That's right, we're starting the column with anime. This one just hit stores last week.
And I doubt there's any better spot from which to appreciate the full potential of the art form, by which I mean the highs and the lows at once, than the mushy middle itself: Studio Gonzo. Founded in 1992 and home to precisely two billion animated productions, Gonzo can best be described as a steady-rolling conveyer belt of fan-friendly product, rarely inspired but frequently present, typically prone to wild variations in visual quality owing to the murderous schedules of high-volume television anime, although they do Original Video Animation (OVA) and the occasional movie as well.
‘Fan-friendly' is a tricky term, actually, since anime has become a global thing and Western money has gotten to be an important source of nourishment. Fans simply aren't the same all over. To illustrate this situation, I think it'll be useful to compare two recent successes from the Gonzo library; I don't want to set up a dichotomy or anything, but think of it as two prominent flags planted on the geography.
On one hand, you've got the hardcore otaku superfan region, best represented by a television series called Strike Witches, which concerns a crack squad of panty-clad 15-or-so-year-old girls who sprout magical animal ears & tails and blast off on thigh-high rocket boots to battle aliens as anthropomorphized WWII fighter aircraft. No, that wasn't a string of words chosen at random, it was merely an authentic premise gone so far down the rabbit hole of fandom obsession I half expect it'll be reevaluated as a lost gem of popular surrealism a decade or so from now, when we can all discuss panties more freely.
And then, there's Afro Samurai. The kind of show tailor-made for people who saw
Sword of the Stranger in theaters and tremble every night in anticipation for the dvd release of
Shigurui: Death Frenzy. So, me. And: the West?
The creation of one Takashi "Bob" Okazaki, an illustrator & visual designer by trade and hip-hop nerd by pleasure, Afro Samurai began as a series of dōjinshi (amateur manga) and toys centered around a big-haired swordfighter wandering around a fantastical sci-fi Japan/America/Everywhere Else setting; things really took off after an animated promo reel was commissioned, which piqued the interest of Samuel L. Jackson. A five-episode television anime was completed in 2007, budgeted at a handsome one million or so dollars per episode; Jackson starred, RZA scored, Spike TV aired, blood spilled, East met West, and it was forever sealed in stone that Gonzo actually could produce a consistent-looking series, given a small dump truck of cash parked in the lobby.
Okazaki also drew a proper manga series around the same time; both of its two volumes should be out in English now from Tor/Seven Seas. It shared the same basic plot of the anime -- brooding fighter Afro is after the villain that murdered his father and seized the world's #1 fighting headband -- but it didn't particularly
look like anime, or even a lot of manga (a much more varied thing). It mostly reminded me of some odd artifact from the ‘80s b&w comics boom you might pluck out of a back issue bin somewhere, heavy on style and illustrative flair, and armed with the awesome, completely metal decision to color all the blood
red (didn't Tim Tyler try that?), but almost totally lacking in storytelling aptitude, be it in terms of plotting or visual flow.
As such, the Afro Samurai anime spoke well for tradition; its moody hero sliced through all sorts of crazy shit while his imaginary sidekick/alternate personality Ninja Ninja (also voiced by Jackson) cracked wise; the action scenes were pretty impressive and the designs fairly unique, even though its five episodes necessitated a dull quasi-romantic subplot and incessant dollops of backstory. Hey, remember - mushy middle.
Still, if you're like me and you thought it was alright, you'll be pleased to know the television movie Afro Samurai: Resurrection is an improvement in every department. Most of the main crew returns on both sides of the ocean -- star Jackson, composer RZA, director/storyboardist Fuminori Kizaki (now also co-writer with Okazaki and anime porn ‘n non-porn script hand Yasuyuki Muto) and character designer/animation director Hiroya Iijima (no, you haven't heard of most of the Japanese crew; Afro Samurai is by far their most prominent thing) -- but the 97-minute runtime is pared down to allow little more than setup, fighting, jokes and some extra space to underline the series' themes a dozen or so times.
The plot isn't much: Afro is sitting around after the events of the first show when surviving teddy-headed antagonist Kuma returns to abduct him and seize the #1 headband for the dominatrix-like Sio (voiced woodenly by Lucy Liu), a classically conflicted villain, in that she strives to intimidate Our Hero but struggles a lot too, presumably to avoid falling out of her minimal costume. Her life of tragedy is connected to Afro's violent antics in Series One, and her villainous scheme involves digging up the grave of Afro's beloved father and growing a clone of him with which to teach him the ways of familial torment!
That's already more detail than is likely necessary - know that Afro sets out to cut a lot of people with sharp things, sometimes in adaptation of scenes from Okazaki's manga. The animation quality remains fairly high, with a uniquely fluid sense of style (one prolonged fight scene is presented in a glossy, almost airbrushed-looking manner, for no apparent reason beyond maybe looking neat, which it does) and a gratifying devotion to detailed, tactile action with some underlying logic - stuff that's missing from a lot of ‘action' anime today, which tend toward stiffness and airless aesthetic conservatism.
Granted, the writing can only most charitably be described as workmanlike - action either crashes into Afro without warning or appears wherever he walks, unless something soppy and tragic is going on. The big theme is the same as last time: Afro may be an awesome fighter, but he's ultimately only a catalyst to further acts of violence that prevent meaningful change from ever occurring in the world. To put it in comic book terms, it's a drastically less sophisticated version of the kind of thing Garth Ennis was doing in The Punisher MAX - and The Punisher was pretty goddamned pulpy to begin with. But Afro Samurai also has no qualms about luxuriating in the violence it's pretending to decry as futile, which maybe puts it in the tradition of the grindhouse fodder that sat alongside that first great wave of martial arts movies in the US.
But hey - what about all that East-West fusion stuff? Hip-hop and samurai?
Ah, it mostly gets me thinking back to old(er) anime times. I'm hardly the first to mention this, but the sci-fi/horror touches mixing with violent, unrelenting action in this picture are strongly reminiscent of the later works of anime director Yoshiaki Kawajiri, a famed key animator turned oddball auteur who co-founded the great Madhouse animation studio and became a specialist in bloody theatrical and video pieces like Ninja Scroll and Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust - all projects that became wildly popular in the West, despite their sometimes limited success in Japan.
Indeed, recent years have seen Kawajiri shift specifically toward Western co-productions, like the anthology project The Animatrix and the OVA feature Highlander: The Search for Vengeance, which left him in an odd position - Kawajiri was and remains a sharp individual, and his appeal to the West has not prevented his unique methods from crashing into ideas about how he should behave. That Highlander project got taken off him and recut, while his long-rumored involvement in the recent Batman: Gotham Knight dvd may have resulted in his removing his (and his crew's) name from the final project, if he was truly ever involved.
In this way, Afro Samurai's brief similarities to Kawajiri's works say something about the continuing evolution of international-targeted anime, that often the anime attuned to ‘Western' tastes is steeped in the purely Japanese, the long running alchemy of outside influence and indigenous tradition, transformed into what's purely national. And then international - it looks like Gonzo has a nice relationship going with their North American partners. We'll see how it goes, and keeps going.
Joe McCulloch is the fist behind Jog - The Blog. He posts to The Savage Critics, and prints with The Comics Journal, Comics Comics and Bookforum. Via fists.
The Watchman is ©2008 Joe McCulloch.
