ANI-MOVIE, *Megazone 23: Part 1 & 2

One of the more unusual experiments in the 80s anime boom was the Megazone 23 anime franchise. The first two movies were theatrically released through AIC and Tatsunoko but had completely different character designs between the year-long premiere of each one, and the third chapter was actually an OVA taking place centuries later. Each part of the trilogy has at least two separate English dubs provided by American and British production companies, with the most infamous being Robotech: The Movie which tried making it a midquel to the Macross Saga before Carl Macek created Robotech II: The Sentinels to which he claimed that the Megazone 23 treatment was one of the worst things he was ever involved in since it didn't get a theatrical showing. Megazone 23 however acted as the template for several future sci-fi works of innocents trapped in an artificial world, so if it weren't for this anime, you might not have Dark City or The Matrix. The purpose of this review is to go over both parts 1 and 2 as it's an ongoing narrative carries over from one movie to the other.

Taking place 500 years in the future, world wars cause humanity who abandoned Earth, and split its warring factions into two separate city-sized starships called Megazones. The one called Megazone 23 has the majority of its inhabitants believing that they are all existing in Tokyo during the mid-1980s. Acting as the main computer program known as Bahamut runs not only the simulation of 20th Century Earth but also the higher functions of the ship they are one. Shogo is a punk that comes across a transforming motorcycle robot connected to Bahamut's artificial idol EVE that reveals the illusion he lives in, prompting him to try and stop Megazone's secret leaders from creating a new totalitarian regime as they are planning on confronting the rival invading Megazone. The first movie ends with Shogo ultimately failing in his mission, but surviving in the second installment by raising an underground army of bikers with bazookas bent on taking down their fascist overlords. All this while both Megazone ships are on a course toward Earth where the defense program known as ADAM awaits to lay final judgement on the last living human civilization.

The difference of styles between both parts of this series is nearly staggering, whereas the characters in Part 1 has them with spiky hair and pastel-colored hair, the look for Part 2 was slightly more realistic with completely altered haircuts, making it very difficult to tell the few returning cast members from the previous chapter. The dubs separated between the original international editions and the ADV Films redub are up to the individual watcher to determine which is better, although the ADV dub makes it easier to tell the difference between the returning characters in Part 2 after their stark redrawing. Animego currently has a collected edition of the entire anime trilogy, including both dubs of Part 1 and 2 in one convenient package.

ANI-MOVIES, *In This Corner Of The World

Where anime movies like Grave Of The Fireflies and Rail Of The Star presented how tragic World War II was for the average citizens of Japan, the manga In This Corner Of The World by Fumiyo Kono takes a slice of life look during this turbulent age. Kono had first written a manga taking place a decade after the WWII, which was multiplied for this title that was adapted into an animated film by MAPPA, and directed by Sunao Katabuchi who previously headed up Mai Mai Miracle. The movie was crowdfunded by Japanese donators that it more than went over the initial budget, so much so that after its initial 2016 release that it was given an extended edition in 2019 which made it the longest anime movie of all time.

Set in the early 1940s of the now abandoned town of Eba near Hiroshima, Suzu is a genuinely happy girl living with her family, including her older brother and younger sister. Her brother eventually goes to join the military, along with her crush on local boy Tetsu. When she reaches 18, Suzu is engaged to Shusaku, and joins his family living in the city of Kure near a naval base. She helps out with Shusaku's family at their home, even though her bossy sister-in-law Keiko moves in after her husband dies, but Suzu's niece Harumi brings her joy. Suzu's married life is hard for her adjust to at first considering how much of a daydreamer she can be, usually applying her imagination into a skill of drawing sketches. Suzu does eventually come to love her husband, despite how the plagues of the Pacific War prey upon those living near the naval base. When Suzu is watching Harumi while Keiko is visiting her in-laws, a delayed bomb goes off killing Harumi, and Suzu loses her arm in the explosion. After suffering from her injury, Suzu plans to visit her family, however Hiroshima is attacked, leaving most of Eba largely in tatters, and her surviving younger sister suffering from radioactivity. Aside from giving into depression given the circumstances, Suzu eventually gets back together with Shusaku, and adopt a child orphaned from the war. The closing credits show Suzu raising her new daughter in the rebuilt area of Hiroshima.

In This Corner Of The World isn't fishing for sympathy of Japan's roll in WWII but shines the light on how the events made victims out of everyone living and dying through this point in history. The plot of the original edition is the only one currently available in English, so there is a significant amount of material not covered from adapting the manga. The theatrical release does have numerous time skips, which makes it difficult to follow the narrative, especially if you're watching it streaming without subtitles. The other setback concerning the story is how the characters are hard to tell apart with similar designs, plus difficult it is to figure out some of the characters' ages throughout the duration of the film. There is little CGI being used in this production, relying largely on hand drawn animation, which is pure quality worthy of Studio Ghibli. The movie is released through Shout Factory, along with some assistance by Funimation, so the dub is considerably good, but the soundtrack is stunning, making for a memorable viewing experience. This is one of those few anime movies that is perfect for non-otaku to enjoy.

MISC. MANGA, *Himitsu Sentai Gorenger

Super Sentai is one of the longest running TV franchises in Japan, and the concept of there being an entire team of superheroes in a live-action show mostly began with Himitsu Sentai Gorenger. Shotaro Ishinomori had formerly created the first manga team of heroes in Cyborg 009, and got even more success with Kamen Rider where he combined the idea of a group of heroes with toyetic vehicles, despite the fact that Gatchaman had already done this a few years prior. Since Ishinomori was also an accomplished manga artist, he wrote and drew two separate manga adaptions of the TV show at the same time of its broadcast. The first one was from a weekly publication, while the second ran in four chapters of a monthly release, thus making for three distinct takes on a single plot when including the live-action series.

Tsuyoshi is the son of martial arts shrine, and is shocked to discover his father dead along with all the other students. They were targeted by the evil Black Cross Army to stop the formation of the special anti-crime organization, "EAGLE". Tsuyoshi then joins four other teenagers to create the colorful crusaders codenamed Gorenger. They engage the Black Cross Army with their super-up motorcycles and the aircraft Variblune, which was included as part of America's Shogun Warriors toyline. In both adaptations of the manga had battles of good and evil including mecha dinosaurs, samurai on robot horses, and masked menaces.

The Gorenger manga went more for character studies and the character's motivations for being heroes as opposed to generic Tokusatsu fighting poses and giant robots. Shotaro Ishinomori still did a masterful job with his retro designs largely inspired by American comic book heroes. Seven Seas Entertainment collected both manga adaptions into a single hardcover in one of their better jobs at translating Japanese. It might seem a little strange reading two seperate origin stories of the same superhero team, but if you're a die-hard Power Rangers otaku, you might want to open on this time capsule of pure nostalgia.

OBSCURE O.V.A.S, *Kase-san And Morning Glories

Yuri anime is a rarity in the American market. There's plenty of titles like Sailor Moon and Utena which feature or hint at it, but Kase-san And Morning Glories is a bonafide high school romance story, that just happens to also be a shoujo-ai. Based on the manga by Hiromi Takashima, Zexcs was the studio behind this slice-of-life story which was turned into a one-shot OVA that happened to get a small theatrical release in Japan.

Halfway through their senior year, the timid Yamada starts to develop a relationship with the outgoing Kase who is popular for being a good soccer player. The two are schoolmates who became friendly through class interactions, but they notice each other through just being themselves. Kase is attracted to Yamada for just being a shy girl who devotes alot of her time to caring for the school's gardening club activities, and Yamada is drawn to Kase because she seems like her ideal love interest. The story focuses more on the two of them forming their relationship, and how they grow comfortable towards each other. You would think that Kase would be the stereotypical cool girl with a major tsundere vibe instead of being clutzy and fuzzyheaded when it comes to how Yamada makes her feel. During their school field trip to the ocean, Kase and Yamada come to understand how their relationship affects the way other people see them. The major struggle involves the two young lovers realizing that their plans to go to college in seperate cities would lead to them having to be apart, though both eventually understand that they can't live without the other and decide to stay together no matter the future.

Lesbian relationships still have a negative view in some aspects of modern Japan, especially in the field of same-sex marriage, but Kase-san And Morning Glories narrows its view in the budding romance of two teenage schoolgirls. The anime doesn't really get into how their romance would affect their social lives. The OVA is more focused on how the main characters slowly ease into how best to comfort the other. Some viewers might feel a little shortchanged for starting a yuri anime with the two lovers already in their early stages of their romance as opposed to how their relationship began. However, the positive aspect in this is how much better the girls' lives become from knowing each other. Don't go into this thinking of it as a pro-lesbian feature, but as a refreshing dramedy for nearly any audience.

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 replaces it with tells 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 that is trying to debut their new cars for the Olympic ceremonies. Kokono's tablet seems to give 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 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.