Project A-Ko: The First Anime Parody

For over 40 years, the first recognized anime parody has been Project A-ko from 1986. Prior to this, there were fan creations like fandubbed episodes of Yamato and of course the infamous original animated Daicon openings. Chances are, most American otaku are familiar with the title, especially since it became the name for one of country’s longest running fan conventions. The initial theatrical release led to a trio of OVA sequels, plus a spinoff OVA titled Project A-Ko Vs. Battle which is the first anime to tread into “parallel universe” territory when it came to doing a remake. For many, Project A-Ko was one of the first anime titles that they were introduced to outside of TV titles like Speed Racer or Voltron as it was frequently shown at sci-fi cons and displayed on Blockbuster Video, despite the fact that the movie was labeled as an adult title without being a porno.

Speaking of which, Project A-Ko first began as the concept for the hentai anthology Cream Lemon. The film was directed by Katsuhiko Nishijima who went on to do lots of other ecchi titles like Agent Aika. Nishijima also wrote the screenplay with Tomoko Kawasaki who wrote for Southern Cross, along with Yuji Moriyama who eventually directed the equally crazy Nuku Nuku. They all managed to work in enough fan service in a production intended to be a satire of anime during a time when there weren’t many comedy anime films in the mid-80s, although the rapid-fire humor is similar to Urusei Yatsura which most of the production crew had worked on.

The title was borrowed from one of Jackie Chan’s earlier hits, Project A, and this translated well as there is a ton of action shoved in with all the pop culture references. Among some of the anime titles being parodied were from the late 70s on up like Lupin III, Space Battleship Yamato, and Macross, along with a bizarre replacement of the android from Harmagedon with Colonel Sanders. There’s also some poking fun at American comic books, but we’ll get into that later. Even the names of the main characters are joke nicknames the studios used before deciding on their actual names. The animation was meticulously crafted on the same level as a space opera and treated fairly seriously, so if you were just watching this for the first time you might not recognize Project A-Ko as being a comedy.

The story is a love triangle between the super-strong teenage redhead A-Ko, her very annoying childhood friend C-Ko, and the spoiled rich girl B-Ko who is the queen bee at the new school they just transferred to. The relationship between A-Ko and C-Ko seems like they are just good friends, but B-Ko wants to take it a step further and make C-Ko her lover, although there isn’t much yuri baiting throughout the story. Lesbian fangirls had best not get their hopes up too much expecting this to be a romantic drama. B-Ko uses her scientific genius to create various mechas to put A-Ko out of the way, but A-Ko’s strength always triumphs, so B-Ko uses her secret weapon, a power armor bikini capable of mass destruction which begins the second half of the film as being one giant showdown between the enraged schoolgirls.

The schoolyard brawl is not the only focus of the plot as it takes place in the futuristic Graviton City which was built on the remains of a crashed spaceship from 16 years prior that left a huge crater behind. A stranger in sunglasses named D is an agent for an alien empire who is looking for their lost princess who happens to be C-Ko, even though the movie starts out making you believe that their original target was A-Ko which would explain her superhuman abilities. D reports to the alien space captain who is a joke version of Captain Harlock and Char from Gundam constantly thirsty for alcohol. The huge alien battleship makes it way to Graviton City to reclaim their princess while plowing through all of Earth’s defenses, and the strange part is that it’s all done largely straight like another sci-fi invasion epic. This was due to Japan having not the stranglehold they had on copyrights that they have now, like how Who Framed Roger Rabbit could only have come out in the 80s when all the characters were available to shuffle between different license holders.

The two plots finally converge with D abducting C-Ko, forcing A-Ko and B-Ko to put their duel to the death on hold and make their way up through the spaceship where it’s revealed that all the aliens who look like men are really women. This idea alone is what separates Project A-Ko from your average parody by revealing that an entire invading force were all really warrior women with a huge laundry cargo hold filled with smelly undies. The ship crashes on top of Graviton City where its left dangling precariously on top of the highest building in town. The next day, most of all the damage to the city has been repaired overnight just like at the end of any Power Rangers episode, and we finally discover where A-Ko gets her fantastic strength from. It’s briefly revealed that A-Ko’s parents are none other than Superman and Wonder Woman who got married and moved to Japan, although they’re both apparently permanently retired since they didn’t do zilch during the alien attack from the day before.

Aside from poking fun at DC superheroes, Project A-Ko was a smorgasbord of pop culture references. There are spaceships that are just the Valkyries from Macross, although with no cool robot mode. Transformers gets tagged too when B-Ko builds a convertible robot to stop A-Ko which is completely incapable of piloting once its robot form. The most estranged bit in this comes from Fist Of The North Star where one of B-Ko’s flunkies is a huge muscular schoolgirl version of Kenshiro who has a masculine voice when she’s flexing up but a normal girl’s voice when she’s talking.

Project A-Ko was given a wide release in the 80s through Central Park Media which used the original Manga Entertainment dub from England. After the first movie, CPM dubbed all the other OVAs through Ocean Group in Canada, so if you were a regular watcher of Ranma and Dragonball during the 90s then you’ll recognize a lot of voice actors in it. The film was reaching for an international audience through Shochiko in Japan as the soundtrack had songs done entirely in English composed by American musicians Joey Carbone and Richie Zito, one of these was actually sung by Samantha Newark who was also doing the speaking voice of Jem around the same time. The movie would regularly be featured on the old Sci-Fi channel during their anime showcase marathons. You might have seen this film labeled Supernova in various other regions where it’s rewritten that A-Ko is really bionic instead of a superhuman. Most of these editions were censored leaving out some of the blatant nudity that was rampant in the 80s, although the film doesn’t have an obligatory shower scene.

This film is one of the first anime that highlights women as the main characters. For one thing, the main romance plot is between three females with no central Archie archetype for any of them to fawn over, although most of the feelings between the leads are platonic, however B-Ko seriously has some less than innocent plans involving C-Ko. Project A-Ko helped established females as assertive strong figures which that eventually go onto influence other anime like Alita, even though A-Ko and B-Ko’s focus is about bickering teenagers instead of standing up to some opposing evil force.

Project A-Ko has been released several times over the last few decades into English and has been picked up by numerous US distributors. It was first released by Central Park Media throughout the 90s and most of the early 2000s. Afterwards, the rights went to Eastern Star which is an imprint of Discotek Media, and has subsequently become available on different streaming formats, most of which are for free. Perspectives on the movie differ over time with some of the older otaku loving it when it first came out mostly for the cheesy humor but then looking back on it later as just being a big piece of schlock. Modern day anime fans have come to appreciate the high-grade animation, even though a good portion of the film’s fan service might turn off possible viewers and seen as being degrading to women even though the entire story is about strong women fighting each other and not for the love of some dull guy. There is gratuitous nudity in most uncensored editions of the film.

The current Perfect Edition of the film has a horde of features including clips from the unreleased Project A-Ko CD-ROM game and numerous commentaries. Project A-Ko made a big enough impact among American fandom to not only get its own English tabletop game, plus a comic book adaptation drawn by Ben Dunn from Ninja High School which is another title worth looking up if you liked this. Depending on how much you appreciate the animators’ attention to detail, you’ll probably have fun with this over multiple viewings, but it’s not unreasonable to see today's youth finding it dated and just loaded with panty shots.

ANI-MOVIES, *Ghost Cat Anzu

What if My Neighbor Totoro was changed to have the father be a deadbeat and the mother was already dead? That's what you get when you watch Ghost Cat Anzu. Based on a one-shot manga by Takashi Imashiro, this was directed by Yoko Kuno with Nobuhiro Yamashita who has already adapted other manga into live-action films such as Confession and Let's Go Kareoke. The majority of animation done for it was provided by Shin-Ei Animation which had already done similar productions in Doraemon, and they went back to the well of early animators by first shooting the movie in live-action and rotoscoped it. Similar to several anime films of the Reiwa era in Japan, this borrows quite a few elements from Studio Ghibli where modern day spirits are seen an ordinary part of life, and going to the Land of the Dead is like to something out of Beetlejuice, so the movie starts out like Totoro and then eventually makes a sharp turn into Spirited Away for the final act. This is a self-contained story that has a lot of world-building and is a deep dive into Japanese folklore.

Young Karin is taken to a country temple by her father Tetsuya who leaves her there with his father who runs the temple while he goes to pay off a huge debt to the yakuza. Karin is stunned to find there is a giant talking anthropomorphic cat named Anzu who is a ghost cat that's been helping her grandfather at the temple for decades. Anzu tries to make Karin feel welcome, but she blows him off wanting to make it back Tokyo to visit her mother's grave. Anzu eventually takes her to Tokyo, but they can't enter because Tetsuya didn't keep up his payments, so Anzu gets help from the God of Poverty who takes them to the afterlife to see Karin's mother who is stuck working in maintenance for the oni running the place. Karin makes a break with her mother and Anzu back to the world of the living where none other than Enma himself who runs the underworld on a merry chase on scooters, limos, and sports cars. Karin's mother decides to go back the afterlife and leaves her under Anzu's protection. Tetsuya shows up at the end having paid off his debt but agrees to let Karin stay at the temple with Anzu and her grandfather while he goes on to be insolvent.

Ghost Cat Anzu might on the surface seem like an all-ages film, although it delves into murkier territory. Karin is a fleshed-out character for being the young protagonist, while Anzu is more like someone's happy-go-lucky uncle that usually helps them out. The behind the scenes of this movie are fascinating as its one of the most polished rotoscope anime films ever made. This style can be rough at times with strange looking humans who are sometimes hard to differentiate from the other yokai shown in the movie, but Anzu himself blends in well to the picture with all the regular and supernatural characters believably blend together. It's a charming family comedy that isn't afraid to get a little dark.

Cheers to our friend, C. Martin Croker, 10 years later.

 

ANI-MOVIES, *Lonely Castle In The Mirror

Lonely Castle In The Mirror started out as a novel by Mizuki Tsujimura which was later adapted into a manga, and then into an anime movie in 2022 from A-1 Pictures directed by Keiichi Hara who also did Miss Hokusai and The Wonderland. Even at 116 minutes, the movie cuts a few things from the original source material, so a decent deal of pacing, sub-plots, world-building, and character conflicts are trimmed to fit the run time. The book is a modern-day fantasy set in Japan and centers around the victims of bullying and how their lives are shaken up from the experience. This isn't a fairy tale as it does bring up some mature situations involving sexual assault and home invasion, so don't think of the title of the film trying to be another Ghibli-wannabe.

A group of seven middle schoolers each appear in a magic castle on top of a mountain in the middle of a sea set in an otherworldly realm. Four boys and three girls are introduced to the master of the castle, a small girl called the Wolf Queen who wears a wolf mask who tells them they have nearly a year to come to the castle from 9-5 PM any day through their own mirrors where they live, but if they don't leave the castle before 5 they will each be eaten by a giant wolf. Every one of them don't regularly go to school as they are all traumatized by bullies, so they spend their time hanging out getting to know each other and what they have in common. The Wolf Queen informs the kids that there is a key hidden in the castle which opens a secret door and whoever gets it first will be granted a single wish. The main character is Kokoro who has been mistreated by girls at her school who even tried to break into her house to terrorize her, but she is the one who comes closest to figuring out the secret of the castle and what ties them all together.

Lonely Castle In The Mirror is full of surprise plot twists and revelations, so to keep the mystery of the story, it's best to say that that is a faithful adaptation to the book and has a satisfying conclusion. There's a divide between the movie's initial reviews and how others looked at it when it was put on streaming and Blu-Ray, so it's best to ignore the Rotten Tomatoes score. The film does get dark but not to the point of being morbid, although it's got a fair enough rating at PG-13, although it does show how anxiety from bullying can plague a young person's life and how it affects them in the future. The story is a slow boil, but the animation is in a league of its own with great blending of 2D production with CGI. This is a noteworthy anime movie with a dub that outsells the original Japanese language edition.

ANI-MOVIES, *Mind Game

If your movie was so creative that it went on to influence the spastic Everything Everywhere All At Once, then you know it's about as spastic as it gets. Mind Game was a 2004 anime film based on a manga by Robin Nishi that was the directing debut by Masaaki Yuasa who started out as an animator on Crayon Shin-chan before going on to direct other hits such as Devilman Crybaby and Riding Your Wave. This film is an experimental production that switches from multiple forms of animation including some live-action and the best possible outside source to compare it to is Run Lola Run, even though there's only a single shown case of a change in the timeline. Many confuse Mind Game for being an anthology film like Robot Carnival, but instead it shows a singular story told from multiple perspectives similar to the classic Rashomon samurai flick. Yauasa used his eclectic approach to create an anime that was specifically unpolished which worked in his favor as the movie blends genres in a spectacular melting pot.

Nishi is a clueless college student who wants to be a manga creator who runs into his old girlfriend Myon and follows her back to her father's restaurant which her younger sister Yan works at the grill. A pair of yakuza come looking for Myon's father who cheated on the younger one's girlfriend causing him to eventually shoot Nishi right up his shaft and he dies. Nishi ends up in an afterlife of sorts and challenges the ever-changing god there to let him go back, so he gets sent back just before he was shot and turns the tables and plugs his original shooter. Nishi then runs off into the night with Myon and Yan who steal the yakuza's car, so now there's an entire fleet of gangsters chasing after them. Once they go off a bridge, the three escapees are immediately swallowed by a gigantic whale where they spend the remainder of the film along with an old castaway who has been trapped in the whale for decades. After a great deal of trippy dream sequences and self-reflecting, Nishi and the others manage to eventually get out of the whale. The story then goes back in time to where Nishi first runs into Myon and we see different flash forwards of what the characters' lives might be like in this new timeline.

Mind Game is a particular pastiche of an anime movie which you need to put your expectation on hold to watch because its unconventional storytelling will completely baffle most non-otaku or fans of auteur cinema. Its offbeat plot is one of most intriguing of all time for an animated film, especially since its title is so pretentious. It is a schizophrenic experience that bombed on its original release but has gone to get 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, but Masaaki Yuasa managed craft a nonsensical story that makes crazy anime like Dead Leaves seem tame by comparison.

ANI-MOVIES, *Children Who Chase Lost Voices

For Makoto Shinkai's third full-length anime movie, the future director of Your Name wrote an original story for it, although you will notice a great deal is borrowed from the works of Studio Ghibli. Children Who Chase Lost Voices is technically Shinkai's only isekai motion picture, and a large portion of it reflects Ghibli movies like Castle In The Sky, Princess Mononoke, and particularly Goro Miyazaki's Tales From Earthsea which is strange as most hardcore otaku were turned off by it. This was Shinkai's first fantasy movie as most of the prior ones had sci-fi elements, and his production company of Comix Wave Films brought its A-game with the jaw-dropping landscapes and striking sky backdrops. Unlike most of Shinkai's other movies, there is superb detail given to some of the film's action sequences which makes you with the director would eventually head up a shonen project. The major theme of the story is learning to let go of those who have passed on and how this compulsive need can drive people to cross entire worlds to make the pain stop.

Asuna is a responsible girl who learned to take care of herself since her father died and her mother is a full-time nurse. Whenever she's not at school, Asuna has her own little sanctuary in the mountains, but one day she encounters a mysterious beast on a bridge, although she is saved by a young boy named Shun who claims to be from the country of Agartha. Asuna later learns Shun's corpse was found in the woods, while at the same time a substitute teacher Morisaki takes over her class and starts mentions the fictional land of Agartha which is supposed to by underneath the surface that is connected to the Hollow Earth belief. Asuna then runs into a lad named Shin who is Shun's younger brother who came to collect a crystal Shun left behind. The two of them are attacked by a military organization labeled Arch Angel which Morisaki is an agent of and is bent on finding Agartha. Shun and Asuna make it to the hidden door to Agartha where Morisaki follows them leaving the other Arch Angel soldiers behind as he came to this magical realm to find a way to resurrect his deceased wife. Shun parts ways from them as he returns the crystal, but it turns out Aauna had a similar crystal of her own left behind by her father, so know he has to track them down while avoiding other hunters sent to capture the topsiders. Asuna and Morisaki now journey to a place called the Gate of Life and Death where wishes can be granted, and Asuna wants to find a way to be reunited with Shin, despite the endless army of shadow monsters that pursue them.

Children Who Chase Lost Voices shows why Makoto Shinkai has often been called the "next Miyazaki", even though for this film its more Goro Miyazaki than his father Hayao. The film lacks slightly from pacing issues and not having a definitive direction as you don't always know where the plot is going with a new story element is added every few minutes. The inner world of Agartha is something out of an RPG daydream which could have used a few more random encounters or the occasional boss battle to liven things up a little. Asuna is an interesting protagonist who in the end isn't as determined as she thinks she is in her quest, although her mentor figure of Morisaki is seriously in this for himself but with some moments of care for Asuna. This was the longest of Shinkai's films to date when it's clear it could have been trimmed by at least ten minutes. If you've seen any fantasy anime, then you'll find something familiar here, but its major draw is Shinkai's unparalleled cinematic perspective.

ANI-MOVIES, *Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko

Based on Kanako Nishi's novel, Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko was directed by Witch Hat Atelier's Ayumu Watanabe with animation crafted by Studio 4C whose resume goes all the way back to Katsuhiro Otomo's classic Memories. This was a comedic slice-of-life story between a girl and her mostly clueless mother and how her bad life decisions led to the dire straits they're currently in. It's not so much of a full-length story but comedic segments strung out with a several flashbacks to fit a singular plot, similar to like that in My Neighbors The Yamadas.

Kikuko lives in a houseboat in a harbor town with her overweight mother Nikuko who has a long history of continuously getting hornswoggled out of her money by bloodsucking bachelors. Nikuko now works as a waitress at a bar and grill, but Kikuko is more the more responsible one even though she's still in elementary school. She makes friends with a boy student who makes funny faces when he thinks nobody is looking, who is one of the few sensible people she knows with her classmates arguing about who plays on whose team in basketball. Nikuko has recently been gaining more weight, and her carefree behavior causes Kikuko to feel embarrassed even though most of the locals find her eccentricities charming. We learn that Nikuko is not Kikuko biological mother but her former best friend's who couldn't accept the responsibility of being a parent, even though she later marries a rich man and has two children with him. Despite hearing this painful truth, Kikuko still considers Nikuko her real mother and lovers her with all her faults.

The film spends an inordinate amount of time focusing on Nikuko's weird perspective, like constantly making bad puns from Japanese kanji, which is one of the reasons that this movie wasn't given an English dub. This lackadaisy storytelling also makes it difficult to keep up with the wobbly narrative. Studio 4C on the other hand does pump the film with gorgeous visuals to keep the viewer's mind engaged for a brief 97-minute anime production.