MEGAZONE 23 PART 2

this review originally appeared in 2005 at Anime Jump. Like Part 1, the DVD is currently available at bargain prices and you should totally get it.

It’s tough for me to review this film objectively. It’s an integral part of my late teenage psyche. I wasn’t a particularly introspective 18-year old, but there were two things I was sure of – I liked punk music and I liked Japanese cartoons, and MEGAZONE 23 PART 2 combined them both in a package convenient enough to stick in the pocket of your trenchcoat and impress your fellow late-80s teens with at any gathering.

And why not? It’s a Japanese cartoon starring punk rock kids on motorcycles who defy the police with machine guns and super robots in a battle to expose the massive fraud that underlies their very society. The film obsesses over details like beer cans and cigarette packaging and stars doppelgangers of the “Like A Prayer” Madonna and Cyndi Lauper and female pro wrestlers, and instead of the bug-eyed, melon-headed look that segregates most anime to the back of the visual arts bus, MEGAZONE 23 PART 2 stars recognizable human beings with nostrils and scars and sex lives. It’s about as far as you can get from SPEED RACER and still be a Japanese cartoon.

I think I went to high school with these guys

I can’t say PART 1 interested me overmuch; the Mikimoto character designs seemed like stale MACROSS, the Garland motorcycle-robot was entirely too functional, and on the whole I was more interested in watching VAMPIRE HUNTER D or DIRTY PAIR. PART 2, on the other hand, was a completely different story, and I mean that sincerely. It didn’t look, act, sound, or smell anything like the first MEGAZONE. In fact it didn’t look like anything we’d ever seen, at all. You could tell right away – via Yasuomi Umetsu’s no-nonsense character designs - that this wasn’t some kids’ TV cartoon tarted up for a direct-to-video release. Hell, in the first two minutes there are about six misdemeanors and eighteen felonies contained in a scene of mayhem and property destruction as wild if not wilder than anything Hollywood or Hong Kong would offer that year (1985!!) And this isn’t outer-space flying saucer nonsense – these are real life Tokyo neighborhoods being overrun by 80’s punker bosuzoku.

Except they’re not: this Tokyo is a fake, a prop, a stand-in. The real Earth’s been destroyed and the human race is inside the Megazone, a giant space ship big enough to hold entire cities and millions of people, some of whom know they’re living out one of science fiction’s hoariest cliches and others who never wonder why no one they know has ever actually been, you know, outside the city.

The unbelievable truth

Our hero Shogo Yahagi would still be one of these brainwashed proles if he hadn’t had the good sense to get involved in the hot motorcycle business. Turns out his stolen bike was a top-secret transforming giant combat robot designed to fight aliens in outer space, and that his entire life has been spent inside a giant space station, whose main computer systems are controlled by an artificial intelligence who moonlights as an idol singer known as EVE. While investigating this mystery- well, okay, he was committing grand theft super transforming robot motorcycle, all right? -Shogo winds up accused of murder and on the run, and that’s where PART 2 starts.

Holographic or not, the gals all love Shogo

Reunited with his biker pals, Shogo rekindles his romance with Yui and works out a plan to fool the authorities and find out once and for all what’s really going on. Meanwhile his opposite number in the government, the enigmatic B.D., can’t spend too much time searching for Shogo, because the hideous space aliens that attacked the Earth have found the Megazone, and are kicking ass on Earth spaceships with weapons that remind us uncomfortably of Roto-Rooter Gone Wild.

Naturally the key to everything is finding EVE. Aren’t most of life’s mysteries solved through communion with idol singers – especially computer-generated ones only slightly more artifical than the real thing? The incongruity of seeing total punk rockers going gaga over easy-listening top-40 pop music takes the edge from PART 2’s realism. On the other hand the punks of 1988 were going apeshit over the “swing revival” ten years later, so anything’s possible. When EVE isn’t singing, the Shirou Sagisu soundtrack ranges from moody 80s synth to some good honest speed metal guitar work.

typical anime club meeting circa 1985

After a running battle through “Tokyo” between the motorcycle punks and the cops and the all-out space assault by the sicko aliens, B.D. and Shogo achieve detente of sorts, though it’s academic at that point because EVE has activated A.D.A.M. and that means that the Megazone is destroyed in a total rotoscoped-from-atom-bomb-test-footage sequence that still looks pretty impressive. At this point you can either make some sort of fancy-pants biblical reference about Eve giving Adam knowledge which drives them out of Eden (Megazone), or you can make a joke about the Coleco Adam, possibly the worst home computer ever marketed to a confused American public. The choice is yours.

Not to give anything away (I think the spoiler warning has expired in a 20 year old film) but MEGAZONE 23 PART 2 ends its tired science fiction cliche of people living on a space ship so big they think they’re on Earth with another tired science fiction cliche of a small group of survivors left to repopulate a new planet. But that’s OK; you kind of want a familiar ending after the A-bomb test footage. Besides, if you’re watching MEGAZONE 23 PART 2 and aren’t focused on the visuals, you’re missing out, because the darn thing looks great. There’s a lot of rotoscoping and serious attention is paid to light and shadow and color and hair and clothes. There’s none of the fakey shorthand stuff so often seen in TV anime. Not that there aren’t outer-space giant robot laser gun battles in this film – there are, and plenty of ‘em – but there’s a real attempt to convince us that the high-tech and the low-brow exist in the same world. The animation’s reach sometimes exceeds its grasp, but even the less competent scenes have a punky charm.

eat hot lead, fascist pig transforming robot!

The dub pedigree of MZ23 2 is iffy; an English track by Intersound (the Robotech people) was included on a Japanese LD, but it never got a proper US release. I didn’t get my bootleg video pirate copy until 1988! ADV’s new dub ditches many of the earlier version’s more colorful moments; no longer do machine-gun toting punk chicks shout “EAT HOT LEAD FASCIST PIG!” while lighting up a police helicopter. However, the ADV script does actually acknowledge the existence of a PART 1, something the 80s version glossed over entirely, and dodges some of the production pitfalls of the earlier incarnation (hint: when a character complains about noise, it helps to actually have noises in the background). The voice work is smooth – almost too smooth at times for the characters, who, after all, are unemployed squatters with bad personal hygiene – but overall ADV’s version is professional and entertaining all the way.

Ultimately, in the face of the film’s climax, the valiant stand of the motorcycle teens against the adult world of authority winds up being pretty meaningless. Just like real life. Still, as director Ichirou Itano says in the accompanying interview, the real message of the film is the you should take defeat gracefully and move on to the next challenge with no regrets, because you did your best and it’s not your fault the world is filled with phonies, Holden Caulfield.

BD bulks up, gets fashion sense, punches Shogo's lights out

The interview is part of one of the disc’s extras, a fold-out poster. Itano, the inventor of the now-ubiquitous “missiles flying everywhere” visuals used in most SF anime, was given carte blanche to follow his bliss with MZ23 2, and the result is an anti-authoritarian epic with a heart and sharp as hell looks.

best use of multiplane camera rack-focus zoom ever.

Maybe you’re just looking for some 1980s revival anime, or if you always wanted to see the anime take on the Sid Vicious look, or if your jones for severe realism via Japanese cartoon character design wasn’t satisfied by AKIRA or JIN-ROH. If you want anime with colorful and unique characters, cosmic storylines, and plenty of property damage and beer, then MEGAZONE 23 PART II is where you need to be.

Next: probably not reviewing "Megazone 23 Part 3 Part 1", because that would involve me, you know, having to watch it.

MEGAZONE 23 PART ONE

Guest reviewer Shaindle Minuk gives us this review of MEGAZONE 23 PART ONE, which originally appeared in 2004 on the Anime Jump website, back when this DVD was new. You can now find it for as little as $3; definitely worth picking up.

Originally planned as a full television series, Megazone 23, released in 1985, wound up being a pioneer in the then-fledgling Original Video Animation market. It shares much of its creative staff with 1984's Macross: Do You Remember Love, in particular character designer Haruhiko Mikimoto (aka "Hal"), though in this case his design is limited to one character: pop idol Eve Tokimatsuri. Although the rest of the cast is designed by Toshitaka Hirano, Hirano's style is close enough to the Mikimoto school of design that there is plenty of visual consistency, while still ensuring that Eve has a slightly different look that makes her stand out from the rest of the characters. This is important, because Eve is most definitely not like other girls.



Megazone 23 Part 1 has actually been dubbed twice before into English, first as a semi-aborted attempt at a Robotech movie called Robotech: The Untold Story. New scenes were animated for this, and the dialogue strongly re-worked in order to link up the storylines to the Robotech TV series, but the movie only saw release for a handful of test screenings. It's just as well. A few years after this aborted franken-sequel, Carl Macek's Streamline Pictures released a reasonably straight dubbed adaptation to video, later ported to a bare-bones DVD release from Image. This new DVD version is, of course, a direct translation and of no relation whatsoever to Robotech or Macek's old Megazone 23 dub.

I don't want to describe too much of Megazone 23's plot, because there are a few interesting twists in the script-- and while it's not like they're going to BLOW YOUR MIND or anything (this isn't The Manchurian Candidate I'm talking about here) they were fairly innovative at the time and provided inspiration for subsequent popular entertainment on both sides of the Pacific. Suffice it to say that Shogo Yahagi is a fun-loving 18 year old who loves motorcycles and girls and supports these interests by working at McDonald's (an amazingly realistic touch for a science-fiction/fantasy anime hero). His existence becomes decidely less carefree the night his buddy Shinji shows him a weird-looking motorcycle enscribed with the word "Bahamoud." This bike is some sort of top-secret experimental weapon and Shinji quickly pays with his life for letting this little secret out of the bag when he and Shogo are surprised by duplicitous, mysterious government agent BD and his henchmen. Shogo makes off with the special bike and in short order finds himself way over his head-- no small feat when you consider the sheer enormity of his 80s hairdo.



And make no mistake, this anime is very much a product of the 80s. HOO BOY, is it a product of the 80s. The interesting thing about this is that there are very good reasons for the specificity of details, above and beyond the mere fact that it was actually produced in the 1980s. The setting, Tokyo in the mid 80s, is very deliberate and lovingly detailed. Street and neighbourhood names are rattled off by the characters, who spend their time in landmarks easily identifiable for anyone who's ever spent any time in that city. This versimillitude-- well, if you can suspend your disbelief for the presence of "video phones" and punkers who rock out to J-pop idol singers-- is necessary for the full impact of the revelations made in later scenes. Metaphorically, the story (like a lot of anime, really) could be described as a dramatization of the point where youthfulness collides with mature reality, the loss of innocence that occurs when you realize how creepy and corrupt and dangerous all the adults surrounding you are. Not unlike Catcher in the Rye's Holden Caulfield, the teenagers in Megazone 23 discover that the world is full of "phoneys".



English captions give your Japanese art books class

Of course, unlike Holden's New York City, the world of Megazone 23 is full of actual, literal phoneys. This again works well for the setting, because the 80s, especially Tokyo in the 80s, was an amazingly artificial time and place. The music is, fittingly, high-adrenaline mid-80s synth-pop without a single "live" instrument in the whole ding-dang score, and the three songs sung by Eve (seiyuu: Kumi Miyasato) are catchy and quite good, if you happen to like 80s-era J-pop (which I do). The first one, "Sentimental Behind My Back," notably contains what is probably J-pop's only reference to Jewish folk painter Marc Chagall, so what's not to like?




The design aesthetic of the anime is, as stated earlier, very good at providing a realistic setting for a fairly fantastic story. The character and mecha designs match up well in their balance between cartooniness and realism. The actions scenes are pretty well-animated, but the character animation is sort of lackluster. OVAs of this era tended not to have big budgets (the big bucks were reserved for feature films) and it shows here. It's not terrible, but it's pretty stiff and there's a lot of inconsistency, especially in scenes where character and mecha are shown together.



Just beat it

The DVD is of good quality and as is usually the case with DVD releases of old anime, the dust and brush strokes on the cels are clearly visible. Otherwise, it's a very good, clean print of the film. It's got some ads at the beginning but you can skip past them. The extras consist mainly of lots of pre-production artwork and a commentary track by the people in charge of the dub, anchored by one Matt Greenfield, which is interesting if you are into the early days of anime fandom in North America-- these folks are certainly qualified! There is also an insert with a lovely "Hal" painting of Eve on one side and a very interesting history of the development of the Megazone 23 storyline and characters on the reverse.



The psuedo-Shinjuku of MEGAZONE 23

I had one problem coming into this dub, which is that PEOPLE IN THE 1980'S DID NOT SAY "MY BAD" ARGH ARGH ARGH. Anachronistic slang really pisses me off. It's particularly odd given that the rest of the dub is almost self-conscious about the fact that the setting is firmly planted in the mid-80s, even going to the trouble of adding references to A Flock of Seagulls and whatnot in order to remain true to the era. The voices, by and large, are fine, not exactly the same as the Japanese voices (well, except the singing of course). Shogo seems less carefree and more, well, wussy in the dub, though, which didn't really work for me. Maybe they were trying to mitigate the scene in which he slaps romantic interest Yui during an argument by making him come off as harmless, I don't know. Speaking of which, that is really the most dated part of the whole video, big hair and idol singers aside. Back in the 1980s, it was actually considered acceptable for an anime hero to give his girl a slap if the occasion called for it. Of course here in North America we know better (DON'T WE?!) but Japan is obviously a different culture and aside from the somewhat slower rate that women's rights have gained ground over there, there's a certain precedence in Japanese culture for "slapping some sense" into people. So what seems really distasteful and inappropriate to us would probably just seem like par for the course to the Japanese. Nevertheless, if nothing else has improved about anime in the past 20 years, it is extremely gratifying to see that good-natured anime heroes don't go around slapping heroines anymore. (If anything, the pendulum may've swung too far in the other direction, but that's neither here nor there.)



Shogo and Eve at their day jobs

Aside from that, there are certain things that don't quite make sense when translated into English-- small talk about blood types, for example-- but otherwise it works out okay. There are changes to details of the dialogue, most of them presumably for either clarity or timing, and I can't figure out why everyone in it answers the phone by saying "Yes???" but otherwise it seems pretty close to the subtitled version. It's no Robotech: The Untold Story, anyhow, thank God.


All in all, I highly recommend this DVD for anyone with fond memories of this production's initial release, as well as anyone who likes a good urban science-fiction story. It's got motorcycles that transform into robots, bad guys who may actually be good guys, brainwashing, violence, romance, some tasteful sex scenes, some rather distasteful sex scenes, catchy J-pop, and references to the obscure 80s film Streets of Fire. I ask again, what's not to like?

next: Dave reviews MEGAZONE 23 PART TWO

Black Lagoon: Roberta's Blood Trail (OVA/2010/RUS) 16+

Роберта, террористка-горничная, боевик ФАРК, появившаяся в первом сезоне "Черной Лагуны" (в 8 серии), возвращается к нам в пятисерийной OVA. Действия будут происходить как в знакомом нам с вами Роанапуре, так и в других весьма экзотических местах.
Мы увидим всех героев оригинального аниме, плюс к ним добавится парочка новых необычных персонажей. События коснуться непосредственно команды "Лагуны", а вот куда приведут эти самые события - это вам и предстоит узнать, посмотрев данную 5-серийную арку, продолжающую оригинальное аниме.

Тип : OVA
Производство : Japan
Выпуск: : c 27.06.2010 по 02.03.2011
Жанр : приключения, комедия, драма
Количество эпизодов : 5
Аудио : RUS (Eladiel & Lupin)

Gakuen Tokusou Hikaruon

This is the kind of OAV that you get a copy of in 1987, watch once or twice, forget about in favor of the DIRTY PAIR movie or BUBBLEGUM CRISIS videos, and next thing you know it's 2011 and you're digging VHS tapes out of a box wondering what the hell "Hikariyon" is. Except the tape is labeled "Space Sheriff" and that's funny because the guy who labeled it “Space Sheriff", he obviously couldn't read even basic katakana. Yet he was the kind of guy who would insult the Japanese language skills of others. These are the kinds of people one was forced to deal with in "the good old days".







So let's just get this out of the way. You know about KAMEN RIDER and ULTRAMAN, right? You know about all the Sentai shows and the shows like DENJIN ZABOGA and SPACE IRONMAN KYODAIN and STARWOLF and all the wild live-action shows that sell toys to Japanese kids. Well, there's a subset of tokusatsu that's called 'uchuu keiji' which is charmingly transliterated as "space sheriff", though aficionados prefer the term "metal hero". Except there are "metal hero" shows that aren't "uchuu keiji" shows. Anyway... this concerns outer-space lawmen who come to Earth, specifically Tokyo, to battle evil outer space villians and monsters from other dimensions. Our Uchuu Keiji heroes transform into high-tech armor and use ray guns, light sabers, motorcycles, Mazda RX-7s, and the occasional super robot or giant dragon ship to fight for justice. The first "Metal Hero" series was UCHUU KEIJI GAVAN in 1982, followed by UCHUU KEIJI SHARIVAN in '83 and UCHUU KEIJI SHAIDER in 1984. Later the "Metal Hero" genre lost the Star Wars trappings and got more down to earth with shows like METALDAR, WINSPECTOR, and JANPERSON ("Fight For Justice!")







Meanwhile in 1986 the Japanese animation industry was in the midst of an original video animation boom. Home video was hot and rental shops needed product to keep people coming in the door. In America that meant keeping your local video store well stocked with VHS copies of "Down & Out In Beverly Hills" "Runaway Train" and "9 1/2 Weeks". In Japan this meant original, direct-to-video animation releases DIGITAL TARGET GREY, URBAN SQUARE, FANDORA, OUTLANDERS, DEL POWER X, COSMOS PINK SHOCK, something called "Pink Noise Volume 1 Call Me Tonight", and coming up in January 1987, Volume 2 of the Pink Noise series, Gakuen Tokusou ("Campus Special Investigator) HIKARUON.



The OVA boom meant freedom for animators as they were not limited by the constraints of merchandise-driven broadcast television or the dictates of the theatrical film industry Freedom! Expressed in this instance by AIC making the interesting choice to create an animated version of a Uchuu Keiji show. And that’s just what we get with HIKARUON.





Ms. Adzumi, Hikaru



Ms. Adzumi’s class at Ryotoku Academy High School has a new student, Hikaru Shihoudou. It also has a big problem with teenage suicides as we see in a pre-title sequence. Hikaru hasn’t even taken his seat before he runs afoul of the classroom bully, giant gang leader Gomi. Cutesy class vice-president Yayoi Shiina stands up to Gomi’s bullying, but her subsequent assault is interrupted by Hikaru and his ninja darts. Turns out Hikaru is, surprise, actually Hikaruon, a metal hero space sheriff tokusatsu super fighter. Together with Ms. Adzumi he infiltrates high schools, 21 Jump Street style, to battle Uraer, an evil monster from another universe who gains power by stealing the precious souls of high school students.





Classy cars, classy teacher outfits, hideous monsters.



After school, Hikaru walks Yayoi home and they’re attacked by Gomi’s street gang in a well-animated scene involving a tricked out Mitsubishi sports car. Clearly they’re on the track of the bad guys. The next evening Hikaru tracks down the ringleader while Adzumi puts on her miniskirt to investigate some nightclubs, and winds up assaulted by punk rock club ninjas. And I mean “assault” in the “clothes get ripped off and it's pretty clear there's a gang rape about to happen” sense. Because that's what we need in our Space Sheriff story, implied gang rape? Looks like superhero decadence hit the OVA world about twenty years early. If this was an episode of LAW AND ORDER SVU or a more adult-themed anime video like, say, the others in the “Pink Noise” series, sexual assault would be a thematic fit. But this is an animated video about a super hero in metal armor who fights for justice and says so while waving his arms meaningfully, and as such is meant for six year olds, and I don’t know how you raise YOUR kids, but my kids, if I had any, would be at least eight or nine before I start advising them to avoid nightclubs filled with punk rockers possessed by demons from the ultra-dimension.





Henshin!



Luckily the virtue of our female characters is well-protected. Yayoi, tricked into the evil Uraer dimension, is menaced by our evil Uraer monster, but Hikaru waves his hands and becomes, you guessed it, Hikaruon, complete with red and blue metal armor, laser gun, Justice Blade, super motorbike, and a habit of shouting the name of whatever special attack or gadget he's about to use. I am being very serious here when I say that this is a note-perfect animated version of a Uchuu Keiji television show, complete with motorcycle sidecar, flashing light sabers, and a mid-battle dimension jump. With his various high tech super weapons Hikaruon is naturally able to defeat Uraer, who as it turns out was really class president Amakusa in disguise. That’s a win for clean student government if there ever was one.





Backgrounds courtesy ultra dimension. Yayoi's outfit courtesy 1980s fashion sense



As to why AIC figured that the world needed an animated version of a show the world already had 100+ perfectly watchable episodes of - not a parody, not a loving homage, just a standalone episode of a show, as if there was a whole season of HIKARUON and this was just a sample – well, maybe we’ll never know. Director Kazuhiro Ochi worked on a whole raft of different series, from the 1980 TETSUJIN 28 to LADY LADY, FIST OF THE NORTH STAR, the animated version of the live action RAINBOWMAN, GOD MARS, and the HO-scale fighting robot show PLAWRES SANSHIRO and one imagines he’s a director who could handle damn near anything. What we see in HIKARUON is nothing special – you will see the same exact creepy, drippy ultra-gross space monsters in every OVA from this period, from ICZER ONE to YOTODEN to CRYSTAL TRIANGLE, and while the fight scenes are nicely animated, the show neither fully embraces nor breaks free of its source material’s grip as we saw in, say, ASSEMBLE INSERT or PREFECTURAL HIGH SCHOOL EARTH DEFENSE FORCE. However, for those looking for something extra in their animated versions of live-action hero genre shows, we’re given some ultra-creepy attempted rapes. Go HIKARUON! Go right back to 1987 and stay there.



edited for stupid