And now, what may be my favourite arc of Violence Jack. There’s no doubt the original run is better, it came during Nagai’s peak years after all, but for sheer crazy remixing of another Go Nagai property, this cannot be beaten. Why?

It is the Mazinger Z chapter of Violence Jack.

Mazinger Z is Go Nagai’s seminal giant robot work from 1972 and revisited multiple times since them. We’ve already seen one sequel, Great Mazinger, and one alternate retelling, God Mazinger, referenced in Violence Jack. In turn, Yasuhiro Imagawa’s 2009 anime retelling of the series, Shin Mazinger Shougeki! Z Hen, would reference Violence Jack heavily, including this arc specifically.

This arc does not involve giant robots. Oh no. Instead it involves a blind black martial artist, Jim Mazinger, who uses the young Japanese boy Kouji Kabuto as his eyes. By having Kouji sit on his shoulders and pilot him like a robot.

Jim is obviously a mix of Jim Kelly and Mazinger, with a bit of Gorongo from Zuba and Barry Hercules from Starfleet/X-Bomber (maybe Jun Hono’s father too? I don’t think I’ve seen his character design though). While Nagai had used stereotypical “sambo” characters during the sixties in titles like Shameless School, he certainly didn’t persist with it as his career progressed. Which kind of makes the cultural ignorance defence harder to take when people use it to defend manga character designs that persisted with that stereotype into the 80s and 90s. If someone like Go Nagai, who frequently goes out of his way to shock and offend, could make an effort back in the early 70s, then nobody following him really has any excuse.

Jim makes an appearance in Imagawa’s Shin Mazinger as the body that Viscount Pygman uses through much of the series, before eventually shedding that body for something resembling his traditional form. That in turn has echoes of a scene later in this particular arc, albeit with a different Mazinger cast member. I also wonder if the spear and lion we see him with in the opening episode are a reference to Gorongo from Zuba. More on the insanity that is Zuba in a later Violence Jack arc.

We open the arc with Mondo and Ryoma encountering Jim and Kouji destroying some evil karate practitioners. Kouji explains their plight while we see Doctor Hell’s evil karate dojo. Eventually Hell sends Ashura and three burly karate types to attack Kouji and Jim’s dojo. I’m going to guess those three would be analogues for particular Machine Beasts (the enemy mecha in Mazinger), not sure which though.

They attack while Kouji is away from Jim, murdering their students and taking advantage of Jim’s blindness. They are about to win when Violence Jack makes his one appearance this arc (not clear if it’s a vision or something physical), giving Kouji the chance to leap onto Jim’s shoulders. And then remove some heads from other shoulders!

Meanwhile Ryoma and Mondo are spying on some Amazonian looking martial artists dueling in the river. Naked. These are Aphrodite and Diana, based on the female robots from Mazinger. Ryoma and Mondo get spotted and surrounded by the women.

Back at the dojo we get a lengthy training sequence where Jim is training kids in karate. Sayaka, Boss, Mucha & Nuke show up during this sequence.

While Jim and Kouji prepare, Hell makes preparations of his own. Ashura trains more evil martial artists, and Hell recruits a gang of gunmen and assorted other hoodlums under the command of Count Brocken. Yes, he is headless here too…

Things begin to escalate as Brocken’s men arrive at the Kabuto dojo, Ryoma and Mondo are caught peeping by Aphrodite and Diana and Hell has a visitor at his own dojo. Kouji’s presumed dead father, Kenzo Kabuto!

As Jim makes short work of Brocken’s men, while Kenzo challenges Hell to a fight, which Hell accepts. Jim and Kouji then face the other evil karate experts that Ashura has brought with him.

Alas, tragedy awaits Jim as he faces Brocken. Brocken appears to be using a sword, but fells Jim with three gunshots. How you may ask? Well, Brocken is actually a pygmy on stilts wearing a trench coat and fake arms & head! This is why this is the best arc in Violence Jack.

All is not lost though, for back at Hell’s dojo, Kenzo defeats Hell in front of his men, tearing his heart out of his chest.

Aphrodite and Diana mop up the remaining members of Hell’s army, dispatching Brocken with a rock to the head. We then get a brief epilogue showing the grave of Jim Mazinger and the Kabuto dojo move on with their lives.

This is probably the purest remixing of another Nagai property in Violence Jack, mainly down to the fact Jack barely features in it. Instead the focus is just on changing elements of Mazinger into a martial arts movie parody. The flexible supernatural nature of the series means you can buy a headless hoodlum like Brocken, after all we’ve seen giants, demons and psychics already. So the gag of revealing him to be the Pygman stand-in in a ridiculous disguise, is further out there.

That flexible supernatural nature comes back in a big way during the next arc, where we get a prison exploitation movie homage/parody. More on that next time!

I wrote about the first three episodes and the gist of the show over here.

The first 12 episodes are really great, totally living up to the promise of those opening episodes. Had it stopped there, I’d probably love it as much as I did the same team’s Bacanno!. The problem is they then went straight into another 12 episode story arc.

That second arc unfortunately pales next to the first. It’s more to do with the strengths of the first arc than any specific flaws the second has. Particularly how those strengths aren’t able to be duplicated in the second arc due to the nature of the adaptation.

The big problem is that the first arc does a really great job of introducing characters, and there’s a lot of characters it has to introduce. The second arc has a lot less characters to fill us in on, and some of the new characters don’t get their backgrounds fleshed out.

Where the first arc felt like a series of interlocking origin stories, the second arc has to deal with a fairly linear gang war story. We do get a couple of new origin stories and a couple of fun character introductions in there, but it doesn’t compare with the weirdness of the first arc. Related to this is the second arc’s use of different narrators to relay different points of view of the narrative and characters isn’t as strong as the first arc’s episodes.

The second problem is that the lead of the first arc, Celty, is pushed into a supporting character role in the second arc, with Mikado, Masaomi and particularly Anri taking the lead roles.

Frankly, they aren’t as interesting as the adult characters, plus the plans of Izaya which set them up as the main characters, are revealed as delusions of grandeur by the end. Which is kind of the point, and you can appreciate that when the point is forcibly made by Simon in the final episode, but while you’re getting there you’re expecting a little more than what you get.

That plan of Izaya’s is probably the one weakness that is the arc’s own. The plan relies on that screen-writing cliche of not having characters talk to one another in order to keep the running time up and the story going. If the three had just talked honestly to one another the whole story would have lasted on episode. They give enough reasons to keep the characters emotionally isolated from each other, and that isolation is somewhat the theme of the arc, but I felt there was about one too many episodes of drawing that out. It passed from tension to frustration.

Had they put a gap between arcs, I think I’d have been a bit more accepting of the changes, but in contrast with the opening arc it was a little dissatisfying.

That being said, there’s still plenty to like in the second arc, particularly the various fight scenes with Shizuo and the inventive lengthy chase sequence where Anri is pursued by the Yellow Scarves. And there’s a pay-off between Izaya and Anri (and then Izaya & Simon) at the end that puts Izaya’s self-proclaimed “love” of humanity in a clearer light. Makes me wonder if there’s some subtle word play around that in the original Japanese dialogue that the Crunchyroll subtitles miss?

Certainly there’s nothing in the second half that would put me off wanting more Durarara!!, there’s still mysteries to be explored and it’s full of engaging characters. I just hope that further story arcs don’t rely on three teenagers not talking too one another to power twelve episodes worth of plot.

I was going through some nineties Newtype freebies I still have lying around while trying to find the copies of V-Max I hope I still have somewhere and found the following bit of nonsense from a Utena ‘zine that came with a 1997 issue.

My neck’s slowly getting back to game strength, so it’s time to return to my journey through my personal gaming history.

While a lot of gamers in the 90s were huge fans of Mark Rein·Hagen’s Vampire the Masquerade, I prefered Jonathan Tweet’s Over The Edge. The pair had created Ars Magica earlier in their careers, and their subsequent individual games are continuations both in gaming mechanisms and story elements.

However, rather than the abiding goth/metal/spiritualist/ecologist overtones of Rein·Hagen’s games, Tweet’s is (as a gamer I ran it with at university once said) Naked Lunch The RPG.

Taking place on the amoral Mediterranean island of Al Amarja, it’s a surreal thriller of game, one whose direction can vary greatly depending on the group of players. In part this is down the mix of influences Tweet brings the background of the game, but more over it is down the incredibly simple ruleset and the infinitely flexible character generation system it supports.

Like Tweet’s rewrite of D&D for the 3rd Edition, OTE is notable for being able to put the rules on a single page. Unlike D&D, it isn’t backing that up with pages of skills, spell lists, character classes, powers and monsters. Each character is described by three stats that are unique to them and a flaw. For anything else they either simply roll 2 dice for or they cannot do it at all. It’s a system that you can easily tear from the background material and use to for any material you want, as long as you’ve got a group who are willing to collaborate rather than play a RPG as some sort of contest between the players and the GM.

A typical Over The Edge game involves the player characters as tourists visiting (or fleeing to) Al Amarja. The why is usually down to the players, they might choose to start as a group or be thrown together by fate and the vagaries of Al Amarja’s immigration controls.

For instance, the last campaign I ran, the players were all recruited by a secret conspiracy who were battling a satanic children’s author in New York prior to being sent to Al Amarja to uncover the conspiracy said children’s author was part of. This being Over The Edge, both conspiracies were actually part of the same larger conspiracy, The Movers, a conspiracy so fractured, large and unwieldy that no one knows who is in charge (one published adventure explores this by having someone just decide that if they act like they are the leader it will have pretty much the same effect as if they were).

Having bought most of the material that was published for the game, I can safely say you can probably just get away with using the core rulebook. A lot of the adventures are fall between two stools, too detailed to improvise around, but not not detailed enough to hold you and your players interests. One of them is even a run around the sewers… Even EVERY Neverwinter Nights level designer figured that out as a setting, you don’t really need to drop money on clichés like that.

You’ll probably be able to put something better together using the vast amount background colour the rulebook provides and the characters your players create. The sourcebooks are stronger, and often have better adventures than the stand alone adventures, but they are not essential. Personally I really liked the Player’s Survival Guide, Weather The Cuckoo Likes and Friend or Foe? Thinking about it, while there’s nothing really essential in terms of supplements for running the game, the Survival Guide is definitely worth picking up. Lots of good ideas in there that go beyond just Over The Edge.

Easily in my top ten RPGs, the setting, rules and highly customisable character generation make it one of the best RPGs of the nineties. Possibly THE best. And if you are loving Durarara and like RPGs then you definitely want to pick Over The Edge up. Their mixes of the mundane, the weird and warring factions are pretty similar. Certainly enough that watching Durarara reminded me I had this post waiting to be finished in my drafts.

This was, of course, a show I had thoroughly PSHAW’D when it first appeared. Anthropomorphised countries? WWII? It sounded like a dreadful idea.

However, while writing the piece on Wonderful, I decided I ought to check out the big modern gag anime that I hadn’t already seen. Namely, Lucky Star, K-On and Hetalia. While Lucky Star and K-On don’t really work for me in the form they are in, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself enjoying Hetalia.

Despite what the loudest, most obnoxious parts of its fandom might suggest to you, it works on a variety of levels, not just that of pretty boys in uniforms. In fact, the pandering innuendo is probably the weakest aspect of its humour, which unfortunately becomes more of a crutch for the series than is in evidence during this first batch of episodes.

What the show is strongest on is the historical humour, often delivering jokes that are arguably too clever for their own good, due to their reliance on very specific historical and cultural events (what other anime is making Busby Stoop Chair gags?). I’m a big fan of overly specific humour and parody, but I can see how the need to research the history to get some of the jokes would be off putting. And to it’s credit it doesn’t overuse them, often using them a starting point, spinning the humour off the historical reference by using it’s main comedic weapon.

Namely, national stereotypes.

Now there certainly is the potential to be truly offensive here, and it’s easy to assume it would be by the description. Or indeed the name. However, from my point of view, it’s no more offensive than ‘Allo, ‘Allo and it’s probably about the geopolitics of WW2 to the same extent as that erstwhile British sitcom. Of course people complained about ‘Allo ‘Allo, so it’s not surprising that Hetalia has its critics too.

Where the series mainly confines its use of anthropomorphic geopolitics is in the non-WW2 sections, particularly the Chibitalia segments set during the Holy Roman Empire. The WW2 era is wisely left more for the broadest gags based on national stereotypes. Because some of those gags are very broad, it’s worth avoiding watching too many episodes in a row. There’s only so many jokes about Italy being obsessed with food and surrendering you can watch in one sitting, even if they are interspersed with sketches about historical border changes in Central Europe.

The writing is so all over the place and the animation functional but consistent, that it won’t rank up there with all time classic gag anime, but it’s not as dumb as it looks on the surface. Well, OK, it is that dumb sometimes, but it’s also too clever for its own good at other times. And the timing and editing is very good, light years ahead of the likes of Lucky Star and K-On.

This is the third of three reviews of films I caught at the BFI’s Anime Weekend. They run the weekend every couple of years and it’s well worth paying attention to as you’ll get a chance to see films you won’t at UK anime conventions (i.e. Mind Game in 2006, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time in 2008).

Luke and Professor Layton find themselves in a puzzle contest promising eternal life.

This film is not going to disappoint fans of the Professor Layton games, and there’s likely enough of those fans that it won’t need any other audience.

That being said, there’s only a couple of instances where familiarity with the games is intended, and frankly if you’ve only played the English language releases, they’ll likely leave you similarly non-plussed as the non-fans. You see, this film takes place after the fourth game in the series, part of a prequel continuity set before the games we’ve had translated so far.

That means there are a handful of characters it assumes you are familiar with, such as Layton’s other assistant, Remi Altava and Inspector Grosky, the ridiculously manly Scotland Yard detective, whose chest hair is always trying to escape his shirt. You won’t have met them yet unless you’ve played Professor Layton and the Spectre’s Flute, but with one exception you can easily grasp their characters within seconds of their introduction.

Otherwise, it’s easy to grasp what’s going on in the story, no matter how preposterous it gets. And it does. It is Professor Layton after all. However, like the writing on the games, it does such a good job of drawing you into Layton’s world, that it is still completely possible for you to guess the final reveal, even though it is completely outside of our reality. It makes complete sense given what you’ll have seen up to that point and it plays fair in giving you clues to that reveal. The Sherlock Holmes influences in the characters and the Lupin III influences in the game’s OTT set pieces, means it all transfers very well to the screen. Even the puzzle sections work well, and they even find a way to fit the games typography organically into the film.

Visually it continues the look of the OLM produced cut scenes and Level 5′s character design. This means you get a cast full of big headed grotesques and weirdos, who move in a very pleasing manner with some strong camera movements. I really, really like some of the running sequences in both the film and the game cutscenes. They are just so full of character.

Layton himself is probably the weak point, the would-be iconic nature of his design and particularly his dot eyes, leaves him rather plain in terms of expression when placed next to plucky Luke, the boisterous Grosky or the ass-kicking Remi. Though that might be just because he’s a British Gentleman as the script continually reminds you to comic effect. Though apparently being a British Gentleman means chatting during an opera performance and blocking the view of the people behind with your big top hat. He does get an action scene of his own near the climax that is quite fun despite the limitations in his character design.

Definitely a must see for fans of the games, but certainly worth a rental or visit to a screening when it becomes available whoever you are.

This is the second of three reviews of films I caught at the BFI’s Anime Weekend. They run the weekend every couple of years and it’s well worth paying attention to as you’ll get a chance to see films you won’t at UK anime conventions (i.e. Mind Game in 2006, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time in 2008).

Sci-fi take on a traditional children’s adventure yarn, told with humour and an imaginative line in aliens.

Welcome to the Space Show is a project from the “Besame Mucho” team of director Koji Masunari, writer Hideyuki Kurata and producer Tomonori Ochikoshi, along with their Read or Die collaborator, character designer/animation director Masashi Ishihama.

It tells the tale of 5 children who get whisked off into an adventure in space during their annual holiday in the countryside. “Five Go Off To Space” if you like. It definitely adheres to the unsupervised nature of popular children’s adventure fiction. There’s even a dog and evil smugglers!

What weaknesses there are, seem to come from Kurata. The story is too long, caused by there being a few too many elements that needed to be set up to get to the ending. It’s not that it really lags, it’s just that it feels like there’s just a litle too much of it. It really pushes the number of “Chekhov’s gun” moments you can have in a story. On top of that, the villains are sketches rather than fully drawn personalities and lack fleshed out motivations. That’s something that you could see in the team’s Read Or Die projects too, a focus on the mechanics of the plot over clarifying the actual reasons it was all happening.

However, Kurata is also great at writing gags and likeable heroines. The comedy in the film is one of the film’s strongest points, full of genuinely amusing lines and situations. And the central conflict isn’t really the one between the heroes and the villains, but between two cousins who have fallen out over a lost rabbit. That totally human dilemma grounds the sci-fi lunacy that surrounds it, and allows the film to get away with leaving its villains with motives that are only hinted at.

The other overwhelmingly strong aspect of the film is the visual inventiveness, particularly in terms of creating the sense of a universe teeming with diverse life forms. In the Q&A after the screening, Masunari said there were about 400 different alien designs used through the film. Personally it took me back to some of the brief insane crowd scenes you’d get in Urusei Yatsura, where they’d populate a crowd with characters from earlier episodes. Except in Welcome To The Space Show, this was happening for most of the running time of the film. It avoids being a distraction, instead it works more like the little incidental gags you’d get in the What-A-Mess books. I suspect rewatching will pay dividends as extra visual gags reveal themselves.

Of the three films I saw at the BFI Anime Weekend, it was easily my favourite despite its flaws. While not a classic, it’s a good family film. More importantly it’s more talent making the leap from TV/OAVs to movies, and it’s a strong debut feature for Sony’s A-1 Pictures. Would love to see them get Kazuki Akane & Hiroshi Onogi (Noein, Birdy The Mighty Decode) to create an original film too, so hopefully this one is a big enough hit to make them continue on the feature film route (Welcome To The Space Show is yet to be released in Japan, this was the second screening in the world so far).

This is the first of three reviews of films I caught at the BFI’s Anime Weekend. They run the weekend every couple of years and it’s well worth paying attention to as you’ll get a chance to see films you won’t at UK anime conventions (i.e. Mind Game in 2006, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time in 2008).

Boy, oh boy, were there ever some nerds in the audience for this one. Possible the most heightened air of nerd excitement I’ve felt in a room. Even the sugar rush costumed kids of the MCM Expos don’t get as excitable and fidgety as a room of Evangelion fans, most of whom had just sat through the first of these “remakes”.

They liked it a lot, giving it the most applause of the three films I saw.

I’m not so sure about it. It felt a lot like Peter Jackson’s Two Towers, in that there’s a lot to admire visually, but in terms of story, it’s all middle and it goes on too long. There are elements, like the new pilot character, that you are going to have to wait until the next film to get some feeling of whether they were worth including in this film. I liked the character, but at the same time, her presence in the film did little but add two fight scenes that were arguably two too many. Even if one of the fights was one of the better sequences in the film, I was getting burnt out on robot action by that point.

The other elephant in the room is the film’s nature as a reworking of material I’m already familiar with. That makes it hard to judge as a piece of work on it’s own in the same way that the film version of Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy gets judged against the radio, TV and novel versions. Or the Red Dwarf film would if it ever got made. Or Michael Mann’s Miami Vice film was against Michael Mann’s Miami Vice tv series (or to a lesser extent Heat & LA Takedown). Not to mention the multitude of BBC comedies that leapt from Radio to TV as I was growing up and would disappoint me with either changes in cast or straight recycling of gags. And once you move away from projects where the original creator was involved in some way, then the list gets ever bigger. It shouldn’t be a surprise that Evangelion gets reworked in this way, it’s more surprising that we don’t get more projects like this based on popular anime or manga. Which we probably are. I don’t have the time to plot remakes against time today.

For this particular film, the thing that bugged me was that there are elements in the film that go so far in the opposite direction from original TV series that you wonder if they are doing it because it’s right for the story, or because it’s a surprise for established fans, or because we’re going to get an ending that somehow unifies the whole Evangelion canon.

The way it ends suggests it will only take one more film to retell the remaining portion of the series and/or End of Evangelion, as they had originally indicated. So what is that fourth film with supposedly all new content going to be, and will it add extra meaning to the changes in the same way radio adaptations of later Hitchhiker’s books had to make sense of the conflicting book and radio continuities? The thing that really struck me about the changes was how positive some of the outcomes are to situations that went really badly in the TV series. Is that just a change in mood that the new character also seems to reflect, or is it something else? What about the visual elements cribbed from End of Evangelion rather than the TV series? Is that just because they are neat or are they trying to suggest something else?

Due to the nature of the original series, I’m left with this nagging feeling they are deliberately trying to be tricksy, and that they are going to end up disappointing me by trying too hard. In fact, even if they aren’t being tricksy, the fact that I suspect they are, might mean they’ll end up disappointing me anyway.

The counter-evidence to those continuity swerves is that, like the first film in this remake sequence, they have stripped a lot of the ambiguity of the plot away by putting it into focus more than the original did. You get much more of a sense of the political chicanery in the world and a clearer view of the arms race going on between NERV and SEELE. Where the TV series focused on the people, this series of films focuses more on the events. That may be what they are going for and everything else is just phantoms created in the mind of viewers already familiar with the material.

So, odd film and indifferent review. Which is about how I feel about the original series too. It’ll probably take someone with no Evangelion baggage at all to get a clear view on how well it works as a film, rather than as a pop culture ouroboros.

—

And now a short aside.

I don’t know if I’ve just become hyper aware of it, or simply that I’ve seen UFO on ITV4 in recent years, but in the first half, maybe two thirds, the Gerry Anderson influence seemed even stronger than the TV series. Particularly the fly past the SEELE moonbase, the shots of Tokyo-3, the whole visit to the aquarium sequence, the strobe effects in the Entry Plug and the personality differences in Rei. She really reminded me more of Marina from Stingray here than she ever did in the TV series.

Cars are raced. Things blow up. Friendship and love.

Animation work by Takeshi Koike is a rare enough occurrence to make it a big deal. Well worth dropping the £30 to go to the Sci-Fi London “Manga All-Nighter” and setting aside two days to recover from sitting in a cinema all night. So it was good to learn that Redline lived up to the hype that my brain had been feeding to itself for the past three years or so.

I could have done without the sound problems we endured for the first ten minutes or so, where they somehow lost one channel on the left hand side. The channel with dialogue and small sound effects in. Nothing important, you know? It was incredibly distracting, making it hard to get into the movie and started the evening on a sour note. Not sure what was responsible for it, the cinema or the digital copy being shown as none of the other films had the same problem. In the end the sound got jiggled around, and while we still appeared to be missing one channel, we didn’t seem to be missing any actual sound.

Amazing how actually being able to hear what is being said and having all the sound effects really helps a film! Particularly one that is charging straight at you, screaming its head off like Redline.

The trailer released last year gives you a good taste of the film, though I don’t believe that, beyond the title animation, any of that footage is actually in the finished film. There are scenes that are similar, possibly even containing some identical key animation, but there’s significant differences in the setting and events portrayed in the trailer and the finished product.

The story that the film hangs its over the top cartoon racing action on is the tale of Sweet JP, a a talented racer fallen on hard times, forced to fix races due to the mafia debts of his best friend. Despite that, due to events in the pre-credits opening race, he accidentally finds himself placed in the top race in the universe, Redline.

Redline is to be run through Roboworld, a planet whose ruler is none too pleased to have the media circus show up on his planet as he doesn’t want his secret violations of peace treaties being shown across the universe. Which will be kind of hard to keep secret as the Redline course is due to go through his secret military compounds.

Finally, JP is falling for “Cherry Boy Hunter” Sonoshee, the racer who beat him in the opening race and who had inspired him to turn pro back when they were younger.

So you’ve got love, friendship, war and really loud cars going really fast – what more can you want from a film?

“We really want non-Japanese to see and appreciate this work”, Koike said in an interview. He doesn’t have too much to worry about there. The character design is varied, expressive and accessible. Just having your characters have lips is often enough to get people over their “I don’t like anime” position. The setting and action calls to mind obvious reference points like Speed Racer, Cannonball Run and obviously Wacky Races. The Wacky Races comparison is worth dwelling on. For starters, Wacky Races is very popular in Japan, so I don’t think appealing to non-Japanese is necessarily going to have negative effect on domestic performance. Secondly, it’s not afraid to go for blatantly Wacky Races style gags amidst all the sci-fi chaos. So fearless is it, that its conclusion is one such gloriously perfect gag.

But there’s other influences there too. You’ve got European sci-fi comics influencing some of the grander sci-fi designs, where Roboworld have apparently designed everything with inspiring awe in mind, rather than practicality. And there’s a Jamie Hewlett influence in there too, most obviously in the Booka-like Trava (returning from Koike and Redline collaborator Katsuhito Ishii’s Trava Fist Planet), but also there was a forgotten Hewlett strip called Fireball that also dealt with a sci-fi take on Cannonball Run / Wacky Races. There’s even some Mike Judge in there with Johnny Boy, the Beavis-looking sidekick to the Batman-styled bounty hunter Lynchman. The breaking down of Koike’s visual influences could easily be a post in itself, needless to say having a frame of reference beyond other anime is a great boon.

Most importantly, it’s a cartoon that’s not afraid to be a cartoon in the loudest, most over the top manner possible. It doesn’t have much more to say than that friendship and love are awesome things, but that’s perfectly OK as it’s saying it in a way that is just as awesome. It’s the first anime since FLCL that’s really clicked with me on a visceral level. If they’d offered me a VHS copy for £100 immediately after the film ended, I’d probably have bought it.

I hope this gets a UK DVD release sooner rather than later, but in the meantime I’d be happy just to see it in the cinema again. So don’t miss out if it you get the chance to see it.

The following will spoil your enjoyment of One Piece and your “enjoyment” of X-Men Second Coming. You have been warned.
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