So, over the last year or thereabouts, I’ve been periodically rewatching some of the older animes I remember viewing way back when. This has been a mix of TV shows, movies, and OVAs. I recently completed re-watches of two of my favorite 1980s mecha shows, namely
Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam and
Armored Trooper Votoms, and at the moment I am (slowly) going through re-watches of both
Space Pirate Captain Harlock and the original
Legend of the Galactic Heroes. I am planning on reviews of all four series soon - or at the very least, the two that I have finished re-watching - but for now I’m going to say a few things about some of the ancient OVAs I’ve been unearthing and watching again.
Black Magic M66 - This is a classic OVA, and one of the titles that helped make the genre popular. Good animation and some dang good animation direction make this probably one of the best OVAs of the 1980s (although it is admittedly pretty much a Terminator rip-off). I watched this in the English Dubbed version (which I surprisingly had not seen before), and its actually quite impressive how well it still holds up.
Rating: 8/10; App. 45 mins.
Appleseed - An early GAINAX production, but frankly not one of their better efforts. The animation, art direction, etc. all seem horribly dated. The writing is also not great, and the story is full of plot holes. Even the original Japanese voice acting sounds a little lack luster. Overall, if you’re a fan of the original source material its probably worth a look, but anyone else will probably be somewhat disappointed.
Rating: 6/10; App. 1 hr 10 mins.
Gunnm I &
II (aka
Battle Angel Alita I &
II) - Good animation and art direction, but marred by an exceedingly compressed story. This OVA series digests the first several volumes of the manga into two half-hour episodes, and the resulting story is just a little too fast paced. Characterization suffers, and some of the more dramatic moments kind of fall flat because the makers were not able to more properly set them up. But still, it’s a good introduction to the
Gunnm/Alita series, and well worth a watch.
Rating: 7.5/10; App. 30 mins per episode (2 episodes).
Bavi Stock I &
II - Possibly one of the most obscure OVA titles to ever be released in the 1980s.
Bavi Stock I is by far the better of the two, with some very impressive animation and art direction (particularly in the chase sequences) and some pretty good writing.
Bavi Stock II, on the other hand, has a very noticeable drop in quality across the board from the first video - the animation is shoddier, the art direction is extremely basic, and the plot is almost laughably innane. Taken together the two videos do tell one complete story (more or less), but having the promise of the first video squandered by the shoddiness of the second makes it overall a bit of a disappointment. Still,
Bavi Stock is a pretty good example of the kind of OVA stuff that came out in the 1980s, when young animators started small companies in the hopes of coming out with their own hit products.
Rating: Bavi Stock I - 7.5/10; Bavi Stock II - 5.5/10; App. 45 mins each episode.
Bride of Deimos - A horror OVA. Not a great example of the genre, but not a terrible one either. Some pretty good animation and a few genuinely creepy moments.
Rating: 7/10; App. 30 mins.
Oruorane the Cat Player - This is an odd, mostly slice-of-life style anime. Basically, an out-of-work musician encounters an old man who has taught his cats to sing, and the two of them give a music concert on Christmas Eve. That’s pretty much the entire story. The whole thing feels like what an anime might be like if it were a Hallmark Cards holiday special. It’s a pleasant bit of holiday fluff but not much more, well worth it if you would like something cheerful during the holidays.
Rating: 6/10; App. 30 mins.
Greed - One of the earliest OVAs, and probably also one of the least sensical. The plot of this one meanders everywhere, from high fantasy to post apocalyptic SF to mystical mayhem. The animation is pretty choppy, and the acting sounds like even the voice actors were bored with it. Worse, plot holes abound and the ending is so convoluted that it borders on the absurd. Even if you are a fan of these early OVAs, I think it likely you’ll come away unimpressed.
Rating: 4.5/10; App. 55 mins.
Lovely-Girl Commando Unit Battle Skipper - An early anime from Takashi Watanabe, director of
Slayers and
Boogiepop Phantom. I have a confession to make: I have a soft spot for anime with absurd, completely unlikely, over-the-top, High School settings. Stuff like
Revolutionary Girl Utena, or the more recent
Armed Girls Machiavelism. Most of them are utter trash, and I fully understand that someone should be thoroughly ashamed for liking them. But still I watch them, and more than likely I’ll find myself enjoying whatever stupidity they dole out. Call them one of my Anime Guilty Pleasures.
Battle Skipper definitely falls in this category. Set at St Ignacio's Girl’s High School in Tokyo, the plot of this one basically has the five girls of the school’s Etiquette Club fighting the machinations of the President of their rivals, the school’s Debutante Club. To fight the evil President (who plans to use her position as a springboard to conquer Japan), the girls have 5 mechs and an inordinate amount of ordinance. Hilarity ensues. Honest, its stupid and brain dead, but then this sort of show was never meant to be high-angst drama. The only major complaint I have with this title is that it was an anime-original series in which only 3 episodes were ever produced; 25 years on, and I’m still waiting to find out what Sayaka Kitaouji’s next evil move is. Which, sadly, is a great illustration for one of the larger pitfalls of the OVA format: many of them were designed to be spring boards for longer series that never materialized. So aside from the fact that we’ll almost certainly never find out what happened next, I’m going to say that Battle Skipper is a great little brain-dead series that is certainly worth an hour-and-a-half of your time.
Rating: 7/10; App. 27 mins per episode (3 episodes).
