Saturday night Sci-Fi: Monster City & Dangaio

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Begins @ 12am. I'm sure this has been shown before, although I don't remember if I saw it all...

Monster City

Ten years ago, the evil Levi Ra killed Kenichiro Izayoi and cast him into the fiery pit. Ra is the earthbound emissary of the demon world, and is preparing to open the portals to all his devilish allies. Only Kenichiro's son Kyoya can stop him, assisted by Sayaka, the daughter of an elder statesman (who has just abolished nuclear weapons and solved the Arab/Israeli problem), and Chibi, a midget on roller-skates. Kyoya and friends must walk into the demon-infested wasteland at the heart of Tokyo and stop Levi Ra before it is too late.

Based on a novel by Wicked City's Hideyuki Kikuchi, and directed by Wicked City's Yoshiaki Kawajiri, Monster City is at least partly responsible for the popular mainstream notion that "all anime are the same". Opening with the stark red/blue colour palette so beloved of Kawajiri, its lead character is a dead ringer for his Goku Midnight Eye. Its plot is not 100% dissimilar to Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Demon Womb, which also features a demon world trying to enter our own, and a climactic battle at the Shinjuku skyscrapers.

There is little, in fact, to distinguish Monster City (aka Hell City Shinjuku, aka Demon City Shinjuku) from a number of similar films, many made by the same Madhouse studio in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Strangely paced, with long spells of silence broken by cheesily awful music, its ending is surprisingly anti-climactic. One gets the impression that the crew were all working on autopilot, a feeling unchanged by the listless English-language dub, which inexplicably gives half the cast Tex-Mex accents. Listen out for some classic Manga Entertainment "fifteened" dialogue, including: "I'm gonna tear his head off and shove it up his ass!" Sayaka, however, has an alien quality brought about by that distinction that is so rare in anime dubs: a British accent.

When trying to sum up Monster City, words like passionless and perfunctory spring to mind. A Ben Kenobi clone, telling a Luke Skywalker clone to avenge the 'death' of an Anakin Skywalker clone is a little too off-the-peg for my liking, especially when he goes looking for his father's sword. The wasteland at the heart of Tokyo is too like Akira. One apparent steal, however, is no such thing. An early shot showing Levi Ra almost split in two, then repairing himself instantaneously, may have been plundered two years later by James Cameron for Terminator 2.

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Begins @ 1:30am

Dangaio

Four kids (Mia, Pai, Lamda and token male Roll) are abducted and brainwashed by the kindly (!?) Professor Tarsan and trained to become warriors in the fight against the pirate Galimos. They later discover that their planets were destroyed by the invaders (who keep their armour on indoors so the animators didn't have to move their lips) and that the kids' powers are the last thing that prevents the end of the universe.


In Japanese 'dan' is a bullet, 'gai' is a criminal investigation and 'oh' is a phoenix. And no, I don't know why it's called that, either. If watching Dangaio makes you feel like you've been thrown into a series halfway, that's because you have been. For reasons known only to themselves, Manga Entertainment, the UK's largest Anime distributer, cut the first episode of this three-parter down into a ten-minute prologue.

The Eighties anime industry, still taking tottering steps into the world of straight-to-video science fiction, had a lot of trouble working out what to give its audience. Boys who had grown up watching kiddie shows that featured giant transforming robots were now grown-up twentysomethings with video recorders, and Dangaio was one of the many experiments aimed at bringing them back. But it pushes many of the wrong buttons; the amnesia sub-plot is a lame excuse for long exposition scenes and huge holes in the plot, and it contains many of the flaws of children's shows, without exploiting their appeal. The end result is a show that imitates the big robot fights (originaly designed to sell toys), and includes a psychic-weapon subplot influenced by the adult comic Akira, which was released as an anime itself halfway through the Dangaio series.

The dub is typical of the translations of the period; listen out for the tell-tale 'bloodies' and occasional asides like Pai's darts slang ('One hundred and eighty!') that mark this out as a British dub, made with American accents in an attempt to secure US distribution.

Director Toshiro Hirano specialised in giant-robot science fiction shows like Iczer-One and Zeorymer, but his crew went on to change the way that these shows were made, and were responsible for some of the most well-received anime in recent years. That sudden scrape of fingernails-on-blackboard that heralds the first attack is an excellent use of sound design, from Armitage III's Yasunori Honda. Animation director Hideaki Anno went straight from Dangaio to direct his own show, Gunbuster. Five years later he would film the 'last word' on giant robot shows, the apocalyptic Neon Genesis Evangelion. The three robot designers on the show are all now directors in their own right: Shoji Kawamori made Macross Plus and then took giant robots into a fantasy setting with The Vision of Escaflowne. Masami Obari slummed it for a while making martial arts shows like Shadow Skill and Toshinden, before returning to science fiction with a venegeance as the director of Virus Buster Serge.

Note also the careful balancing of the sexes amongst Dangaio's protagonists. Producer Toru Miura realised early on that that a primarily male audience would prefer to watch a lone boy (Roll) amidst a gaggle of gorgeous girls (Mia, Pai and Lamda) rather than a load of sweaty blokes in spacesuits. Miura went on to perfect this eye-candy formula in one of the Nineties' most successful marketing-led shows: the Tenchi Muyo series.

Sci·Fi Watcher's Guide by Sci·Fi Watcher's Guide by Jonathan Clements - Taken from the Sci Fi website, all courtesy of Johnathan Clements. He's gonna find out about this one day and may come-a-looking for me :{

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Monster citys a 1/2 decent watch, don't expect anything amazing from it. :|

Dangaio, i'm sure i saw that years ago, just thinking about the story line. Quite good if i remember correctly :)