Review: Redline

Anime is no stranger to excess. In fact, that’s what gave it such an advantage in decades past, when other venues of animation played it safe and boring. Yet anime goes for the wrong kind of excess all too often, losing itself in predictable violence, unvarnished misogyny, toy-fueled pandering, and, most recently, hyper-cutesy piffle aimed at the socially withdrawn. Even the few worthwhile anime creations from recent years are reserved, cuddly fare like Ponyo and Summer Wars or thoughtful snails like The Sky Crawlers. It’s been far too long since a film embraced that excess, that visceral glee and magnificent stupidity that made people sit up and notice this crazy anime thing in the first place. Redline does that.


Redline lands deep into an advanced future, though a profusion of starships and hoverspeeders hasn’t killed civilization’s fondness for cars. So there’s a circuit of combat racing that culminates in a cross-planet rally called the Redline (think Wacky Races, F-Zero, and Death Race 2000). Sweet JP, a heavily pompadoured young punk, wrecks his way into the big race after losing a qualifier to fellow human Sonoshee McLaren. The two plunge into the Redline alongside the simian cop Gori-Rider, his criminal rival Todoroki, the vicious superhero Lynchman, the odd team of the elfish Trava and the lobster-like Shinkai, the Superboins pop duo of Boiboi and Bosbos, and the previous Redline champion, a cyborg called Machinehead. Their racetrack is the whole of Roboworld, a bellicose and heavily armed planet that vows to throw its entire military at these high-speed trespassers.


That’s really all you need to know. Redline doesn’t waste your time with hard-science prattle or meaningless background. It’s too busy looking good. Strike that—it’s too busy looking fucking amazing. Director Takeshi Koike and co-creator Katsuhito Ishii hit on a strange style that recalls both Peter Chung and dark ‘90s anime, and they imbue every inch of the film with heavy shadows, beautifully animated detail, and enough sexual imagery to fill a hot-rod magazine. The backgrounds swarm with enough bizarre aliens to beggar Star Wars. Vehicles heave and rush. Explosions pulse and twist the air. Characters look gorgeously distinct without clashing. And it all meshes with a slick little soundtrack. Redline shows the seven years’ of work that went into it, and it begs to be paused and dissected frame by frame, just to properly appreciate every little touch.


Yet Redline has to slow down sometime, and that’s where it loses a little of its impact. The film opens with a stunning race and climaxes with an absolutely brilliant one, and in between lies a good 45 minutes of building things up. It’s a fairly routine story of betrayals, personal grudges, and mob conspiracies, but the stunning look brings it up to new standards. It’s a shame that the film isn’t even longer, as a few interesting points are lost in the big race. What’s the connection between Machinehead and Sonoshee, who both have high-powered Steamlight fuel? Is planet Supergrass, a pink-hued realm of sorceresses, backing Redline just to piss of the Roboworld elite? And who are those Roboworld revolutionaries, anyway?

And you know what? It doesn’t matter. JP and Sonoshee are a hero and heroine seen many times before, but they’re also cute as can be. There’s more to their little meeting than competitive sparks, and Redline shows it all instead of telling. Every character’s brought to life with great visual flourishes: Shinkai’s crustacean squawking, Machinehead’s polite menace, the tears streaming from super-sensitive Roboworld officer Deyzuna. And then you have the Super Boins and their transforming Go Nagai fem-roadster, such a preposterous sendup of sensual cartoon women that it’s hard to be offended.


In fact, Redline’s vision raises anime clichés to beautifully absurd pop-art. Highly personal animation is normally confined to short films, but Redline is a full-length indulgence of what Koike and Ishii want, whether it’s an enraged dog-man racer or a string of sexual metaphors that stretches all the way from a destructive infant-monster to a bright pink finish line. For someone who worked on director Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s Ninja Scroll and Wicked City, Koike emerged with surprisingly upbeat tastes. He shares none of Kawajiri’s trademark Issues With Women, and Sonoshee’s inevitable team-up with JP isn’t as sexist as it first appears. For that matter, the film’s overlying conflict sees the feminine Supergrass society vex, defeat, and literally shatter the edifice of a phallic, warlike, and comically male-dominated dictatorship.

It all turns Redline into a rapid-fire rebellion against the grim and brutish animation that Japan bred throughout the 1990s. For all of its explosive energy and manly overtures, it's a joyful rush that rarely dips into gruesome territory. The race even discards its air of macho, competitive techno-fetishism in the grand finale, when JP and Sonoshee stick to something more important. It nicely caps the film’s mockey of cynical, violent entertainment, thereby resisting mockery itself. Yes, the ending is silly. So is the rest of Redline, if you haven’t noticed.


Redline’s voicework diverges a bit between the Japanese and English tracks. Takuya Kimura’s a friendlier JP than Patrick Seitz, and Yuu Aoi puts in a little more energy than Michelle Ruff when it comes to Sonoshee. On the other hand, Liam O’Brien pulls off the better version of Frisbee, JP’s mechanic and co-conspirator. Special credit also goes to Derek Stephen Prince for making Deyzuna sound a lot like Brak from Adult Swim’s The Brak Show. The dub script does suffer from some strangely anachronistic profanities, though. It’s never on par with Angel Cop, but it’s jarring to hear racers of the distant future merrily call each other cocksuckers.


It’s sad to think that Redline might arrive too late. The film already flopped among Japanese audiences, and perhaps it won’t become a cult favorite in the West. It lacks the cynical bite of Akira or the existential tones of Ghost in the Shell, and it doesn’t enjoy the barren playing field that helped both films back in the 1990s. The average geek is no longer impressed by the simple idea of weird cartoons from Japan.

But there’s still hope. No matter the era, Redline is amazing to watch. It looks like nothing else ever animated, and its visual depths reject anime’s nastier elements. Koike and Ishii captured the right sort of excess with Redline. If enough people give the movie a chance, they just might capture it again.

Little Things: The Guardian Legend

It’s very hard to find an NES game with a decent story—or any story at all, for that matter. Many of them have premises, introductions, motivations, conversations, and perhaps a theme or two, but rarely does an NES title assemble a fully coherent and vital narrative. The Guardian Legend, Compile’s amazing shooter/RPG hybrid from 1989, certainly doesn’t. Yet it has all the story it needs.

With only a screen's worth of expository text, The Guardian Legend hurls a transforming jet-android woman at a planet-size asteroid headed for the Earth. Once the heroine (in her spaceship form) breaches the big rock’s outer defenses, she’s greeted by a harsh message.


“If someone is reading this…I must have failed," confesses the narrator of The Guardian Legend’s meager backstory: the asteroid, Naju, housed a proud and civilized race before it was overtaken by some deep-space menace. The message’s author was the only survivor of this attack, and he or she mounted a last-ditch attempt at destroying Naju from within. After explaining just how this can be accomplished, the author closes with a haunting reminder: "I hope this message will not be read by anyone...It will mean that I have failed."

It’s a simple introduction, swiped from any number of films and novels where a final desperate message sets the stage for some horrific danger, but it’s particularly effective in The Guardian Legend. It’s a game without much background, and the heroine herself is never properly named during the adventure (she’s dubbed “Miria” only in the Japanese version’s manual). This brief missive accounts for most of the game’s dialogue, and in that minimalism lies power. Accompanied by the somber chirps of the soundtrack, the message lays out a bleak challenge and makes sure you know that your only real ally, someone who actually knew what to do, has been dead for a long time. You’re all alone in this.


Well, not quite. Venture into one of the adjoining rooms, and you’ll meet Compile’s mascot Randar, who sells you weapons and never stops smiling. He offers no further reassurance, but the big blue corporate icon makes Naju and The Guardian Legend just a little less forlorn.

Might Have Been: Nuts & Milk

[Might Have Been tracks the failures of promising games, characters, and companies. This entry covers Hudson Soft's Nuts & Milk.]

Nuts & Milk has a small place in the equally small history of video games. It made the rounds as a simple maze-based game on various Japanese computers, but when Hudson remodeled it for the Famicom in 1984, Nuts & Milk became the console's first title released by a third-party publisher. Considering what else was fighting for space in the Famicom’s early years, Nuts & Milk wasn’t a bad game—it just had an unfortunate title for English speakers.


When one stops snickering and actually plays the game, Nuts & Milk reveals itself as an entirely harmless imitation of early ‘80s arcade culture. Players control Nuts, a pink blob who traverses levels of planks, pipes, and brick in search of his girlfriend, Yogurt. To properly rescue her, Nuts much collect all of the fruit in any given stage while avoiding his rival Milk, whose blue skin apparently brings instant death to Nuts and his kind. And Nuts must do this in 50 different levels, harried by multiple clones of Milk.

It’s all very simple, but it’s not quite as cleanly programmed as appearances suggest. Just like Donkey Kong and its legions of single-screen imitators, Nuts & Milk works against the player in many little ways. Nuts has trouble jumping when he's on wooden floors or against a wall, and a lot of his fruit-gathering solutions involve properly calculated falls. Particularly frustrating are the springs that bounce Nuts up to greater heights, but only if the jump button’s pressed at exactly the right nanosecond.


The game also looks very much its age, though there’s some appeal in the characters. Nuts and Milk are early examples of the blob-with-eyes design trend that would mold countless characters and corporate icons in the Japanese game industry of the 1980s. The finest little touch comes when Nuts falls from a decent height and lies immobile for just a moment, with a look of perfect befuddlement on his barely extant face.

There are few bonuses in Nuts & Milk. As in Donkey Kong, Hudson offers A and B games, but the only difference is the presence of hot-air balloons (which kill Nuts) and helicopters (which award points) throughout the stages. The real extra is a level editor akin to that of Lode Runner. It’s rather easy to use with a stock controller, and the basic tools of Nuts & Milk provide some clever layouts. The game also gives you a “ROUND ERROR” if you try to trap Nuts and his foes in some twisted, unwinnable 8-bit hell. Hudson wanted this to be a happy game, so don’t make it anything else.


Nuts & Milk was never released in North America, perhaps because it seemed basic and cliché by the time the Nintendo Entertainment System launched in 1985; indeed, games like Nuts & Milk became downright ancient with the advent of Super Mario Bros. If Nuts & Milk was to have a place in the NES lineup, it would’ve come in the first wave of titles, alongside Kung Fu, Clu Clu Land, Wrecking Crew, and, of course, Donkey Kong. A renamed Nuts & Milk could’ve had early Nintendo owners across America spelling profanities with bricks and pipes.

Yet Nuts & Milk went no further anywhere in the world. Hudson re-released the Famicom version for cell phones and the GameBoy Advance, while the game’s often found in those 1000-in-1 pirate game consoles hawked at mall kiosks. There has been no sign of a Nuts & Milk sequel.


There is, however, this curious blue blob seen in Mickey Mousecapade, a mid-'80s NES game developed by Hudson (and published in the U.S. by Capcom). Give it feet, and you’d have Milk. Even if it's not the same character, it’s still a sign of how rapidly the NES library evolved. Fifty single-screen levels became a meager offering by 1987, and one game’s main villain could easily be another game’s lowly stooge.

Tape Test: Twilight of the Cockroaches

[Tape Test covers notable anime available in North America only through old VHS releases. This installment looks at Twilight of the Cockroaches, released by Streamline Pictures in the 1990s.]

“Franz Kafka Meets Roger Rabbit,” proclaims the cover of Twilight of the Cockroaches. It almost fits. Like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? this odd half-anime film from 1987 has live actors next to cartoon characters. And like Kafka’s "The Metamorphosis," it’s…uh, it has roaches. Well, humanoid roaches. Even though Kafka’s story wasn’t necessarily about a roach. Oh well. I sympathize with whoever had to describe Twilight of the Cockroaches in a short tagline, and the Kafka one has a sharper ring than “Watership Down With Roaches” or “A Bleak Anime Version of Joe’s Apartment.”

Life is pleasant for the roaches in the bachelor pad of one Mr. Seito. They frolic amid dirty dishes, they swim in the toilet, and they fly where they please, all without Seito caring a whit. They have roach politicians, roach nightlife, roach class prejudices, and a roach holiday that commemorates a tragic loss of roach life. And if this isn’t an obvious enough allegory for the Japan of the 1980s, there’s even a meretricious morning-news show run by roaches. But the bugs aren't accurately insectile blattella asahinai. These roaches are largely humanized anime characters with antennae, an extra set of arms, and glovelike flippers where their hands should be. Fables about mice or rabbits get semi-realistic animal heroes, but biologically accurate roaches don't appeal to viewers so much.


All of this glorious roach opulence isn’t enough for Naomi, a 19-year-old (insect years, I assume) roach girl. She’s bored with her milquetoast fiancé Ichiro and generally discontented with the roach lifestyle. So she’s quite intrigued when a strange roach named Hans arrives at the Seito pad.

Hans brings the placid Seito roaches stories of his home, where roaches are systematically hunted and exterminated by humans. And no one’s more fascinated by it than Naomi, who likes Hans for his grim demeanor as much as his square-jawed German manliness. So when Hans departs for his native land like the dutiful soldier he is, Naomi follows. And she finds the adventure she so vaguely pined for. Hans and his fellow roaches live an apartment where a fastidious woman hauls out bug spray and shoes to rain death upon her unwanted tenants each night. She’s also lonely, and so, it seems, is Seito. And they’re neighbors. And so destruction is sown for the hedonistic roaches who in no way represent 1980s society.


Director Hiroaki Yoshida meant Twilight of the Cockroaches as a message for modern Japan, and it's a pretty simple one. Yet another tale of creatures undone by materialism and ignorance, it veers into muddled, cautionary terrain without much in the way of solutions. The film’s at its most enjoyable when parodying the relationship between humans and ancient pests: the roaches of Hans’ army are militant in their defense of roach life, right down to a marching anthem about roach birth rates. Yoshida's mixture of live-action and animation is hardly as smooth as Roger Rabbit (or even Cool World), but there's a much greater thematic divide between the silent, towering live-action actors and the scurrying, babbling cartoon critters. Yoshida also adds a brief stop-motion interlude in an attempt to make the film even stranger.


Aside from the talking feces, Twilight of the Cockroaches goes exactly where one expects. The roaches’ world crashes down all around them, the humans show no compunction, and there’s an uplifting little epilogue. Naomi’s affections for Ichiro and Hans are resolved, albeit in a strange way that wouldn’t work with human characters—or any vertebrates, for that matter. Still, the scenes of roach genocide have an undeniable impact, and the film has at least one genuinely unnerving moment when Naomi wanders into a roach motel. She’s stuck on a glue floor among slowly dying bugs, who thrash and starve in a shadowy grave. Nothing deserves to die like that.


Twilight of the Cockroaches received its U.S. theatrical release and dub courtesy of Streamline Pictures, and it has the usual round of competent actors reading occasionally bizarre lines. Rebecca “Reba West” Forstadt plays Naomi, and she considers it “my most bizarre role.” It’s a fair dub, though there's always the Streamline-fueled suspicion that the script's been needlessly altered.

DOES IT DESERVE A PROPER DVD RELEASE? Yes. Twilight of the Cockroaches may be routine beneath its partly animated surface, but that surface is something unique. What other films wring pathos from a roach shitting on a human’s face? What other films have bizarre, pseudo-fascist songs about the enduring roach race? What other films try to make you happy that a single roach can spawn an entire colony? Not very many, that's for sure.

Tape Test: The Awful Truth

I haven’t done much with Tape Test. With this week’s installment, I’ve put up only three entries in as many years. There’s a reason for that: everything is awful.

I should explain further. When I started Tape Test, I looked forward to writing about the various VHS anime that’s not yet available on DVD; I even had a stockpile of cheaply acquired tapes for starters. Of course, I knew that most of them would be mediocre, as the overwhelming majority of anime is, but I was convinced that I could find something interesting to say about each and every one of them.

I was wrong. There are indeed a few notable anime creations only released on VHS in the West, but the majority I’ve found are awful in the worst way: they’re hackneyed, boring, and completely devoid of valid entertainment. I realized a while ago that I didn't need to write thousand-word pro bono excoriations of DNA Sights 999.9, Explorer Woman Ray, Ehrgeiz, Ogre Slayer, Genesis Surviver/Survivor Gaiarth, Dragon Century, Raven Tengu Kabuto, Blue Sonnet, Luna Varga, Akai Hayate, AWOL, Grey: Digital Target, The Legend of Kotetsu, Roots Search, or the 1996 remake of Hurricane Polymar. Many of these I remembered all too well from that unfortunate time in my life when I was willing to watch just about any remotely promising anime the local Blockbuster or comic store had up for rental. I sat through Dragoon ten years ago, and I’m not doing it again. Not for free, anyway.

And that's what happened to Tape Test. As any critic could tell you, it’s not the worst of it that gets you. It’s the banal and unremarkably terrible.

Dreaming is Free, Games are Not

I haven't collected games in a while. I was into it thick and stupid for a few years when I lived in Ohio, because that's how your early twenties usually go: you want everything you didn't have when you were a teenager, and you finally have enough money and free time to enjoy it all. I gave up collecting upon realizing several things: most games weren't worth owning, I was just as content with emulating them, and amassing a huge library would turn me into the sort of person who regularly posts on forums like Digital Press and Atari Age without self-awareness or contempt. Yet I remember what it was like to visit flea markets and mom-and-pop stores, picking over crates of old NES games just in case there was a rare title or, better yet, a prototype of a canceled game.

Well, that's exactly what I dreamed of last night. I was at a flea market, in a game vendor's stall that had inexplicably sprung up in the ruins of a gas station. I was looking over a massive bin of NES cartridges. I was also telling myself that I was over this, that I didn't collect games any longer. But a small part of me still said "What if there's an unreleased game in all this? What if it's something no one's ever heard of before, like that Sunman thing? You can preserve it and put it online so everyone can play it! You'll be famous in a small niche of the Internet." So I kept looking, albeit with a slow, feigned casualness. Me? Oh no, I'm just glancing over these old Nintendo games out of passing interest. I'm not a huge nerd or anything. Not me, never.

Then another shopper, roughly my age, wandered up to a section of the bin I hadn't yet checked. He pulled out a cartridge and yelled in excitement, and I knew he'd found something amazing.

He held it up, and it was indeed rare: an NES game based on Operation Dumbo Drop.

I was left standing there, wondering just what lesson I'd been taught. Had I lost out because I hadn't been a good and devoted game-scavenging nerd? Had I let this previously undiscovered piece of history fall into the hands of someone who might never share it with the world? Did I even care that a game based on Operation Dumbo Drop was possibly lost forever? What if it was actually a good game, some unexpectedly decent piece by Natsume or Compile or Aicom?

But mostly I was left wondering if my dream was somehow rooted in fact. Was an Operation Dumbo Drop game ever announced for the NES?



No, it wasn't, but someone else asked about it. Perhaps this dream isn't mine alone.

The Dark Side of Captain Commando

Captain Commando was a veritable chameleon among game mascots. As mentioned in a recent feature at 1up.com, the Capcom icon started off as a box-art pitchman and went through two different designs in the 1980s. It wasn’t until 1991 that Capcom finalized his look with an arcade beat-‘em-up.

Captain Commando is a typical enough outing in the Final Fight tradition. The eponymous Captain and his three Commando assistants pound street thugs and monsters, and it's dressed in a futuristic style inspired by manga superhero tales and old serial adventures like Captain Future and Lensman. It’s also pretty mild as the violence goes. Sword-wielding enemies can cut the Captain in half, and the mummy commando, a.k.a. “Mack the Knife,” causes foes to disintegrate into skeletons when he defeats them. That's about it. These scenes were removed in the Super NES version of Captain Commando, and there wasn’t much to take out.


There’s nothing in Captain Commando to suggest that Capcom’s underlying vision for the game was a bloody procession of sadism and gruesome deaths. For that, you’ll have to read a promotional comic that Capcom made.

The first five pages of this comic were run in Capcom Illustrations, a 1995 collection of arcade-game artwork. Those pages are likely the work of company artist and Captain Commando planner Akiman, and the empty word balloons suggest that the project was never finished. A two-volume Captain Commando manga was released in 1994, coinciding with the Super NES version, but it seems to be a different production.


Our story begins with news of unrest at some scientific facility, and this alarms fully clothed passersby as well as couples engaged in pants-free leisure (remember to read these panels right-to-left). The suit-wearing man in the crowd looks like an older version of Captain Commando, and it’s the closest that this comic comes to including any of the game’s heroes. This is all about the bad guys, folks.


The broadcast cuts to footage of the facility interior, where some unfortunate guards are slaughtered by the forces of Captain Commando's end boss, Genocide first boss, Dolg. If you look closely at the bottom-right panel, you’ll see one of the game’s “Z” enemies slicing a guard in half. On the lower-left, Dolg snaps off another guard’s head, the first of several unpleasant sights in this comic.


Dolg, realizing that he’s on TV, seizes the last un-murdered guard and bites off the top of his head. An adept public speaker, Dolg keeps talking through a mouthful of brains and skull fragments. Meanwhile, the lab’s surviving employees are rounded up by yellow-hooded flunkies, all known as “Wooky” in the game.


Flanked by two “Carols,” Dolg confronts the lead researcher of the facility. One might assume this bespectacled scientist is important, but he never appears in the game. A displeased Dolg orders one of his underlings to show the good professor that they mean business, so a Wooky grabs a hostage by the head and... ewww.

The assembled thugs laugh while the professor winces in disgust. This scene is made slightly more unnerving by the fact that Wookies are the lowest-rung enemies in the game. They’re punching bags that are barely even dangerous in groups. It’s like seeing a grown man decapitated by one of those little blue slimes from Dragon Quest.


This horrifying display causes the next guy in line to lose his nerve, and he points an accusing finger at a fellow hostage. The absence of dialogue leaves no clue as to who this blonde woman is or why her identity creates a little question mark over one Wooky’s head. Perhaps she’s an undercover agent. Perhaps she knows whatever secrets the villains seek. Perhaps she’s Rachel, the daughter of the president of Sercia. The close-up suggests that she, like the professor, is a significant character, but she doesn’t appear in the game either.

Snitching on his comrade doesn’t do this poor sap any good, however. It only attracts the attention of one of the Carols, who electrocutes him with her prod-like daggers. Or maybe she’s shocking him with her embrace. Then again, a close look reveals that the current is arcing out of her ass. That’s somehow a fitting conclusion to this story.

So ends this preview of a Captain Commando comic that was perhaps never completed. It raises the question of what other violent, officially endorsed manga may exist for Capcom games, which rarely traipsed into Mortal Kombat territory. Is there a Street Fighter II comic where M. Bison mercilessly executes captive scientists? Is there a Final Fight comic where Rolento and Andore Jr. dismember innocent Metro City pedestrians and laugh at their screams for mercy?

Then again, a comic like this isn’t such a surprise. By their own admission, Capcom’s artists are regularly inspired by violent manga like Fist of the North Star, Battle Angel Alita, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, and even Apocalypse Zero. A brain-devouring giant is par for the course in the first volume of Battle Angel Alita, and murder by electric ass would be an unspectacular sight in the pages of Apocalypse Zero. Strange as this comic is, it's a good look beneath the surface of many a Capcom game.

Little Things: Wonder Boy in Monster Land

Wonder Boy in Monster Land may have a title both generic and silly, but it’s an important game in the history of Westone and their biggest series. The original Wonder Boy went through the motions of a rudimentary platformer (and spawned Adventure Island along the way), but 1987’s Wonder Boy in Monster Land slowed the pace while adding weapons, armor, shops, and other RPG-ish features. And so it started the franchise’s climb toward the fantastic Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap and Monster World IV.

Another thing about Wonder Boy in Monster Land: just about every foe has a death animation. Most side-scrollers of the NES and Sega Master System didn’t bother with this; enemies exploded, flickered, or flipped off of the screen upon dying. Wonder Boy in Monster Land, on the other hand, gives each defeated creature a single-frame demise.


The most striking one comes from the mushrooms that amble toward Wonder Boy in the early stages of the game. At first, they look sedate and dutiful.


Then Wonder Boy stabs one, and its face changes to a look of pure agony. The creature’s final half-second on Earth is spent in tearful horror, gazing not toward Wonder Boy but out at the player. Or perhaps it’s looking at the vast spectrum of all it'll never be, at everything it longed to do with its brief fungal existence. A glimpse of a life unfulfilled torments this mushroom soldier, who couldn't even be a Goomba in Super Mario Bros., just before it vanishes from the world, leaving behind nothing but the stink of regrets. And a shiny coin for Wonder Boy.

Many other enemies in the game have little death throes, but nothing so memorable as the mushroom underling. And Wonder Boy? He doesn’t react at all. As I pointed out years ago, Wonder Boy is a bit creepy.