Sazae-san, Doraemon, Anpanman, Dragon Quest, Kiteretsu Daihyakka, Hai Akko Deso

Oishinbo, Obocchama-kun, Dragonball Z, Manga Hajimete Omoshiro Juku, The Laughing Salesman, Sally the Witch

Goldfish Warning, Parasol Henbee, Ranma 1/2 Nettohen, Yawara, Chibi Maruko-chan, Obake no Holly

The Mischevious Twins: Clare Academy Story, Trapp Family Story, The Two Lottes, Brave Exkaiser, Mashin Hero Wataru 2, NG Knight & Lamune 40

Idol Tenshi Youkoso Yoko, Getter Robo Go, Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, Moomin, Magical Angel Sweet Mint, Karasu Tengu Kabuto

Emergency Departure Rescue Kids, Robin Hood no Dai Boken, Magical Taruruto-kun, Edokko Boy Gatten Taro, Karakuri Kengo Musashi Lord, Peach Command Shin Momotaro Densetsu

The Three Eyed One, Pygmalio, Brave Fighter of Sun Fighbird, Cyber Formula GPX, The Secret Garden, Little Ghosts There, Here, Where

City Hunter 91, Doronpa!, High School Mystery: School of Seven Wonders, Jankenman, Metaljack, Shonen Ashibe

Rajin-Oh, 21 Emon, OH MY Konbu, Reporter Blues, Dear Brother, Math Fun

Lupin III: Chase Napoleon’s Dictionary, Jarinko Chie, Genji Tsuushin Agedama, Dodge Danpei, Kinnikuman: Scramble for the Throne, Magical Princess Minky Momo: Hold on to Your Dreams

Burn! Top Striker, I Am Chokkaku, Mitsuteru Yokoyama’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Marude Dameo, Ultraman Kids: Haha o Tazunete 3000 Man Kōnen

(titles continuing from the previous year in bold)

Well, 1991 definitely had a lot more shows than 1990. Even taking into account that a few of these are holdovers that ended early 1991, there’s a lot more going on here.

However, is any of it memorable?

From looking at the TV Asahi survey from 2005, I noticed there wasn’t any new TV shows from 1980, 1991 or 1994 listed. If you look at what came out in 1980 there are some note-worthy shows, but possibly only note-worthy in retrospect. Things like Ideon, which flopped at the time, or Wonderful Adventures of Nils, an early Mamoru Oshii work, nothing new to set the world on fire.

Goldfish Warning fits into that niche in 1991. It’s notable now, because many of the staff moved onto to work on Sailor Moon the following year. If a Junichi Sato show is going to stick in your head, it’s that one, not its predecessor.

To be fair to Goldfish Warning, it has racked up 25 pages of pixiv fan art so it or the manga must have been doing something right to stick in people’s minds that much. Or maybe just one person who really likes drawing Goldfish Warning fanart. I don’t know, I didn’t look into it that deeply. Most of the other shows launched in 1991 that I searched for had 2 pages at most.

Other shows suffer the same problem but in the other direction. Dear Brother is over shadowed by the earlier Rose of Versailles. The World Masterpiece Theatre shows and their imitators are overshadowed by earlier, more widely praised work.

Some shows have simply fallen into obscurity. Even its co-creator’s new fame as AKB48 svengali, hasn’t stopped OH MY Konbu from being hard to find screenshots for. And I’m not even entirely sure when Math Fun ran or if that’s definitely a screenshot from it.

And of course, everything was being overshadowed by Dragonball Z.

All I know for sure is this: I want to see the Monkey Punch-does-Thunderbirds show that is Emergency Departure Rescue Kids.

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Is there a story that has had as many different titles via adaptation than Erich Kastner’s Das doppelte Lottchen? Even the wikipedia page immediately switches between Lottie & Lisa and Lisa & Lottie. You (and I) are probably more familiar with the story as The Parent Trap, from either the 1961 or 1998 Disney live action films.

The final show to run in the World Masterpiece Theatre aping slot “Fudosan Anime World” (1989-1992, NTV), The Two Lottes was produced by Tokyo Movie Shinsha and directed by Kenji Kodama (City Hunter, Detective Conan). It is pretty much exactly what you’d expect. The story is relatively faithful, albeit expanded upon to fit 29 episodes.

The character design noticeably avoids the then current trends of Toriyama angularity, Nintendo SD and retro manga. The animation feels recognisably from TMS. Comparing it to the other TV anime I’ve looked at from 1991, it would be hard to argue that the animation isn’t well above what was merely competent TV animation of the day.

When you are dealing with a plot where two characters are meant to look alike, you don’t want to fall in the trap of “same face, different haircut” that some anime do. The Two Lottes avoids that handily and the other girls who aren’t Lisa or Lotte can be distinguished from them and each other. Similarly, the performances and animation distinguish the twins’ different personalities well.

Shuichi Seki (aka Junichi Seki) was the character designer. He’d worked on the previous show in the slot, The Mischievous Twins, as well as the then recent WMT shows such as Trapp Family Story and Daddy Long Legs. He’d been a big part in establishing the 80s WMT look designing on shows such Perrine Story (1978), Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1980) and The Swiss Family Robinson (1981). In the UK we got to see his design work on Vicky The Viking, Dogtanian and The Wizard of Oz.

From the first episode, the impression is that it suffers a little from the attempt to stretch out the book. In this episode that is mainly evidenced in the long time it takes for the twins to meet and it becomes clear we’re not really going to get going until episode 2. I’m curious if they have to make characters stupider later on to keep the twins’ deceit going for 29 episodes. It’s entirely possible that parents are stupid in the book too, I have never read it, but based on this episode, you get the impression of them as fairly appalling human beings, even though they never appear on screen.

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This is both a show that started in 1991 and also one that that started in 1987. Which goes some way to explaining why it’s a lot better than most of the TV anime from 1991.

The first City Hunter anime aired 1987-1988, two years after the launch of the manga. It was followed, pretty much immediately by City Hunter 2. When that ended in 1989, there was a break of 3 months before City Hunter 3 aired. There was over a year between that show ending at this one beginning. However, if you needed a City Hunter fix there was a couple of OAVs in between.

All of these were directed by Kenji Kodama (Detective Conan) and produced by Sunrise, so there’s an argument that you can look at them as a holdover from Eighties anime trends rather than fitting into what was new in 1991. But there’s only so many spikey haired Toriyama clones one can watch in a row so consider this me treating myself.

In their fifth year of adapting Tsukasa Hojo’s manga, this is a very slickly made TV anime. There’s plenty of limited animation short cuts, but its strengths overpower any budgetary restrictions.

It’s biggest strength? Akira Kamiya. He is/was THE BEST, and he was perfect for the role of Hojo’s hero, the lecherous gunman Ryo Saeba. It’s hard to imagine anyone else being able to switch between stone cold killer, dapper playboy & goofball idiot and make you believe it’s all the same guy.

Another strength is in how it uses its soundtrack. It’s not afraid to let the soundtrack do the heavy lifting on a scene if needs be. I believe it’s just Tatsumi Yano on the music here. There are entirely still establishing shots in this episode that are boosted immeasurably by the soundtrack cueing you into the following scene.

When Tiger & Bunny prompted my look at the buddy TV show, I didn’t look ahead to the 80s and where the buddy show went then. One place it went was female/male buddy show with “unresolved sexual tension”. From US TV you had Remington Steele, Scarecrow & Mrs King and Moonlighting. From the UK you had Demspey and Makepeace. And City Hunter firmly fits into that trend with the relationship between Ryo Saeba and Kaori Makimura. It almost seems like the makers of Tiger & Bunny had set things up to do a version of that in the future with Barnaby and Kotetsu, but I wonder if the popularity will make them stick with the NC1978 era heroes for now.

Next, the final 1991 anime I will look at and another show from City Hunter ’91‘s Kenji Kodama…

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If you are going to call your opening theme 21st Century Boy you are building expectations you can’t possibly live up to. Is it really going to be one better than T-Rex’s classic? It is not.

Thankfully after the disappointment of the opening theme, we open the episode with some pseudo-news reel of metal beasts attacking various cities across the world. There’s some nice work here that, like the song title, sets the bar far too high for the rest of the episode. With all other cities destroyed, our villains decide to head to Tokyo. Future villains take note, attack Tokyo first, as you’re only giving them time to develop giant robots otherwise.

In Tokyo, we jarringly get what appears to be a clumsy homage to Captain Power with a computer simulation training sequence, and the animation quality drops off a cliff. Remember how cool and different the original Getter heroes were? Well they’ve been replaced by a bunch of poorly drawn blandies who’ve been over doing it with hairspray. Ryouma Nagare and Hayato Jin show up in the manga to give the newbies the Getter Robo rub, but they are notable by their absence in the anime.

The main strength of the episode is in its mixing of “realism” into the Getter Robo stew. The handling of the robot in this episode feels more like a “real robot” and the use of realistic helicopters as a support crew for Getter Robo juxtapose nicely next to the pure fantasy design of the Metal Beast. It makes the creature seem more otherworldly rather than the “oh, this sort of thing happens all the time” vibe of earlier Dynamic Productions titles.

Despite that, and tiny glints of visual fun (check out the style of the New York inhabitants in the first picture above), it’s not enough though to cut through the boring heroes and the overall sense of production sloppiness that the slack talking head scenes induce.

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Top Striker isn’t very good, yet it has its charms.

It often feels like a weird hybrid of World Masterpiece Theatre and a sports anime. A big part of this is due to it being a Nippon Animation production, but the design by Nobuhiro Okasako comes across as an odd choice. While, to my knowledge, he didn’t design any WMT shows he did do some design work on Adventures of Pepero the Andes Boy which we could kindly describe as a WMT peer. Given that he did the anime character design for the first Captain Tsubasa show, you’d think that he’d have been a good fit.

The difference is that in Tsubasa, Youichi Takahashi’s original designs still shine through in the anime whereas Top Striker is an original work. The irony is that if you put the giant heads of Top Striker‘s kid characters on the bodies of the adult Tsubasa characters, you might get something closer to a normal human being’s proportions.

As it is though, whatever good there is in the layout of some of the football scenes, it often feels like the character designs are scuppering it with their enormous bonces. 

The show also feels like it was a year late, being about a Japanese kid playing football in Italy, yet arriving on screens a year after Italia 90. Did Italia 90 kick start some sort of Japanese interest in Italy that made this show a good idea?

Storywise the first episode feels like it was generated by a checklist. Orphan? Check! Disapproving Aunt? Check! Kindly maid? Check! Avuncular older gentleman? Check! And so on. If you grew up in the 70s and 80s you’re likely to have seen this umpteen times before, both in and outside of anime. I suspect the same is true if you grew up in any decade after the Victorian era. That’s orphantainment!

The reason it still charms is it all that cliched stuff isn’t horribly written, and there’s tiny little touches that make you think they put a little more thought in than they probably needed to. For instance when the show’s avuncular older gentleman, Mr Bertini is due to meet the disapproving Aunt for the first time, we see he’s slicked his hair down to a ridiculous extent in some attempt to pull himself up to the aunt’s social standing. It’s a simple little character piece that tells us more about Mr Bertini just through the drawings on the screen.

Another neat trick it pulls is when we flashback to the town doctor’s earlier career as an ace striker, the show tries to give that scene a pseudo-sixties anime feel both with making the flashback black and white and to some degree in the way the action is shown. There’s just enough charm in the character work and the football scenes to get across the romance of football (and Italy) despite the technical shortcomings and the cliched plot.

It’s still not enough to make me want to watch more, but I can see why they thought people might have wanted to watch it in 1991. While it didn’t make it’s way to the UK, it did air on Franch, Italian and Spanish television. Next time, we will take a look at a the show that Top Striker replaced. And that show did make to the UK airwaves.

Oh, and I almost forgot, a small child’s life is literally saved by the power of football in this first episode. In that someone kicks a football to stop something killing a child. And then an impromptu town celebration breaks out. That helped charm me too. I am a sucker for sports stories where the sports skills can be used to solve EVERYTHING. I blame Sport Billy.

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Has there ever been a manga that broke big by shamelessly aping the biggest manga of its era? I’m going to guess not.

Today, the big manga is One Piece, and reportedly some editors want creators to make their strips more like Eiichiro Oda’s record breaking comic. In 1991, Shonen Jump had two behemoths of the medium on its pages, Dragonball and Slam Dunk. You could see their influence in both manga and anime of the day, but with Dodge Danpei you get two blockbuster series emulated for the price of one.

Based on a manga by Tetsuhiro Koshita, it feels like someone looked at Slam Dunk and said “well, another basketball manga would be too obvious, what’s another indoor ball game where you use your hands? Oh I know, dodgeball! And while you’re at it can you make it look like a poor man’s Akira Toriyama? Thanks.”

The end result is a hero who looks like a red headed Goku, a friend who’s a Krillin look alike and dodgeball uniforms that look like Toriyama designed body armour. Plus, other occasional Toriyama-esque touches like the shape of some characters eyes & eyebrows and silhouette hairstyles.

This first episode introduces us to hyperactive brat Danpei, and Danpei to the dodgeball team. This involves some nonsense with a dangerous loose dog and the thugs who own it being dealt with through the use of DODGEBALL SKILLS. I hope the rest of the show kept up this theme. Need to change a light bulb? Throw a dodgeball at it. Cooking a meal? Throw a dodgeball at it. Filling in tax returns? Throw a dodgeball at it.

We then get a scene where Danpei’s unnecessarily hot mother dresses up as a shark to scare her son, before being given the standard perverted camera pan up her swim-suited body. It’s not at a Gear Fighter Dendoh level in oddly Oedipal creative choices, but it does feel a little odd. Probably can’t blame the animators too much here, as a Google image search reveals that this is definitely Koshita’s thing.

Finally, this is all topped off a piece of lunacy that turned me around on this episode. Danpei visits his dad’s grave, and we get a superimposed shot of his dad in his dodgeball gear. Which has Games Workshop style SHOULDER SPIKES. Danpei then accidentally knocks the gravestone over, revealing a secret compartment containing a SPECIAL SECRET DODGEBALL. With a flame logo on it.

Outside of the irony-free gusto that the show has, there’s little to recommend here. Even more than Metaljack, this show feels like what I imagined all the early nineties TV anime that we didn’t get to see because we were too busy with OAVS to be like. As with many other shows of the era, the videogame spin-offs seem to be remembered better than the actual manga and anime that spawned them. As well it might, as Dodge Danpei had seven videogames based on it in the span of 1992-93.

Koshita had bigger hit with Lets&Go in the late nineties and more recently has been working on licenced strips such as Yatterman, Toy Story and Inazuma Eleven, a property that draws from the same well as Koshita’s own works did. Maybe even a bit from Koshita himself.

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In case you were wondering what Patlabor would be like if the heroes were a cyborg cop sentai team with bolt on mecha suits and a robot dog that battled crimes planned by New Wave LARPers and executed by biomechanical robots, well I have the answer for you. It’d be a lot like Armoured Police Metal Jack.

This was astoundingly derivative. When I went in search of early nineties TV anime mediocrity this was the sort of thing I was expecting to find. But I wasn’t expecting to find something so densely packed with other people’s ideas done wrong.

Having lots of outside influences isn’t a crime, nor will it neccessarily mean your show is horrid. The franchise that reshaped the television anime landscape in the nineties, Neon Genesis Evangelion, wore its influences on its sleeve too. So what was Metaljack doing wrong? Outside of having a workhorse director and low production values, that is.

It’s influences were shows that were still fresh in people’s memories.

For starters you’ve got cyborg cops. Robocop had spawned all sorts of copyists in Japan from the arcade game ESWAT to the 8-Man revival OAV. Falling between those we had Metal Jack. Only, it doesn’t stop there. The cyborg cops have Super Sentai colour coding.  They have Saint Seiya-like crown helmets to allow their flowing Eighties manes to fly freely in the wind. The main character is basically a Ryo Saeba clone. The monsters they fight are “biomechanical” monsters, so you’ve got the well strummed Alien and Guyver riff being played too. And while not clear from the first episode, you can throw some Bladerunner into the mix too.

To further throw you off kilter, you’ve then got villains who look like they’ve walked in from some other show entirely. That show being Neon Day-Glo Legend of The Galactic Heroes.

At its heart you get the feeling it wants to be a modern take on tokusatsu shows, it shares elements with Kamen Rider, Super Sentai, and more obviously the Metal Hero series. The Metal Hero series Space Sheriff Gavan had influenced Robocop’s look in the first place and in the 1989 series, The Mobile Cop Jiban you had a downed cop turned into a cyborg.  Who fought biomechanical villains. Just like Metal Jack. It was then followed by Winspector where you had a team of cyborg/robot cops, with its sequels following a similar line with various teams of cops.

So not only does it feel like mess of anime and sci-fi influences, it also is very much a “me too” show aping trends in tokusatsu of the time. And given that the animation is pretty threadbare, I’m not sure why you wouldn’t have just watched the real thing instead.

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In which Japanese limited animation makes a really bad decision with regards to animal character design.

We’re back to the wonderful world of ORPHANTAINMENT. For those keeping count this is the third confirmed orphan protagonist so far, and the second to come from classic literature. In this case it was coming from NHK, rather than a World Masterpiece Theatre production, and while its heart was in the right place, its hands weren’t.

For those not familiar with the novel by Francis Hodgson Burnett, it involves a orphan girl, Mary Lennox, going to England from India, following the deaths of her parents. She is going to stay with her uncle, Archibald Craven. Both Mary and Archibald have to be softened from their individual grieving by the intervention of the chipper and perky lower classes, in the form of maid Martha, her brother Dickon and gardener Ben Weatherstaff, and by nature. Which comes in the form of the eponymous Secret Garden and a robin.

There was a 1975 BBC adaptation that got repeated when I was a kid, and I remember hating it. Even hearing that opening theme today makes me mad. I mainly hated it because it wasn’t a cartoon or funny. Well, this 1991 version tries to solve that by adding funny animals!

These animals that appear to be attempts at classic American-style cartoon animals, but end up looking like the sort of overly rendered cartoon animals you’d find on cheap greetings cards in the Eighties. You know, before Purple Ronnie came along and changed everything. Chief among these animals is Mary’s cat Patty, whose uncharming antics battle to dominate this episode with Mary’s tantrums. I like cats, but this pink, malformed menace irritated me. Chi, she is not.

When you consider it was the replacement for Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, it comes up lacking. Though I do wonder if that series’ heroine was an influence on the design choice of making Martha and Dickon non-white characters (perhaps the single interesting artistic choice in the show). But it’s pretty lacking in a vacuum too really. The lack of competence in the production hamstrings it regardless of what show it was replacing. Which probably explains why no-one is interested in it in 2011 (though it did get a box set release in Japan a few years back).

As forgotten as this series is, its replacement in 1992, Oi! Ryoma, languishes in English language obscurity even further. It doesn’t even have an entry in Anime News Network’s encyclopedia.

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The best anime of 1991 according to Animage readers.

This Sunrise property is one of those shows I was vaguely aware of, even before I started to properly watch anime. I believe this was likely due to it being mentioned in Super Play, a UK SNES magazine that was probably the most otaku-y of the UK games magazines of the time. Alternatively, it might have been via Japanese games magazines, as classmates were importing them around this time. More recently I’d come across it in the resume of Mitsuo Fukuda, director of Gundam Seed (BOO!) and Gear Fighter Dendoh (YAY!).

Despite the acclaim poured on it by the Animage readers, it was initially a flop. Cancelled early, it only ran 37 episodes. Its success came in tapping into that fanatical base with OAV sequels that moved the action on roughly in real time. According to wikipedia, the fanbase was initially mainly female (80% for the early OAVs). I wish there was more in English about the franchise’s trajectory as it seems on the surface like a precursor to the “kept alive by otaku” franchises that exist today. Particularly those boosted by a fanatical female audience.

So, what about this first episode?

Well it’s a pretty clever set up that gets the main character into the position of being the show’s lead. Our hero, Kazami Hayato, is escorting a new Cyber Formula race car, Asurada, to a race qualifier, when it is set upon by villains trying to steal it. This forces him to drive the car to get away, inadvertantly making him the driver for at least the next seven days due to the genetic fingerprint ignition and its lengthy reset time. Meaning that in the next episode he will have to race, rather than the intended driver.

I probably should have mentioned that Asurada is also the car’s talking AI. You know, like KITT in Knight Rider. Except this AI is a little more realistic. While it can clearly help out with situations a racing car might be expected to deal with, it’s completely useless when faced with, say, a helicopter trying to pick it up with a giant mechanical grabber.

The designs from Takahiro Yoshimatsu scream 1991 more than the other two shows we’ve looked at from that year. Rampant spikey haircuts, glassy eyes and jaws you can cut glass with abound. It’s not the most angular show of the nineties, but combined with the flat colours the character design firmly dates it from there. Yoshimatsu has plenty of other tricks in his arsenal, most recently he directed and designed Nyanpire, but if you want to see a 2011 take on the 90s angular look, check out his designs on the Hunter X Hunter remake that just started.

The other notable name that I see on the ANN credits is Kazuki Akane (Escaflowne, Heat Guy J, Noein, Birdy Decode) as one of the unit directors. By the looks of things he’d been at Sunrise a while at this point, having worked on Ronin Warriors and Jushin Liger. Later on I should take a look at what talents were nutured by which studios in the 90s.

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Do you like orphans? Do you like Nuns? Do you like singing? Well you were in luck in 1991 as House Foods World Masterpiece Theatre adapted Maria von Trapp’s memoir The Story of the Trapp Family Singers.

Now, I’ve never read that book, and don’t think I’ve seen The Sound of Music. Certainly not as an adult at least. It feels like what I know about the story I know only through cultural osmosis. So I’ve not really got much to judge this adaptation against.

Likewise, I don’t think I’ve seen an entire World Masterpiece Theatre series. Certainly, I’ve seen bits here and there, I think the last one I dipped into would have been the Story of Perrine. But not enough to say where this looks to stand in the oeuvre. Someone else will have to be judge of whether this is good or bad WMT.

What I will say is this. Nuns must be fun to animate.

The animation is certainly fine for TV animation early on, with Maria in her Austrian tomboy get up and exploring Salzburg, but once the nuns appear then we start to get some fun movement. The solid black robes allows for interesting clothing movement without getting bogged down in the detail of folds and rumples. Nuns are like living shadow puppets.

With just a face and a shape the animators get across a lot of different personalities with little effort. The faces are of course designed by Shuichi Seki. Seki’s early designs were on shows adapting western properties, Vicky the Viking and Little Lulu. The aforementioned Perrine was his first WMT design work.  From then his open, slightly bean shaped faces became the look of WMT. More recently he did the character design for the Gokyoudai Monogatari TV show.

Unusually for a WMT show, the plucky orphan here is an adult. Actually when I think about it, it’s fairly unusual for pop culture as a whole. The good thing is that because of that, despite annoying all the other nuns, Maria doesn’t come off as too cloying. The ending theme not so much with it’s alternating HAPPY FAMILY SCENE / MISERY approach.

The other thing that struck me was some of the establishing location shots seem to linger unnecessarily long. Then I realised that is animation as travelogue. These background paintings are actually pretty accurate depictions of actual real life locations. Locations that were thousands of miles away from the intended audience. So let them soak it in.

While it’s nicely made for a TV anime, the main thing that is tempting me back is the promise of the opening sequence that the mascot animal of the show is a full grown cow. I am curious as to how they plan to make that work, if indeed they do.

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