ANI-MOVIES, *Napping Princess

The makers of The Wonderland anime movie bit their teeth on the isekai genre on this full-length original concept. Napping Princess shows instead of the standard tale of someone going to a fantasy world, and in its place tells of a blending of the real world and someplace like Neverland. Director Kenji Kamiyama presents his long career of developing fresh concepts like he did in the first Blood: The Last Vampire, as well as most of Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Signal.MD was the studio behind this blend of traditional animation and CGI.

Taking place in the near future of what would have been the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, Kokone is a sleepyheaded student at the end of her junior year in high school. She often dreams of herself in a magical realm called Heartland based on stories her father told her when she was young. In Heartland, Kokone is a princess of an industrial kingdom where she can use magic to bring machines to life with her magical electronic tablet. While in the waking world, Kokone is reunited with her childhood friend Morio just as her auto repairman father Momotaro is abducted by shadowy men who want to gain access to his wife's old tablet. Kokone ropes Morio into helping her find her father while periodically shifting between the waking world and her dream adventures. The whole thing was a plot created by the devious Watanabe, an executive from Kokono's deceased mother's company which is developing an AI program for self-driving cars, which is trying to debut their new cars for the Olympic ceremonies. Kokono's tablet seems to be able her and Morio what they need to locate her father simply out of thin air, but exactly how much of this is merely advanced technology or from the magic of Heartland is left largely ambiguous.

Napping Princess is a breath of fresh air in the oversaturated market of fantasy anime, mostly because of the dual nature it takes with mixing in reality and dreams, but in a slightly more coherent way than similar titles like Paprika. The character designs of the people in the real world are basic, but their dreamworld counterparts appear to be out of a Studio Ghibli. The animation is slightly average for a theatrical release, but there are some stunning visuals, including a killer kaiju battle near the end. The music is especially memorable, with a Japanese take on The Monkees Daydream Believer for the closing theme. This is a family friendly feature without seeming too cheesy to more mature viewers.

MISC. MANGA, *Battle Of The Planets

Even though anime has been playing in America since the 60s, the first comic based on an anime didn't see ink until 1979. Gold Key had adapted several licenses from Disney to Looney Tunes to Hanna-Barbera, but one of its last titles they did a comic of was Battle Of The Planets. This was the 70s anime series, Gatchamana, which has been redone twice since then for English viewers. Gatchaman was a "science ninja team" that battled the standard monster of the week, a formula that was eventually adopted for numerous sentai show. Sandy Frank had it redubbed and edited for American TV to catch up on the wave of Star Wars mania that was born after Episode IV: A New Hope, which became popular through syndicated television.

The basic premise for the 70s cartoon was that a superhero team codenamed G-Force would repeatedly defend not only the Earth but other planets from attacks by the menacing forces of Spectra lead by the masked Zoltar. The team of Mark, Jason, Princess, Keyop, and Tiny flew around in their superjet, the Phoenix, and would stop Zoltar's various attempts to take over the world, while being in constant contact with their robot operator, 7-Zark-Z, an R2-D2 addition to the American version to help bridge various episodes for the edited English dub. The comic series took some liberties with this by doing things that they didn't have the resources for in the cartoon. Most of these involved 7-Zark-7 actually getting kidnapped by Zoltar, giving all the members of G-Force their own individual mini-spaceships to be able to go on separate missions on other planets, plus the bizarre rewrite of making Keyop into an android instead of a test tube baby which was the show's explanation for why his speech patterns were so scattered. The comic also had more Saturday Morning-styled plots with brainwashing pirates, robot duplicates, and giant monsters that weren't just huge mechas that G-Force would periodically tangle with. The biggest leap the comic made over the original anime was that the other alien worlds G-Force would travel to were always inhabited by humanoids, where as here the aliens look more like something out of a Star Wars cantina, with the final issue showing G-Force for once not fighting Specrta and instead helping rescue an entirely different species move to a different planet.

The Gold Key comic was written by Gary Poole, who previously worked on comic adaptations of Flash Gordon, King Kong, and The Twilight Zone. The artwork was supplied by Win Mortimer with a long track record drawing various superheroes such as Batman and Superman, which gives the characters look like they just popped out of Superfriends, with plenty of comic covers mixing up the G-Force's uniform colors. The entire 10-issue comic was collected into a single edition by Dynamic Forces if you want to check out the entire run. Otherwise, you'll have to go around digging through old comic book bins for the original issues.

ANI-MOVIES, *The Wonderland

Originally titled Birthday Wonderland, this feature was based on Sachiko Kashiwaba's children's book from 1988. Keiichi Hara from Doraemon directed this for Warner Bros. Japan, even though it didn't get a wide American theatrical release, which has widely been seen as being a Studio Ghibli wannabe film.

Akane is a middle schooler feeling left out of her friends' social circle, and decides to spend the day before her birthday at home pretending to be sick. Her mother sends her on an errand to a family friend Chii, who runs her own nick-nack store. While there, Akane accidently put her hand on an old clay handprint, which summons a mysterious top-hatted man appears from Chii's basement calling himself Hippocrates along with his fairy companion. Akane is labeled as the chosen Green Goddess meant to save this alternative world from running out of water, so she and Chii travel to this magical realm that somehow diverted into its own timeline due to interdimensional spiders capable of creating pathways to different worlds. Once in this "wonderland", our heroes' enthusiasm changes as Chii wants to explore it, but Akane merely wishes to return to her own world.

The movie does have some stunning character designs, colorful backgrounds, and an endearing soundtrack. The plot and character development though seriously drags in this near 2-hour long movie, making it seem more amateurish for such a lavish visual production. The Wonderland is a decent screening for a lazy Sunday afternoon, but not exactly worth going out of your way for.