ANI-MOVIES, *X

Wrapping up an era of anime and manga that tried the troika of psychics, cyberpunk, and armageddon, X was based on CLAMP's hit X/1999 manga series which took place in the year of 1999. The manga itself started out in 1992 and went through several delays, largely due to CLAMP's huge backlog of other titles they were working on including Magic Knight Rayearth, plus some real-life disasters, namely some earthquakes that hit Japan in the late 90's. The manga carried on well past the year it happens in and ran until 2003, despite the fact that to this day there has been no solid finale to the original source material. X was highly anticipated by fans at the time in a way not seen since the Akira movie came out. Rintaro acted as director who had already worked on the similar anime movie Harmagedon, plus the addition of pop group X-Japan handling the film's soundtrack made fans crave its release even more. The 1996 movie had to draw its own conclusion as the manga was still running, which also turned out to be a problem for the X anime TV series that came out in 2001. It also took a while for the English release of the film which finally saw daylight in 2000, one year after the canonical events of the story. Manga Entertainment had the featured dubbed in England with some of the same actors who were cast in Project A-Ko. This was released as one of Manga's first American releases instead of through their first distributor of U.S. Manga Corps. X/1999 is connected to other CLAMP titles, including Tokyo Babylon which acted as a prelude to X and received its own OVA series as well as a live-action movie. The X film adaptation is gothic moody battle of super-powered characters that probably went on to influence anime titles such as Fate and Record Of Ragnarok. Visually the movie has some of the best animation that was done for its period, although the film sadly falls flat with too much exposition and a hasty need to leap to its own conclusion.

Young teenager Kamui returns to Tokyo after years spent training with his recently deceased mother honing his psychic powers. Kamui visits the house of his childhood friends, Kotori and her older brother Fuma. What none of them know is that they are smack in the middle of a war between two supernatural forces battling for the fate of the world, The Dragons of Earth are seven espers planning to wipe the planet free of humans by destroying seven magical places throughout Tokyo, while the seven Dragons of Heaven are fighting back hoping to peacefully save humanity. The Dragons of Earth kidnap Kotori to persuade Kamui to join their ranks, even though what neither side knows is that Fuma will take on the role of Kamui's opposite in the fights. Each of the psychics have epic Dragonball Z bouts with the other psychics in their mission to bring about or prevent the apocalypse.

X is a high-powered watch with powerful imagery. The downside to all this is that it gets brought down with an unending treadmill of flashbacks, flash-forwards, predictions, and prophecies, making a good portion of the movie just a series of dream sequences with X-Men level action. The Dragons of Heaven and Earth all get sent through the meat grinder, most of which are killed by the possessed Fuma, with Kamui and his Anti-Kamui having a final battle at Tokyo Tower, which was oddly the center of various other 90's anime that involved the fate of the world. There is little regard given to the extended characters as they serve only as cannon fodder like they were in a slasher movie, and the relationship with the main characters gets tortuous with large implications of incest. X suffers largely from having to fabricate their own ending that here is like a scene out of Highlander of which the actual anime movie of did a better job of. CLAMP's work is a hallmark of the mid-90's anime, but the movie should have been pushed back to capture the majority of the manga's saga, again forgiving the fact that the manga was never completed.