Optimus Prime: Awakening

Screened alongside the 40th anniversary re-release of The Transformers: The Movie, with this short playing directly after the main feature, director Joshua Wassung and The Third Floor's Optimus Prime: Awakening plays with metatextual concepts that would seem to go hand-in-hand with a toy franchise that is constantly reinventing itself. Disappointingly though, this funereal self-reflection is undermined somewhat by gauche pleas for further adventure. It's difficult though not to commiserate with Awakening's filmmakers. The short now carries the final performance of the late Peter Cullen as Optimus Prime and is therefore expected, quite unreasonably, to function as something of an epitaph for the actor as well as the role he became synonymous with. Beginning with Prime's death, as seen in The Movie, Awakening follows the flicker of the Autobot Commander's life force as it journeys into a machine afterlife to commune with a swirling intelligence that describes itself as a repository of all Cybertronian consciousness. 

Instead of Primus, the creator of The Transformers in the Marvel comics continuity, this is, seemingly, a God that they themselves have created, through millennia of warfare and struggle. While it does feel appropriate that a race of robots who are locked into a never-ending civil war - that has raged for millions of years and completely drained the resources of their home planet - would be ruled, from a remove, by an entity reminiscent of The Idea of Evil from Kentaro Miura's Berserk, it's genuinely weird to see the rhetoric of cosmic indifference being wielded as the precise summation of a character famously described by his voice actor as strong enough to be gentle. Really, the tension in the modern Transformers property is that adults (myself included) cannot disengage from a Saturday morning sales pitch that is nearly half a century old. Elements of Awakening speak to this fact directly, literally demanding that Optimus Prime lay down his vestments of office and stride, confidently into oblivion, but this effect is dulled by comparison to the work that precedes Wassung's film. 

Rather than cling weakly to life, like his tyrannical rival Megatron, the Prime of The Movie is almost ecstatic in his passing; commanding his subordinates not to grieve and quickly anointing a successor, assured that his knowledge and vitality will pass from this life into The Autobot Matrix of Leadership. This gleaming, crystal device a holy Cybertronian relic that promises relief in times of insurmountable hardship, inspiring a kind of religious reverence that crosses faction divides. That Prime was content to die then. It is we, the audience, who demand that he return in increasingly implausible and less impressive ways. Similarly, the vision quest that Prime is poked down by his haranguing cosmic overseer is not a tapestry of phantoms drawn from this dying robot's memories. Although we are suddenly transmitted into speculative moments of the Cybertronian civil war, the characters within them enjoy an agency that is both distinct from the events of the preceding feature and the voyage of enlightenment that Prime has been bullied into. These are not archetypes, within a fading consciousness, pulling this trembling mind in different directions. 

A battered and bloodied Bumblebee begs Prime not to depart while a beautifully rendered Megatron - who looks almost exactly like a John Stokes illustration from the 1986 UK Annual - is seen, in an aside that follows Prime's decision to depart, to take possession of a discarded Matrix. So, rather than unite the disparate sects of the Cybertronian race through mercy and understanding - perhaps even reestablishing some common ground with the D-16 aspect of Megatron, introduced in Transformers One - or physically pass the Matrix to another young subordinate, this Prime tosses the divine relic into a boiling pit and removes himself from the equation. An affection for Peter Cullen's crackling performance (and Frank Welker's come to mention it), as well as the weight of real-life events, smooth over this strange axial shift but it's difficult to shake the impression that, somewhere along the way, this piece was designed to function as a jumping off point rather than a sainted conclusion; a misbegotten pilot for an ongoing Transformers series without Cullen or his Prime. Such harsh economic considerations are nothing new for a property that has made it its business to sweep old toys off the animated tie-in board the second they're no longer for sale - no matter how beloved they are - but it registers as completely baffling that we are all supposed to solemnly nod that a fitting denouement for this character and that performance is to imagine that, in some tangential continuity, they never existed at all. 

My Bloody Valentine - To Here Knows When

Undertaker from Nightreign by KakoKito

Jeremiah Chiu - Plastic Mind / Elastic Machines

Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway

Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway is an animated Mobile Suit Gundam feature film that is completely disinterested in depicting its namesake powered armour in heroic or, really, even particularly exciting terms. Director Shukou Murase's film - adapted from a series of light novels co-written by series creator Yoshiyuki Tomino - relinquishes any sense that these towering machines are simply substitute, metal bodies for warring humans, preferring to depict them as the magnified horror of an international police state or a particular tempestuous form of aerial technology. When dealing with top-of-the-line suits, Murase's film obscures a relatable, human outline with layered designs that resemble an unholy mix of mythical predator and fighter jet. So, rather than build itself around futuristic armoured warfare, this flash of Hathaway leans much more heavily on the sociopolitical intrigue implied by the futuristic premise. 

We have an almost abandoned home planet slowly being bought up then fenced off by the ultra-wealthy while a cell of eco-terrorists busy themselves by attempting to assassinate members of this hoarder class ahead of an important cabinet meeting in Australia. Hathaway then is closer to a spy thriller or a police procedural than any familiarity with endless Bandai model kits might have you expect. Indeed, a pre-credit sequence set abroad a luxury passenger flight, that is shipping dignitaries between the Moon and Earth, is an opening gambit not just worthy of high-level James Bond filmmaking but exactly the sort of unassuming-then-explosive set-piece that should be utilised when introducing a new actor into the 007 fold. Hathaway Noa, our anchor in these events, foils this hijacking then (after introducing himself surname first to the audience) finds himself in the company of a young woman, named Gigi, who seems able to psychically intuit that which Noa would prefer not to share: rather than a post-graduate student of botany, Hathaway is actually a high-ranking member of the Mafty terror group. 

Hathaway lingers in Gigi's company, ostensibly to see if she intends to blow his cover, ending up as a vertex in an emerging love triangle. His competition? A Federation Colonel named Kenneth Sleg who is, actually, quite taken with Hathaway himself. Sleg threatens young, hot-shot Lane Aim - the kind of upstart character these narratives usually revolve around - that he'll happily replace this subordinate, as the pilot of the flight-capable Penelope, with Hathaway if Aim doesn't buck his ideas up. Hathaway, no stranger to human dynamics in which a tragic heroine is being pulled between ideological opposites, fixates on his role in this drama, almost seeming to contextualise the whole situation as something beyond his ability to influence. Hathaway though, through this romantic drama, finally allows himself to assume the role of an adult protagonist, rather than remain a child bystander. His longing is so despairing then as to be grimly metatextual. The abstracted and functionally useless persona that he has created for himself is commented upon, directly to him, by the few working class voices in the film as well. While Hathaway Noa strives towards a future in which the heavily polluted Earth is relinquished by mankind and left alone to heal, the taxi cab drivers and stall merchants struggling to make ends meet - with the threat of a forced expulsion by Federation jackboots hanging over them - would prefer it if he just did something about the fascists twisting the screws. 

Beach House - April Suzanne

Vangelis - Thermo Vision

Cable by Jesse Lonergan

Ex:Re - Radio Station

Destiny's Son

Destiny's Son (the film also known as Kiru) accomplishes so much with its scant, 70 minute runtime that, thinking back on it, you'd swear it was far longer. Director Kenji Misumi's film offers an unhurried and elliptical overview of a life lived within the strange, death-obsessed system of Bushido. Raizo Ichikawa plays Shingo, the child of an assassin who bumped off a black toothed concubine and the man who would be, in the fullness of time, her executioner. Misumi's film doesn't belabour this point but Shingo does, therefore, seem to have an uncanny aptitude for extinguishing lives. Forced to compete in a local Kendo tournament - and pressed to wield a real katana rather than a bamboo sword - Shingo proves so intimidating that he unseats a twirling champion just by adopting an unusual stance and staring straight at his opponent's throat. These abilities never take hold of Shingo though, he remains almost childlike in his desire to seek father figures who delight in his expertise. Perhaps the strength of Destiny's Son is that it immerses us in the thought patterns of someone who has been thoroughly deranged by his closeness to so much death? 

Cinematographer Shozo Honda captures images both alluring and alarming; while editor Kanji Suganuma ensures that these striking tableaux intrude just at the right moments, when Shingo is at his most troubled. Presumably a virgin, Shingo has little interest in taking a wife and drunkenly boasts that he cannot dishonour the memory of three women who are important to him. Cherished recollections of a bratty younger sister, who was murdered by jealous rivals, and second-hand reports of a mother he never knew make a juvenile sort sense when considering Shingo's reluctance to connect with another but it's the third woman who represents a more adult, and even alarming, perspective. Masayo Banri's Sayo was thrust suddenly into Shingo's life with an edict to protect her from a gang of rampaging samurai. When her brother came under attack, and looked to be losing, Sayo disrobed and placed herself between her brother and his assailants. Quickly struck down by her enemies, flickers of her boldness clearly lingered on with Shingo. It's only as the film begins to wind down that we fully understand the impression that she actually made. Shingo's recollections revolve around her nakedness: strings of her dark hair matted to a sweating neck or a dribble of blood that slowly snakes towards the cleft of her pale chest. As he sadly heaves a sword into his own body, we learn that death carries an erotic charge in the mind of this deeply depressed man. 

The Avalanches - Far Away feat. John Glacier and Khadija Al Hanafi

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Shredder by Alexye

Mitski - My Love Mine All Mine

Appleseed

A lesser adaptation of a Masamune Shirow manga, director Kazuyoshi Katayama's Appleseed doesn't come close to scaling the same cyberpunk heights as either of Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell features or Science Saru's recent The Ghost in the Shell television series (and, if we're being completely honest, this OVA isn't in the same league as Black Magic M-66 or Manga Video fav Dominion Tank Police either). Although Katayama's film fails to adequately translate the core appeals of the Appleseed manga - a beautifully rendered work that is, as the volumes go on, increasingly a futuristic, special tactics slice-of-life seemingly informed by newsagent holds on every motorcycle engineering or firearm magazine the author can lay their hands on - it does develop dropped threads about human estrangement in a seemingly perfect city built by androids. 

In a way this dull, chummy film even anticipates Oshii's Patlabor: The Movie (released the following year) by beginning with a stylised suicide that, in the fullness of the story, spells doom for this forward-looking city. Cop-turned-terrorist Calon Mauthos, who conspires with cybernetic criminals to hand over an enormous gun platform to deliberately ill-defined foreign interests, actually acts upon the alienation that is threaded throughout the first two volumes of Shirow's manga. This bubbling sense of disaffection with utopia was promptly dropped as Shirow developed as a draftsman of speculative weaponry, knife combat and muscular female physiques. Pleasantly rather than expertly realised by a pre-Gunbuster Gainax, this Appleseed plays like a bigger budget pilot episode for an unrealised TV series. Sort of like The Real Ghostbusters for Combat Magazine and Monthly GUN subscribers. 

King Geedorah - Monster Zero

M83 - Blister Sunrise

Dengekiman by Shoko Nakagawa

Bert Jansch - Open Up The Watergate (Let The Sunshine In)

The Death of Robin Hood

Writer-director Michael Sarnoski's The Death of Robin Hood is a film of two halves and, as it happens, two aspect ratios. The first, weaker section is a muddy, 'scope reorganisation of Sherwood Forest mythology with Hugh Jackman's gruff outlaw living in a fog-shrouded wilderness, pursued by the youthful descendants of his many victims. In this pointedly revisionist telling Robin Hood does not redistribute wealth from corrupt nobles and is instead a pitiless bandit who has killed more people than he cares to count. As well as clawing the life out of the middle-aged men attempting to settle some forgotten score, Robin is pressed (only very lightly) in this section to kill a woman and blast an arrow through the head of a child. This latter detail placing Jackman's Hood in the same cinematic company as Henry Fonda's Frank from Once Upon a Time in the West or Clint Eastwood's William Munny from Unforgiven. They are all men who have indulged too greatly in their evil and cannot, therefore, hope for redemption. 

The muck-caked misery of this opening act is somewhat marred then by an approach to violence that teeters on the absurd, with Jackman's ferocious highwayman able to force torches through the blubbering, blancmange-like bodies of his enemies. Presumably a front-end packed with such gruesome incident is a sop to back-end that is almost completely still and meditative. Sarnoski twists fragmented ballads of courteous outlaws - that date back to the earliest days of the printed press - to arrive at a piece that presents like a half-remembered slither of Arthurian legend. The height and width of the film changes to a more European standard while cinematographer Pat Scola fills his frame with landscapes that are crafted out of faces. So, although Jackman's snarling, horizontal Santa struggles to come to terms with his truly awful past, Jodie Comer's prioress and Faith Delaney's Little Margaret are seen to bask in the strange stability that this chained animal offers. Unable to lift a weapon or otherwise retreat from this Avalonian isle, Jackman's Hood detaches from his mainland persona and begins talking through thoughts and feelings that are unencumbered by levity or cod psychoanalytical insight. Instead, we have the final address of a monster teetering on the edge of an oblivion proposed, centuries earlier, by the Roman poet and philosopher, Lucretius. 

Mitch Murder - Hurricane

Tarn by IBI

Sakanaction - Wasurerarenaino

Black Magic M-66

Very loosely based on the "Booby Trap" chapter from Masamune Shirow's Black Magic series, the mangaka's debut work in the comics field, Black Magic M-66 dispenses with the self-published story's interest in Venusian political intrigue, preferring instead to transplant an interlude regarding doll-faced robots into a more familiar, near future setting. As well, and unlike other concurrently produced adaptations of Shirow's work, Black Magic has the writer-illustrator's fingerprints all over it. He wrote, storyboarded (these delightful scribbles later released in their own right by Shirow's Japanese publisher, Seishinsha), and co-directed the OVA with Hiroyuki Kitabuko, ensuring that this video cassette release captures a career at a specific moment - when his interests where attractively drafted women in tense cyberpunk environments; long before pornographic art books with overly expressive names like Greaseberries became the totality of his output. 

Although Shirow's original work prefigures the release of James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd's The Terminator by a year, the malfunctioning and much more easily defeated androids of his amateur work didn't have any specific targets programmed into their circuit brains, instead driven by a petty vindictiveness planted via psychic suggestion. For this breathless, rental tape feature the M-66 cyborgs are redesigned as armoured marionettes, capable of moving their human-like bodies in impossibly fluid ways, and tasked with eliminating a helpless damsel who is introduced in her underwear. Essentially one long chase sequence, with an investigative reporter named Sybel as the protector character, Black Magic represents something of an ideal in OVA releases: it lifts liberally from big screen sources - Aliens, Blade Runner and First Blood are all in the mix - but this material is explored in ways that would be almost impossible for live action filmmaking of that period to portray. So not only do implacable cyborgs toss around soldiers (and their armoured transport) with wild abandon but futuristic buildings contort and collapse around our hapless heroines, leaving them dangling on scaffolding above a neon-lit abyss while a glitching Machinenmensch closes in. 

Czarface Meets Frankie Pulitzer - Mad Technology feat. Method Man

Optimus Prime by Birdie