

Each of them is surprisingly watchable. They put a lot of effort into the films in terms of the drawings of the vehicles and the directing.

Racing anime being merely a sub-genre of that most anime of genres, sports anime, it usually follows the template: beginner rider works his way up through the ranks, is challenged along the way by arrogant veteran with whom a bond of friendship is eventually formed before his inevitable and tragic death or maiming, and hero goes on to finally win the championship. The complexities of the race are boiled down to a samurai duel between rivals who can read each other's every move. A motorcross race becomes a space odyssey and Greek epic rolled into one.

There were many other motorcycle anime, like Pelican Road and Shonan Bakusozoku, but they weren't racing anime, and the biking in these was just a setting for the drama. Here, the racing is the protagonist, and we come away from the anime understanding the intricacies of the sport from the perspective of a pro. Or so the anime makes us feel. It's a dramatization of the sports in a way that is tailored to excite the mind of the manga's intended 13-year-old audience.

The sports anime kinship of Noboru Furuse's racing anime is underlined by the fact that starting around the same time (1988 onwards) he directed the Aim for the Ace! 2 OVA series, a continuation of Osamu Dezaki's quintessential sports anime.

All three of these racing anime are based on manga, so they feel somewhat compressed, but they focus the plot well on the character's growth by reproducing in geekishly obsessive detail the minutiae of his chosen sport, in this case cars and motorcycles. The vehicles are drawn and animated in detail from many angles. Considerable effort is expended in animating the vehicles. Back then it was a given that this would need to be done, so they set to the task with that goal in mind. But it's refreshing because we won't ever see hand-drawn racing anime anymore (Redline being a glorious exception). Even just five years on from Goddamn they used CG for the cars in Initial D.

These are OVAs as the OVA was intended, rather than the cop-out that many OVAs turned out to be: a format for lavish presentation of subjects too specialized (in subject, audience) for the big screen. Though the subject is not very glamorous, and people in the west have probably shied away from them because of it (like spokon anime), these are well made OVAs.

The last OVA directed by Furuse was Goddamn, which has the best title of any anime, ever. The story is the most interesting of the three. It takes a more adult perspective rather than follow the spokon template: The protagonist is merely a cog in the wheel of a big corporation that has aims to expand overseas into certain markets, and doing a rally race is just a means of achieving that goal. The car action is well directed and the plot moves along briskly in the adult world, without the usual silly high school antics or rival melodrama. There's nothing particularly impressive about the animation, but it works well with little budget. Noboru Furuse's drawings are simple but clean, and they're an improvement over the amateurish drawings of the manga.

The height of the animation in the three Noboru Furuse racing OVAs is the practice race in the first volume of Bari Bari Densetsu, with its driver POV shots that put you right in the action (pictured above). They're impressive because they're long shots and they're animated on 1s. It must have taken a very analytic mind to calculate all the different vectors of movement and align them properly, and hundreds of drawings for just a few shots. This could be done more easily with CG now, but what makes it such a bravura performance seen even today is that back then it was a real challenge.

It's clear that the animator who did it must have been Toyoaki Emura. He's one of the unsung heroes of 80s background animation. His chase through the tunnel in Akira (watch) is one of the film's iconic moments. Compare it with the animation of the biking scenes in Bari Bari Densetsu (watch), which was released two years before Akira. Just as Toshiaki Hontani made more realistic smoke FX animation than ever in Akira, Toyoaki Emura pushed background animation to its realistic extreme. Koji Morimoto and Takashi Nakamura did a nice motorcycle POV shot in the even earlier Bobby's In Deep (1985), but it was more dynamic than realistic. (watch)

Toyoaki Emura has his own web site. He has since apparently transition to working with CGI, a move that perhaps makes sense considering the nature of his animation prior to then. I can't help but feel it a shame, though, because he was really good. He went on to work on Venus Wars, Ghost in the Shell, Patlabor 2, Like a Cloud, Like the Wind, Catnapped, Spriggan, Jin-Roh, and Innocence. Incidentally, in Akira, Emura was also responsible for the battle between Tetsuo and the soldiers in the hallway after he escapes his chamber, as well as the following scene where he attacks the 'kids' (up until #27 zooms away in his flying wheelchair). In Like a Cloud, Like the Wind he animated the very first 20 or so shots as well as the battle on the grass around the midway point. He was clearly relied upon for complicated shots that required solid skills and patience.

I wrote about Toei's fantasy adventure OVA Xanadu: Dragon Slayer Densetsu (1988) before. It was a slight outing redeemed by early work from Koichi Arai and ex-Bebow animators.

Well, a few years later, a two-episode OVA with a confusingly similar title was released: Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroes (1992). It never seems to have made it over to the west like other good OVAs of the period, and you'd be forgiven for assuming that to have been because it was a crummy video game tie-in. But despite its obscurity, it's an impressively well-made action piece with a unique style. It might be the best fantasy/action OVA of the period that nobody has ever heard of.

A Wizardry OVA was released one year earlier in 1991 as a tie-in with the popular dungeoner video games, but it was boring and uninspired. Despite the talent at TMS's disposal, and despite TMS staple Kenji Kodama's storyboard, it was nothing more than a walk through a dungeon straight out of the game, with disappointingly staid animation.

Dragon Slayer bears little resemblance to the latter. It doesn't even feel like conventional fantasy anime. The fantasy plot seem like merely an excuse for the director to string together a series of action scenes of hair-raising intensity. With its frenetic pacing and expressionistic drawings, its post-Akira pedigree is obvious. The animation is lively and intense and highly worked. If anything, it feels closer in spirit to the manic Crimson Wolf (1993), with its speedy and dynamic animation and breakneck momentum. Another reference point is Sukeban Deka (1991), which featured thrilling, wildly deformed action animation by Masayuki Kobayashi. The action in Dragon Slayer is similar in style to Kobayashi's animation in Sukeban Deka - the timing ultra-fast and the drawings laden with deformed insertions to heighten the impact of the movement.

The film actually has had something of a cult reputation among Japanese fans due to its unusually fast pacing and animation. The animation at times seems excessively fast, as if the timing on the animation sheet had actually been kicked up a notch at the processing stage to give it more punch. Even the overall directing is unexpectedly fast. Scenes proceed at such a breakneck pace that dramatic moments like the boy's separation from his mother at the beginning border on the comical. That said, it's not badly done. It actually works. Sure, the budget is obviously not extremely high, and the drawings have a rough edge, but this isn't one of those shows that you would watch to laugh at it. The action sequences are creatively and excitingly choreographed, and the lightning-fast pacing of the narrative makes the otherwise generic fantasy plot far more entertaining than it rightfully should be.

The OVA was apparently not well received by fans of the game because the story was extensively overhauled for the anime. But who outside of a handful of Japanese fans from 1992 remembers (much less still plays) the game? They did the right thing to make the anime stand on its own two legs rather than make a faithful but impotent anime adaptation like Wizardry. As a result, twenty years on, Dragon Slayer still holds up pretty well.

Adding to the film's atmosphere are the character designs, which have a nice 'angry' feeling to them courtesy of onetime Nagai Go associate Ken Ishikawa, who also gave us the delightfully fierce and bloody Majuu Sensen AKA Beast Fighter. Yes indeed, this is anime as the lord intended it: fast, dynamic, and brutal.

Stretch and squash indeed

The Curtain-R-Nakamura connection

So, what studio produced this OVA? You'd be hard-pressed to say going by the credits. A variety of big corporate entities like King Records and Amuse Video are cited in production roles, but none of them are actual animation production studios. It takes some knowledge of the staff to extrapolate that informal artist gathering Studio Curtain was probably the 'brain' behind the show, and animation subcontractor Nakamura Production was probably the main production floor of the show's animation. One other subcontractor was also involved: Anime R. (The earlier comparison with Sukeban Deka is even more apt because Anime R was behind Sukeban Deka.)

What ties all of these together seems to be the old Sunrise cooking anime Mister Ajikko, which aired from 1987 to 1989. Most of the main staff of Dragon Slayer worked on (and presumably met one another working on) Mister Ajikko. The style of Dragon Slayer may even be indebted to the directing style of Mister Ajikko.

Dragon Slayer director Noriyuki Nakamura (no relation to Nakamura Production) may not be very well known, but he's a veteran who has been directing since at least 1980 and who continues to be very active on the front line storyboarding TV episodes.

Noriyuki Nakamura was the chief episode director of Mister Ajikko. By the time of Dragon Slayer in 1992, Noriyuki Nakamura was part of an informal animation studio called Studio Curtain, run by Masahiro Kase. Studio Curtain receives a "Special Thanks" credit in Dragon Slayer. Masahiro Kase, an animator in Dragon Slayer, was the chief animation director of the first 3/4 of Mister Ajikko. Masahiro Kase was at Osaka subcontractor Anime R at the time. Kazuaki Mouri, one of Anime R's hotshot animators, was the chief animation director of the last 1/4. Mouri is co-storyboarder and combat sequence supervisor of Dragon Slayer.

Perhaps the most recognizable name in Dragon Slayer is Tadashi Hiramatsu. He co-storyboarded and animated. I already wrote a bit about his early years in my post on Sukeban Deka: He started out at Nakamura Pro and eventually moved to Studio Curtain. Hiramatsu met Kase while working on Mister Ajikko. It's during Hiramatsu's period at Kase's Curtain that Dragon Slayer was produced. Hiramatsu relates that he learned a lot about directing from Noriyuki Nakamura.

The Nakamura Pro team of Tadashi Hiramatsu, Hiroyuki Okuno, Hisashi Hirai and Tetsuya Yanagisawa is credited together in Mister Ajikko episodes 38, 43, 48, 53. These four animators are present in Dragon Slayer. Hiroyuki Okuno is an animator, Tetsuya Yanagisawa is the monster character designer, and Hisashi Hirai is the character designer and animation director.

There's even a tangential Nippon Animation connection. Noriyuki Nakamura and Masahiro Kase both started out at Nippon Animation in the early 1980s, so it's possible they met there or at least recognized one another from that period. Meanwhile, Tadashi Hiramatsu wound up working on several Nippon Animation productions in the early 1990s after he joined Noriyuki Nakamura and Masahiro Kase at Studio Curtain.

Nakamura Pro

As I wrote in my post on Dirty Pair (1985), Sunrise has always made heavy use of subcontractors for their animation, ever since their founding in the early 1970s. Several other subcontractors helped with the animation side of Mister Ajikko, including Studio Live and Animaru-ya. But Nakamura Pro has always had a particularly close relationship with Sunrise, due to their shared origins.

Nakamura Pro was founded in 1974 by Kazuo Nakamura, who had started out at Mushi Pro. His studio was one of many, like Sunrise, founded in the aftermath of Mushi Pro's failure in what I've referred to as the Mushi Pro diaspora. It's ironic to think that Mushi Pro inadvertently influenced the course of anime history in probably exactly the opposite way they intended: Sunrise learned from Mushi Pro's mistake and did not let the artists run the studio. They instead turned to toy tie-ups as a way to ensure the studio's continued prosperity. This resulted in their becoming a robot anime studio. Nakamura Pro did most of its work for the robot shows of Sunrise and Toei in the early days, resulting in a whole generation of animators trained there and elsewhere becoming specialists in a sub-genre of animation that is unique to Japan. Some of the more famous animators turned out by Nakamura Pro include Ken Otsuka, Eiji Nakata, Shuko Murase and Hiroyuki Kitakubo.

Nakamura Pro has its own official web site, where they say they are hiring. Both Nakamura and Anime R are still alive and well doing subcontract animation work on today's TV shows.

It's all very complicated, but here is a basic breakdown of the studios and their animators in Dragon Slayer:
► Curtain: Noriyuki Nakamura, Masahiro Kase, Tadashi Hiramatsu
► Nakamura Pro: Hisashi Hirai, Michinori Chiba, Ken Otsuka, Hiroyuki Okuno, Shuko Murase, Yasuhiro Irie, Akira Nakamura, Tetsuya Yanagisawa, Kazuhiro Itakura
► Anime R: Kazuaki Mouri, Masahide Yanagisawa, Takahiro Kimura, Takahiro Komori

Aside: Although Noriyuki Nakamura bears no relation to Nakamura Pro, the other Nakamura credited in the show - Akira Nakamura, who is credited as enemy character designer - is the younger brother of Nakamura Pro founder Kazuo Nakamura.

Just to further confuse you, I'll close by briefly evoking another of the artist collectives that were so popular in the early 1990s - Gabo Miyabi (画房雅). It was founded by Masahide Yanagisawa after he left Anime R and moved to Tokyo. I don't know whether or not the group existed at the time of Dragon Slayer, but four animators credited in Dragon Slayer were part of the group: Masahide Yanagisawa, Shinya Takahashi, Takahiro Komori, and Yasuhiro Irie. The Sukeban Deka animator I mentioned before, Masayuki Kobayashi, was also part of the group. Other animators involved in the group include Kenichiro Katsura and Tatsuya Tomaru.

Other notable names in the credits include Masami Obari and Masashi Ishihama.

---

Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroes ドラゴンスレイヤー英雄伝説 (1992, OVA, 2x25 mins, dir. Noriyuki Nakamura)

Director & Story Framework:	中村憲由 Noriyuki Nakamura
Script:	松崎健一 Kenichi Matsuzaki
Art Director:	脇威志 Takeshi Waki
Original Character Design:	石川賢 Ken Ishikawa
Animation C.D. & Animation Director:	平井久司 Hisashi Hirai
Storyboards:	中村憲由 Noriyuki Nakamura 難波日登志 Hitoshi Namba 毛利和明 Kazuaki Mouri 平松禎史 Tadashi Hiramatsu
Combat Supervisor:	毛利和明 Kazuaki Mouri
Enemy Character Design:	中村明 Akira Nakamura
Monster Character Design:	柳沢哲也 Tetsuya Yanagisawa

Key Animation:		中村プロ Nakamura Pro:
		柳沢哲也 Tetsuya Yanagisawa
		板倉和弘 Kazuhiro Itakura
2nd Key Animation:		千葉道徳 Michinori Chiba
		大塚健 Ken Otsuka
		石塚貴之 Takayuki Ishizuka
Key Animation:		加瀬政広 Masahiro Kase
		平松禎史 Tadashi Hiramatsu
		奥野浩行 Hiroyuki Okuno
		竹内昭 Akira Takeuchi
		柳沢まさひで Masahide Yanagisawa
		高橋しんや Shinya Takahashi
		大張正己 Masami Obari
		村瀬修功 Shuko Murase
		毛利和明 Kazuaki Mouri
		山川瑞恵 Mizue Yamakawa
		入江泰浩 Yasuhiro Irie
		工藤裕加 Yuka Kudo
		数井浩子 Hiroko Kazui
		青木哲郎 Tetsuro Aoki
		灘波日登志 Hitoshi Namba
		清水健一 Kenichi Shimizu
		木村貴宏 Takahiro Kimura
		重田智 Satoshi Shigeta
		石浜真史 Masashi Ishihama
		小森高博 Takahiro Komori
		亀井隆 Takashi Kamei

Cover of LD Vol. 1

UNDERSEA SILENCE REVORUTION

I sought out the two-part Submarine 707R OVA series from 2003-2004 because it was directed by Shoichi Masuo, one of the great effects animators of the last thirty years in Japan. I wrote a post about him before. The latter post was mainly about his work on Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, in which he animated numerous scenes involving submarines. Directing a whole OVA of submarine action was an obvious next step for this animator. I assumed that the direct-to-video format and intervening decade-plus of advances in production knowhow would have allowed him the technical means, schedule and budget to create even better underwater sub action and visual effects than he was able under the constraints of the TV format.

I wasn't expecting a masterpiece, but I certainly wasn't expecting the unmitigated disaster that greeted me. There was so much wrong with this show that I had a hard time fathoming how it came to be produced. It just goes to show that you can't reason quality. There is no guarantee that a good animator will make a good director, even when the show seems like the perfect fit for a particular animator's talent. For every Masaaki Yuasa or a Takeshi Koike, there must be 10 Shoichi Masuos. I love the guy as an animator, and perhaps there were factors beyond his control during the production of this show that led to these results, but there is just no silver lining in this cloud.

What's even more amazing is that there isn't even very much compelling effects work in Submarine 707R. I'm the kind of geeky viewer who will gladly watch a show I otherwise despise if it features good animation by an animator I like. I would have been happy if it turned out to be a vapid, trite, sloppily-directed effects extravaganza. But there were barely 5 good explosions in the whole thing. What happened?

Shoichi Masuo clearly elected to adapt this manga into an anime because it would allow him to create exciting underwater sub action in the vein of the wonderful, classic scenes of that ilk in Nadia. As if to reinforce the comparison, Hideaki Anno directed the opening sequence, which depicts the 707 being assembled in the style of sepia-colored retro footage. We've seen the same sort of thing from Anno numerous times before; it's one of his stock tricks. But Nadia worked because it had a good directing team; advances in technology do not equate to better anime. Quite the opposite: The ease with which CGI can be deployed seems to have the effect of emboldening second-rate directors who do not have the attention to detail or the director's instinct to realize when a particular visual is simply not working. Back then a hack wouldn't have had the ability to animate such an arduous scene.

The scenes of the submarines in this OVA had the bland, half-hearted, amateurish quality of early CGI adopters from the 1990s - those shows that were brave enough to dare to combine hand-drawn animation with CGI mecha. They didn't know how to do it well, and it looked like crap, but it was kind of expected that CG anime had to go through growing pains. They had to start somewhere. I watched this OVA assuming, based on the evidence, that it was produced in the 1990s. I was shocked to learn it was such a recent project.

The CGI in this OVA is the perfect example of how paper-thin bad CGI feels. It entirely lacks the tactility and weightiness of hand-drawn animation. Even bad hand-drawn animation would have been better. The irony is that CGI was presumably adopted to animate the submarines as a way to make the underwater scenes feel more "real". But the hand-drawn submarines of Nadia felt infinitely more realistic. It's fascinating that the person responsible for those scenes, when working in the context of CGI, seems blind to the fact that the animation of the CGI subs is totally unconvincing. Merely being consistently on-model and easier to move isn't sufficient to impart a feeling of reality. The subs in Submarine 707R feel completely weightless -- and not because they're in the water. Masuo's animation in Nadia was the result of very precise calculations in terms of the drawing and the timing of the movement. The reliance on CGI appears to have short-circuited the most important faculty of animators.

But that's not even the worst thing about this OVA. The directing is a textbook example of bad directing in almost every imaginable way. The pace is astoundingly slow. It's like you're watching it in slo-mo. It feels suspiciously like they drew out 30 minutes' worth of material to 50 minutes. Characters appear in a context suggesting their reappearance, only to disappear. Narrative threads begin, only to be abruptly and capriciously replaced by entirely different narrative threads.

The character designs are a nonsensical mishmash of anime moeblobs, retro-styled characters straight out of an Osamu Tezuka manga from the 1950s, and just plain badly drawn characters. The character animation is nonexistent. The first fifteen minutes of episode 2 are a surreal succession of excruciatingly slow pans over sound effects, in a bald-faced scrabble to fill in the space left until the climactic sequence, which was obviously animated first. The rest of the show isn't much of an improvement.

The CGI floats against the hand-drawn animation like a sub does in the water - or more accurately, like a healthy turd does in the toilet. The two are bad in their own right, and they don't mix well at all. The music was awful generic tinny synth that did absolutely nothing to accentuate the drama and everything to accentuate the awful lack of budget. On the other hand, hollow-sounding orchestral synth renditions of W.W.II Japanese naval marches is the perfect musical expression of this show's awful subtext of jingoistic naval pride masquerading as action movie bombast.

The plot is a complete disaster. Most fundamentally, the motivation of the bad guy is never clearly explained, even though they drop vague hints in certain spots. He's the most transparent "madman bent on world domination" cypher ever - the dollar-store version of the bad guy in Mahiro Maeda's very similar and comparably successful Submarine No. 6, who was actually somewhat compelling because his motivation was thoroughly explored.

Skipping through it post-fact to remind myself what it looked like, I started to think, "It doesn't look that bad. Maybe I was being a little harsh." But sitting through both episodes was nothing less than agony. I don't mean to be mean-spirited. I usually focus on describing good shows to try to see what makes them good, but it can be equally educational about what makes a good anime to look at what makes a bad anime.

About the animation, it's sad that there was not more good animation. A few spots that stood out as having nice FX animation were probably the work of the late Toshiaki Tetsura, a talented mecha animator who died a premature death. Makoto Kobayashi, who is a great mecha designer with a unique style, is also present. In addition to helping out with layouts, he appears to have drawn various shots in the show, most notably the massive carrier seen at the beginning, pictured above. His style comes through clearly in the byzantine detailing of the deck of the carrier and the more 'melty' texture of the strokes. Soichiro Matsuda was also involved as an animator, so he may have done some of the good bits. The ubiquitous Kazutaka Miyatake was the mecha designer, and Hiromasa Ogura was the art director, though this is not one of his shining moments.

My disappointment stems primarily from the fact that I hold Shoichi Masuo in such high regard, and I would have liked to see an action-focused OVA that served as a dense summation of the great work Masuo had done in various places over the preceding decade and a half.