Dragon Fist

If I may paraphrase Forrest Gump, 80s and 90s OVAs are "like a box of chocolate. You never know what you're going to get." That's exactly the case with 1991's Dragon Fist. As one of the QCs fumed, "I've signed on for this OVA to see some martial arts and inhuman characters, not for a really stupid plot about teenagers playing with cloning." You never know.

Dragon Fist starts out on a promising note, introducing Ling Fei-long, heir to the White Dragon Clan. Its members carry the power of the White Dragon in their fists. (Sort of like Ear of the Golden Dragon, where the clan chief carries the power of the Golden Dragon in his left ear.) Normally, heirs to the clan chief are born holding a silver jewel, but Fei-long was born holding a transparent jewel. For this aberration, his kin regard him with suspicion. He is sent to Japan to be schooled and to finish his training. And suddenly, we have a high school drama with sci-fi overtones.

In Japan, Fei-long is an apparently normal high-school student who is bullied for being a foreigner. One day, he sees some thugs trying to kidnap a girl named Katano Fuyuka. He intervenes and saves her, only to learn that she is not Katano Fuyuka. Fuyuka is actually dead, and this girl is a clone. (Despite this, clone Fuyuka seems to have original Fuyuka's childhood memories.) When a subsequent kidnapping attempt succeeds, Fei-long tracks the baddies to their laboratory in the mountains. There he fights the villains, mostly unsuccessfully, until he suddenly comes into his special powers, easily trounces everyone, and rescues the girl. There follows a totally arbitrary and tragic development, and the OVA ends.

Sasaki Nozomu, who played Ling Fei-long, has had prominent roles in better shows, including Tetsuo in Akira and Mello in Death Note. Nishiwara Kumiko, who voiced Fuyuka, played Iris Chateaubriand in all the Sakura Wars franchise and numerous live musicals derived from it. She also had a lead role in Tenkousei, which Orphan subbed this year. Matsumodo Yasunori, who played the chief villain, Sugiura, has had many roles, including Rin, the confused young protagonist in Joker: Marginal City, and Muto, the stalwart hero of Oz. (Orphan has subbed both of those OVAs as well.) The director, Yamauchi Shigeyasu, has had a long career, including Boys Over Flowers, Crying Freeman, the Saint Seiya franchise, and more recently, Yumekui Merry and Kimi no Iru Machi. Dragon Fist doesn't add much to his resume. The music is by the peerless Kawai Kenji, whose accomplishments are too long to summarize, and works well.

Iri found the raw (a VHS rip) and translated it. ninjacloud did the timing. I edited and typeset (there isn't much). Calyrica karaoked the OP and ED. Calyrica and Nemesis QCed. The OVA was never released on DVD, so this raw is probably as good as we're going to get.

Dragon Fist isn't top drawer anime, but it isn't Bavi Stock II or Twinkle Nora Rock Me! either. Enjoy.

Downhill (Twinkle Nora Rock Me!)

There's no way to soften this. Twinkle Nora Rock Me! (Nora 2) is to the original Nora as Bavi Stock II is to Bavi Stock I: a descent from the barely passable into the laughable. It's so bad that...

Audience: How bad is it, Collectr?

Collectr: It's so bad that Mike Toole, of Anime News Network, used it as a prime example in his panel, The Worst Anime of All Time.  He noted the almost total lack of in-between animation, the awkward jerkings that pass for dancing, and other failings. I could point to the absurd plot and the misspelled Engrish signs - DEPURTURE and AERIVAL - in the spaceport, but this just scratches the surface.

To start, the Nora Scholar of the sequel is a totally different character, even though she looks the same and is played by the same voice actress. In the original, Nora was an air-headed teenage space tourist who outsmarts an out-of-control AI by treating him as a naughty teenage boy. In the sequel, Nora is an interstellar bounty hunter with strong psychic powers. The universe is different too. In the original, the setting was the near-Earth planets and moons. In the sequel, the canvas is much broader.

Second, the plot is absurd. After defusing a hostage situation, bounty hunter Nora sets out for the "desolate mining planet" Dazzle. There she enters a rowdy bar and draws the unwanted attention of a huge bruiser named Touchino. She's actually after his older brother, Fuuchuro, who has psychic powers too. In order to find Fuuchuro, she must convince Max, a wannabe dancer, to disclose the brothers' hideaway. (She does this by playing air drums and convincing him to dance with her.) She then has a "wizards battle" with Fuuchuro, defeats him, and joins Max in a concluding dance number at the same rowdy bar as before.

But above all, the animation is wretched. The first major scene - a hostage situation in a spaceport - has no in-between animation whatsoever. Nora's air drumming is completely out of sync with the background music. And the critical dancing scene between Nora and Max is animated at four frames per second. The dancing is awkwardly drawn and not very imaginative, but the jerky animation destroys any credibility.

With Bavi Stock II, at least, there's an explanation for the drastic changes between the first and second episodes: it was made by a totally different staff at a different company than Bavi Stock I. Twinkle Nora Rock Me!, on the other hand, is drawn from the same source material as the original and has the same director, character designer, voice cast, and production company. What happened?

Budget might be one explanation. It definitely looks as though money ran out at some point along the way, and the producers were unable to pay for in-between animation in many scenes. Lack of time - some sort of schedule crunch - might be another factor. Then again, perhaps the staff realized how bad this OVA was going to be and just threw in the towel.

Twinkle Nora Rock Me! has the same voice cast as Nora; see my blog entry on Nora for comments on the principal actors. The music is by a rock group called Vigilante and is entirely in English, most of which is incomprehensible. Fortunately, the soundtrack album has printed lyrics for the ending song.

Intrepid translated the show, his first for Orphan, and Iri checked the translation. ninjacloud timed, I edited and styled, Calyrica and Nemesis did QC, and M74 encoded from a Laserdisc ISO provided by an anonymous donor. The ISO is missing the last thirty seconds due to uncorrectable damage on the original Laserdisc. Despite that, it is  better than the only other raw, which is from a VHS tape. To provide a complete version of the ending song, I've cut out the ending from the VHS raw and added the song lyrics. It's available as a separate file.

So here's the sequel to Nora. Don't all rush to thank us at once.

Meisou-Ou Border

Orphan has done many forgotten 80s and 90s OVAs. Some have been stunningly good, like Oz, and some have been stunningly bad, like Bavi Stock II. But none have led to as much head-scratching as Meisou-Ou Border, a 1991 OVA from Artland. One of the QCs remarked after watching it, "Well, that was random." Nonetheless, it's quite an interesting show.

Meisou-Ou Border is the only anime to come from a 14 volume seinen manga (completely untranslated) by Marley Carib and Tanaka Akio. It tells the story of two drifters, Kubota and Hachitsuka, who return from the Middle East and choose to live on the "border" of conventional society in Tokyo. The anime relates one specific episode from the start of the manga. Kubota and Hachitsuka are lured down to Osaka by an unscrupulous documentary producer, who places them as "innocent bystanders" in the middle of a yakuza gang war. The two manage to hold their own, much to the producer's dismay, and then they drift back to Tokyo. The episode closes with a completely unrelated encounter between Hachitsuka and his former mentor, Jinno, now a homeless man down on his luck. And that's it. The tone is mostly comic - even the yakuza violence isn't very scary or bloody - but the ending is elegiac and very sad.

Kubota was voiced by Horiuchi Kenyuu, a veteran voice actor who is active today, often playing authoritative figures like Colonel Yuuki in this year's Joker Game. Hachitsuki was voiced by Yara Yuusaka, who also had a prolific career (for example, he played Kai in Tomoe ga Yuku!) but is now retired. The director, Ishiguro Noboru, was an industry veteran who directed several episodes of Animated Classics of Japanese Literature; he also worked on Mushishi (another Artland property) before his death in 2012.

Iri found the raw - a VHS rip, apparently - became intrigued by the show, and translated it. ninjacloud timed, I edited and typeset, and Calyrica and Nemesis did QC. The raw is marred by awful frame blending, in a pattern of three good frames followed by two bad frames. There's also a noticeable dropout just past the 4 minute mark. As a result, it's impossible to make moving signs look good, and they've all been set "Yawara style," i.e., as notes at the top of the screen. If a better raw surfaces, we'll do a second version.

My main feeling after watching Meisou-Ou Border is that I wanted to know more, but just like with Sanctuary, this one episode is the only animation we'll get from a much larger manga. At least with Sanctuary, the manga is completely translated into English. For Meisou-Ou Border, the OVA is the only tantalizing fragment available to an English-speaking audience. Enjoy.

 

Yume Tsukai

Yume Tsukai, a contemporary fantasy series from 2006, was one of the first anime shows I worked on; I QCed the entire series for C1. It was quite popular with fansub groups at the time and was subbed to completion by Arienai and Ureshii, AonE and Ayu, and of course C1. However, it was never licensed in North America and, rather surprisingly, never resubbed in English from DVD sources. Accordingly, Orphan is proud to present Yume Tsukai in a softsubbed release based on the R2J DVDs.

Yume Tsukai tells the story of the Dream Masters (yume tsukai), who combat the effects of nightmares that cross the boundary between dreams and reality and erupt in the real world. Dream Masters are named after the seven stars in the Pleiades cluster, which in Japan are named for the seven days of the week. The most experienced is the Sunday Star, Mishima Touko, age 17. She is a recluse and sleeps for 12 to 16 hours a day. Her younger sister is the Tuesday Star, Mishima Rinko, age 10. She is super genki and confident and calls herself the Super Elementary School Student. They are joined in some episodes by the Friday Star, Tachibana Hajime, a lolicon who regards anyone older than a teenager as ancient history; the Saturday Star, Sagawa Satoka, a relative newcomer who lives in Kyuushu; and Touko’s Aunt Misako, who is 29 years old and still a virgin.

The show is episodic, although there is an underlying background mystery about the fate of Touko’s father, who was killed while fighting a nightmare. In most episodes, Touko and Rinko are commissioned to investigate a baffling phenomenon which turns out to be a nightmare erupting in the real world. They must locate the dreamer, gain his or her consent to end the nightmare, and then fight its effects. They do this with shaman sticks known as Broom Gods, into which they place various toys. The toys transform into weapons to combat the nightmare, which is eventually returned to the world of dreams.

This summary makes Yume Tsukai sound formulaic and action-centric, but in fact, it's a series of character studies focusing on the troubled dreamers and their reasons for unleashing nightmares on the world. The dreamers include unhappy children, divorcing couples, bereaved lovers, and depressed teenagers – people who are experiencing real-life situations beyond their ability to cope. (In many ways, Yume Tsukai uses nightmares as a metaphor for the effects of mental illness.) The Dream Masters’ intervention can combat the effects of the nightmare, but the dreamer must choose whether or not to hold on to feelings that led to the nightmare. In some cases, the dreamer is able to resolve the underlying conflict, and there’s a happy ending; in other cases, not so much.

While the stories in Yume Tsukai are interesting, and the characters are engaging, the animation is problematic. Even though the show was produced by Madhouse in its prime (the same year as Nana and Death Note, among many others), it was clearly made on a low budget. As a result, whole scenes, particularly action sequences, are repeatedly recycled. The climactic battle in episode 3, using the Dream Cyclone, is reused more or less verbatim in episodes 4 and 5. The climactic battle in episode 8 is simply not animated at all. In medium shots, the characters' faces are often distorted beyond recognition. These shortcuts, combined with the wispy character designs, can be rather off-putting.

I had been looking for DVD sources for Yume Tsukai for years but never found any at full 480p resolution. Eventually, I bought a complete set on a Japanese auction site and had them shipped to the US (shipping was three times as much as the DVDs themselves). bananadoyouwanna encoded the show. The source was mostly progressive, but occasional scenes were interlaced, requiring careful attention to detail and multiple tries to get the encodes right. Yogicat hand-transcribed the Arienai-Ureshii subtitles, and I OCR’d the AonE-Ayu set. In addition, I had the C1 scripts from ten years ago. Orphan’s scripts are mostly Arienai-Ureshii, but I’ve used the other groups where the phrasing is better. I edited and typeset, Iri checked the translation, ninjacloud timed, Juggen contributed the karaokes (the OP and ED are terrific), and Calyrica and I did QC.

The fansub scripts date from an era when it was fashionable to leave Japanese terms untranslated and supply copious on-screen translation notes instead. After some discussion, the Orphan team decided to translate terms wherever possible, while still preserving honorifics. So yume tsukai is translated as "Dream Master," Nichousei as "Sunday Star," asobetatmatsuru as "play offering," ikai as "another world," tensou as "transform," Tsuburame Oo as "Round-Eyed King," 3-chome as "Third District," and so on. If you prefer untranslated terms, the original fansubs are readily available and quite watchable.

Some other translation notes, mostly from the original Ureshii-Conclave scripts:

• Ep01 – The girls' school is Hanabirazaka Jogakyuin, so "Hana girls" is a nickname for the students.
• Ep01 – Madoromichu means "Sleepy Town."
• Ep01 – A Teru Teru Bouzu is a paper charm shaped like a little ghost. When hung under a window or roof, it's supposed to keep rain away.
• Ep01 (and others) – "Reality is but a dream! Our nightly dreams are the true world!" Based on a line from an Edogawa Ranpo story.
• Ep03 – "Sway gently" is an ancient Shinto resurrection spell.
• Ep03 (and others) – Clinamen bullet. Clinamen is the name Lucretius gave to the spontaneous microscopic swerving of atoms from a vertical path as they fall. According to Lucretius, without Clinamen, nature would never have created anything. This theory is a part of Epicurean physics. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinamen)
• Ep08 – The kanji for Wakaba means "young leaf."
• Ep09 - The chant "Kuwabara, kuwabara" originated as a farmer's appeal to the god of lightning so that his fields would not be struck during a storm.
• Ep09 – "Grief, happiness, they don't exist to me." A death poem for Ashikaga Yoshimasa (1436-1490), a Shogun of the Muromachi period.
• Ep10 - "Pai Pai" is a play on oppai, the Japanese word for breasts.

The lead voice actors are well-known veterans. Kawasumi Ayako (Touko) has had a prolific career, including Lafiel in Crest/Banner of the Stars, Saber in Fate/Stay Night, Ohno in Genshiken, and my personal favorite, Nodame in Nodame Cantabile. Seki Tomokazu (Hajime) has overlapped with Kawasumi Ayako in many series, playing Gilgamesh in Fate/Stay Night, Tanaka in Genshiken, and of course, Chiaki in Nodame Cantabile. Shindou Kei (Rinko) has also appeared in many shows, most recently Boku no Hero Academia. Hisakawa Aya (Aunt Misako) has had an active career as well, including Sailor Mercury in the Sailor Moon franchise and Skuld in the Ah! My Goddess properties. The music is by Terashima Tamiya, who also wrote the opening song. It supports the show’s mood well, with a "spooky phenomenon" theme that seemingly riffs on the main Harry Potter movie theme.

So enjoy Yume Tsukai in this new softsubbed version, and sweet dreams.

A-Girl v0

Here's a bluebird that happened by and flew through the release process in a flash: A-Girl, an OVA from 1993.

In 1992, Madhouse and Margaret Comics collaborated on an OVA of the shounen-ai romance Zetsuai 1989. This was successful, and in 1993, Madhouse issued six additional OVAs based on Margaret Comic properties:

• Oshare Kozou wa Hanamaru
• Singles
• Pops
• Oeda wa Nemurenai!
• Kiss wa Hitomi ni Shite
• A-Girl

Unfortunately, these additional OVAs were not successful and quickly sank into obscurity. None of them made it to Laserdisc, let alone DVD.

A-Girl is based on a 1984 shoujo romance manga by Fusako Kuramochi. It tells a very simple story: girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl gets boy. High-school student Mariko and her elder sister Mayu are forced out of their apartment by a fire and move in with their landlord. Mariko meets the landlord's handsome son, Natsume, who is also a model. They fall in love but break up when Mariko discovers that Natsume is seeing other girls. Eventually, they are reunited, and the end credits roll, except...

The raw we have - and the only one available - is defective: it is small (512 x 384) and is missing the end credits. Apparently, it was stitched together from three pieces on YouTube. Accordingly, we've labeled this release a "v0". If a better raw turns up - complete, and hopefully at 480p - we'll reissue the show.

A-Girl was the directorial debut of Kousaka Kitarou. (He also did the character designs.) He later worked for many years as an animation director and key animator on Ghibli films before achieving prominence as the director of the award-winning Nasu: Anadalusia no Natsu. For A-Girl, he chose a novel approach: he made a "silent movie." A-Girl has no dialog and is performed against a background of Japanese pop songs composed by Okada Tooru and sung (in English!) by SEIKA. Dialog placards provide continuity, like in old silent films. It works pretty well and doesn't interrupt the flow of the story.

Iri found the raw (after sitting on a dead torrent for a year) and then translated and timed it. I edited and typeset the captions, and Nemesis QCed.

So enjoy A-Girl in its truncated form. This will have to do, until a better source turns up. If you like the music, the soundtrack is available on BakaBT.

Utopa

Another show from Anime Tamago 2016, and probably Orphan's last. Utopa is a sci-fi offering from STUDIO4°C, a veteran company known for adventurous fare like Tekkon Kinkreet and Ani*Kuri 15 as well as utter sellouts like PES: Peace Eco Smile. (Gotta earn a living, I guess.)

Utopa is set in the far future, as a longish voice-over at the beginning explains. After ruining the Earth's surface with biological and nuclear war, mankind has retreated to cities in the sky. There, for no particularly compelling reason, they have crossbred with the surviving animals to produce intelligent hybrid species. When a seed drifts into the sky city, three youngsters - Kui, a dog boy, Hiruma, a cat girl, and Ruto, a lizard boy - venture down to the Earth's surface in search of more seeds and new adventures. The biosphere has indeed regenerated, in a new, almost alien way:

Giant jellyfish float through the air, zapping potential prey with bolts of electricity. And nothing seems to be edible (except for the three of them). Hiruma befriends or adopts an oversized caterpillar, which is promptly seized by a giant talking bird as food. The three friends challenge the bird to a contest, with the caterpillar as the prize. All's well that ends well, as you might expect.

Utopa reminds me a lot of last year's Parol no Miraijima. In that show too, three not-quite-human friends - two male, one female - set out on a voyage of discovery from a protected world into the great unknown, encounter many hazards, and eventually win out. I like Parol rather better than Utopa, I think - the characters are more engaging, and the animation more inventive and fluid. Utopa has an odd mix of character designs, as this shot of the bird with the three human hybrids shows:

Kui is played by rising voice actress Tanaka Aimi, probably best known as the titular little sister in Himouto! Umaru-chan. Hiruma is voiced by Ueda Reina, who has appeared in many recent series, including Bakuon and Dimension W. (Ruto is played by an actual child.) The unnamed bird is voiced by an industry veteran, Hoshino Takanori. The director, Tanaka Takahiro, has been a key animator on many projects and animation director on a few; this is his directorial debut.

Iri translated and ninjacloud timed. I edited, and Calyrica and Xenath3297 did QC. The raw is from Ohys and is an HDTV capture, not a Blu-Ray.

Enjoy another egg from Anime Tamago 2016!

Kaze no Matasaburou (2016)

Kaze no Matasaburou (2016) (Matasaburou of the Wind) is one of this year's Anime Tamago (formerly Anime Mirai, formerly Young Animator's Training Project) OVAs. It is based on Miyazawa Kenji's story of the same name and was already made into an experimental OVA back in 1988.

The plot is slight. A young girl from the city named Takada has to relocate to the country for a while, because her father is supervising a power project there, and her mother is away on a business trip. Her new home is so remote and rural that her school class is made up of a boy, a bear, a pig, a frog, a turtle, a cat, a deer, and a worm. Strong winds blow frequently, and all the students believe that this is due to Matasaburou of the Wind, a child of the wind god. Takada gets to experience the tranquil wonders of country life, make a new friend, and find out the truth about Matasaburou for herself. Then she goes back home to be with her mother in the city.

Matasaburou is quietly humorous slice-of-life comedy, but the animation is the real draw. The art style is simple and beautiful, employing watercolor-style fills on starkly drawn outlines. The country backgrounds are reminiscent of Miyazaki but are more impressionistic, like this waterfall:

There are frequent wonderful and whimsical touches too, like this shot of a cricket making his music as the clouds roll in.

Matasaburou is the product of a relatively new studio, Buemon, which has mostly done CGI work. This is their first venture in conventional (looking) animation.

The elementary school students are all voiced by children, a recent trend in Japanese anime that contributes to more realistic performances. The adult parts are voiced by veterans of the industry. For example, the deep-voiced Matasaburou is played by Tanaka Masahiko, who has worked in the industry since the second Astro Boy series in 1980. The music is spare and quiet, befitting the mood.

Iri translated and did initial timing; Yogicat did the detailed timing; I edited and typeset; and Calyrica and Xenath3297 did QC. The raw is from Ohys Raws.

Please enjoy this beautiful anime.