ANI-MOVIES, *Space Warrior Baldios

Movie compilations of an anime series are a seriously hard coin flip. Sometimes they can add to the existing story like Macross Plus: The Movie, while other times it's just one big theatrical clip show like Evangelion: Death. Space Warrior Baldos was a single-season giant robot show from 1980 that was cancelled before the last three episodes aired. In 1981, a movie recounting the series was released with a totally different ending which was picked up by an American distributor who added a dub to it, but with a few minutes cut from the final release, possibly for content. Baldios was one of those gritty anime shows of the 70s-80s where they weren't afraid to show entire masses of people being killed either in a spray of bullets, getting stepped on by a giant, or being absolutely done away with from a natural disaster, whereas in the American dub of it would show the victims escaping due to some convenient parachutes. The English release of the Baldios movie does keep most of this material in, although you can tell that there is some they left out. For a show about a huge space mecha, the titular robot doesn't play a big part in the story and is more focused on the feuding characters. There are even some parts during the few scenes with the robot where the pilots are speaking but there is no dialogue for it, which worked out okay for something like Power Ranger because you can't see their lips flapping, but this was just unprofessional considering most of the rest of the dub in the movie is acceptable for the time.

Starting out on a planet called S-1, the inhabitants are growing restless because the world's resources are running dry. The renegade General Gattler leads a revolt against the government and takes a portion of the population into a giant space ark to find a new planet to colonize. One S-1 citizen that escaped this was Marin, the son of a scientist whose Gattler's forces killed during their coup. Marin enters a space warp and ends up on Earth in the year 2100. The other S-1 remnants set their sights on conquering Earth as their promised land and have launched several attacks on the more heavily populated cities. Marin has been drafted into Earth's special Blue Strike Force that are using a giant robot comprised of fighter ships that merge into the colossal Baldios. For a brief montage, we see the Baldios wrecking the S-1's attempts to take over the world. From this point on, the movie becomes a stretched-out space opera with stereotypical drama cliches like Earth politicians not trusting Marin's loyalty, bickering officers in the S-1 ranks, and romantic subplots that go nowhere. The S-1 forces eventually melt the polar ice caps flooding most of the Earth and killing of billions, and then later use nuclear warheads they stole to cause a radioactive fallout. It is later discovered that the planet S-1 was in fact Earth itself from hundreds of years in the future and that all the S-1's attempts to conquer the Earth of the past lead to the planet's near extinction that they originally came from. Gattler doesn't care about this anyway as he plans to take over his old home world anyway. Marin takes the Baldios in to wreck the S-1 space arc reactor leading to a final conclusion between Marin and Gattler with a confused love interest caught in the middle.

Space Warrior Baldios is a decent enough 80s mecha anime, despite the large lack of actual mechas in it, or at least in the movie compilation version. As the whole feature is going over highlights of the plot, a bunch of the story gets left out with characters showing up for a single scene and then are never seen again. If you want the complete narrative, you are better off watching the TV series and then popping in the movie version during the last act. Discotek Media has both the series and movie available on DVD and Blu-Ray, as well as both being on Crunchyroll. Only the movie is dubbed, but you can watch the uncut Japanese language edition with the full intended runtime.

Weird Fact: Adam West played a mayor on both Family Guy and the 2004 Batman cartoon!

ANI-MOVIES, *Hellboy: Sword Of Storms

Two years after making his cinematic debut, Mike Mignola's big red monster hunter had a short-lived franchise of animated films, the first of which was Hellboy: Sword Of Storms. This was animated mostly by the famous production company Madhouse who have been involved in several anime titles. Milestone writer Matt Wayne handled the adaptation of a Hellboy short story along with Tad Stones. This direct-to-video feature got a little traction from some screenings on Cartoon Network, but the timing of Anchor Bay Entertainment's release was just in the middle of DC and Marvel's opening shots in their war of original animated movies that they were also coming out with at the same time.

After a mission to a Mayan temple filled with mummies and a giant bat, Hellboy along with Abe Sapian and firestarter Liz Sherman head back to BPRD headquarters only for Hellboy to get called into his next investigation. A Japanese professor named Sakai gets possessed by the demon brothers of Thunder and Lightning, which most mythology junkies would know as Raijin and Fujin. Hellboy visits the home of a sword collector that Sakai attacked and is sent to another dimension when he finds the titular Sword of Storms. In this otherworldly realm, our hero is accosted with a never-ending barrage of yokai monsters sent by the possessed Sakai who want to break the sword to free Thunder and Lightning. The sheer number of monsters from Japanese folklore is staggering which Hellboy has to confront, including a kappa, a giant skeleton, an arachne, rubber-neck women, disembodied heads, and an army of zombies. Liz and Abe meanwhile are separated from Hellboy as they confront a kaiju-sized dragon in the Japanese sea who wants to join forces with Thunder and Lightning, all of which is being manipulated by the spirit of an old woman posing as a kitsune fox spirit. It all boils down to a final battle between Hellboy and the demon brothers in Japan.

The "animated" styled of Hellboy is different from what you see in comics and the live-action movie where Hellboy's legs seem much shorter, and his tail is much more noticeable. Most of the rest of the characters stick to their original models, even though the big draw is the voice cast they had for these productions. Ron Pearlman is back as Hellboy, Selma Blair is Liz, but the live-action actor for Abe, Doug Jones, takes up the speaking role of the gill-man for the first time after being voiced by David Hyde Pierce in the original movie. Peri Gilpin also appears as Kate Corrigan from the Hellboy comics who never showed up in the live-action movies and was more of Hellboy's love interest. The animation is above TV standards, but not so much up to theatrical level. The best bits involve Hellboy's journey through the Japanese spirit world where great detail was given to highlighting mythological creatures from eastern folklore, more than even some supernatural anime had done at the time. Most of the material of the movie involving the other BPRD members is pretty forgettable, even when Liz and Abe are fighting a giant dragon. Sword Of Storms isn't the best made-for-video animated superhero feature of the time, but it is worth checking out if you happen to be getting both Hellboy Animated movies.

ANI-MOVIES, *The Fantastic Adventures Of Unico

Astro Boy creator Osamu Tezuka came up with his emblematic manga of Unico in 1976. It has a happy unicorn on a constant quest for peace encountering different fantasy characters in each installment. The one-horned horse seems more like a cross between Astro Boy and Tezuka's other creation Kimba The White Lion than an actual equine. Aside from a pilot film done in 1979, there never was an anime adaptation of the manga until 1981 that was founded by Tezuka Productions and Sanrio with the animation being handled by Madhouse Studios spearheaded by Yoshiaki Kawajiri who later went on to more violent productions like Ninja Scroll and Wicked City. The Fantastic Adventures Of Unico was the first of a duology and adapts two of the manga chapters into a single story. The main difference between the anime and manga is that the original source material had the goddess Venus being the main antagonist.

An unnamed unicorn gives birth to a bunch of babies, one of which conveniently called Unico. This newborn causes so much happiness for mortals that the gods themselves become jealous of him and task the living entity of the West Wind to carry him away to somewhere called The Hill Of Oblivion which the viewer can only guess is the edge of the world. West Wind feels sorry for Unico, so she drops him off the Island of Solitude where the young unicorn befriends the young devil who lives there named Beezle. Their friendship brings the attention of the gods as they realize the island isn't so lonely anymore, and they dispatch the Night Wind to recapture Unico and take him to The Hill Of Oblivion. West Wind shows up and flies off with Unico again to a hidden forest where he befriends a cat named Katy who wants to find a witch and be turned into a human girl. The two of them find an old lady living alone in the woods which Katy believes is a witch and the cat starts warming up to. Unico uses his empathic magic to transform Katy into a girl who decides to move in with the old woman and help her clean up. This all seems fine, but a dark stranger shows up and tempts the now human Katy to his castle where he plans to feed off her. Unico shows up and frees Katy as the demon turns into an eldritch horror straight out of the end of Fantasia. This leads to an epic JRPG fight where Unico digivolves into his final form as a winged adult unicorn and pierces the colossal nightmare right through the heart bringing life back to the forest. West Wind returns to take Unico away to his next adventure in the sequel leaving the friends he made along his journey behind.

The story continues a year later in the concluding film of Unico In The Island Of Magic, the title of which is confusing enough. This first film was a good outing for Tezuka's little bundle of joy with the first half seeming like an amusing family picture, but once the evil demon shows up in the final act it changes into an extravagant battle with amazing visuals and some seriously dark imagery including the bad guy actually getting impaled. The Fantastic Adventures Of Unico is a great feature for kids in its initial portions, but parent might want to supervise the conclusion as it could traumatize them for life.