Lensman

A fast and loose animated adaptation of EE 'Doc' Smith's science fiction novels that is, really, best understood, contextualised and appreciated through the enormous success of another work that drew significant inspiration from the series, George Lucas' Star Wars. Cyberpunk supremo Yoshiaki Kawajiri's feature-length debut, co-directing alongside Kazuyuki Hirokawa, seizes on this antecedent work - originally serialised in the magazine Astounding Stories beginning in 1937 then concluding in 1948 - and reimagines it using the Campbellian shorthand so beloved of Lucas. Lensman's Kimball Kinnison then is, accordingly, transformed from a plucky service cadet to, like Luke Skywalker, a farmhand with a knack for daredevil aviation. Although Kinnison is thinly sketched here, really only a blank surrogate for young audiences yearning for adventure, Lensman actually does do a better job of describing his hotshot pilot credentials than the earliest passages of A New Hope. 

If anything Kinnison's impressive ability to seize control of a decaying star cruiser and safely land its crumbling body anticipates a similarly entertaining setpiece from 2005's Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. As Lensman reaches further and further out into space, Kawajiri and Hirokowa's film applies a grungier, biomechanical aspect to its planets and alien lifeforms - the villainous Boskone Empire are, seemingly, formless energies trapped in shell-like carapace; heroic alien Worsel is the spitting image of Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neill's Nemesis the Warlock, so much so that you wonder if odd issues of 2000 AD actually made their way to Japan. Together, Worsel and Kinnison find themselves key players in a galactic theatre of war that combines fleets of spacecraft locked in battle; the rescue of an endangered loved from the clutches of a formless monstrosity; and a worker's uprising on a planet choked with mining machinery. Obviously, again, this tiered action is a storytelling technique clearly patterned after Lucas' blockbuster episodes but Lensman does at least deliver on the suggestion of a slave uprising, a concept thwarted by reflexive drag racing in Lucas' prequel chapters and teased, then abandoned, in the more recent Disney sequels.