ANI-MOVIES, *Locke The Superman

Yuki Hijiri started out as a manga artist with an interstellar epic titled Locke The Superman way back in 1967. This was one of the first manga to focus on psychic powers or "espers" as its users are normally referred to possessing Extrasensory perception, making them the anime equivalent of the X-Men. The manga is about a never aging esper named Locke normally referred to as a superman who has helped the collected Galactic Federation on anti-terrorist cases for centuries. Locke has an insane assortment of powers including telepathy, telekenisis, teleportation, and the ability to turn himself into a woman who at one point. The animated movie acts as a follow-up to a briefly mentioned encounter between Locke and a former opponent that returns like a tacky movie monster. Locke The Superman's first anime outlet was released in 1984 by Studio Nippon in their theatrical debut which was directed by Hiroshi Fukutomi who also directed the Lensman anime. The movie highlighted amazing battle scenes that became the inspiration for numerous anime and manga of people with superpowers like Dragonball and Psychic Force.

The motion picture opens up with the psychic super-agent in retirement as a farmer on a distant planet. A Federation soldier named Yamaki is sent to recruit Locke in an investigation of his old nemesis Lady Khan who has resurfaced from a previous case and is assembling an army of espers to act as assassins to overthrow Federation control. Khan has set up a school for up-and-coming esper baddies that she's brainwashed into believing will be part of a utopian society branded as Millenium, thus taking a big page out of Hitler's stragety book. Locke goes on his own investigation while a large portion of the movie deals with Yamaki falling in love with Khan's sleeper agent Jessica who has been hypnotized into having amnesia that will awaken once she encounters Locke. This does inevitably happen, but only after Locke has run into Millenium's equivalent of the Ginyu Force. Locke defeats all these assassins and discovers that Lady Khan is in her own personal artificial planetoid where she plans on conquering the galaxy. Khan is revealed to be a living corpse in a fish tank hooked up to a supercomputer that controls all her espers through telepathy who gets taken down quickly by Locke. The last 20 minutes of the film has Locke trying to rally the remaining psychics to stop the space base from burning up in a gas giant.

Locke The Superman is an animated adaptation of an arc from a sci-fi shojo manga, so you can see how this film could have been carried out as a TV series. It has some outstanding fighting scenes and sweeping camera sequences that make for a stellar visual experience. There have been numerous English releases of this movie, one with a British dub that had a bunch of mature content edited out, so you're better off getting the more recent release by Sentai Filmworks which is in Japanese with English subtitles. If you wanted to find out what made Super-Saiyans so "super", then you need to give this space opera a spin.