Urotsukidoji II: Legend of the Demon Womb

Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend concluded with a teen pervert transforming into a homicidal super God and laying waste to Tokyo, having united several dimensions of violently opposed reality into a swirling concrete vortex. So, naturally, Urotsukidoji II: Legend of the Demon Womb begins with a flashback to the European theatre of World War II. At Hitler's behest, a cackling clockwork scientist has built a gigantic demon-summoning machine powered by energies extracted from women being sexually tortured. As is to be expected, everything goes wrong and the clockwork scientist's son swears vengeance on the world, waiting half a century for the opportunity to present itself. Despite retaining director Hideki Takayama, Demon Womb is a diminished, discursive follow-up: an insulting interquel that makes very little effort to weave itself into anything like the established continuum. 

Akemi and Nagumo's relationship, previously brimming with all manner of nightmarish personal danger becomes a repulsively chummy, sex comedy counterpoint to this film's central couple, Megumi and Takeaki. The former remains beastman (and Chojin superfan) Amano Jyaku's flirtatious sister, the latter Nagumo's previously unmentioned cousin who arrives via a soul-sucking plane crash and, after receiving a blood transfusion from his relative, becomes the main suspect in a spate of violent sex crimes. Quite apart from the nonsensical allusions to Nazism, Demon Womb actually manages to appear both gratuitous and ill-considered even when judged against a prequel famous for popularising the animated depiction of phallic tentacles. Whereas Overfiend at least built its story around a peer group beset by demonic possession, thus ensuring that the audience had some sense of purchase on the unfolding scatology, Demon Womb is a succession of barely connected, pornographically animated assaults. The Megumi character, in particular, leaves a bad taste; the poor woman set upon by a series of muscled monsters who subject her to sustained, eroticised rapes. Not just unpleasant then but outright repellent.

Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend

Originally issued as three separate video cassettes by JAVN, a distributor of pornographic films operating under the umbrella of Bob Guccione's Penthouse brand, director Hideki Takayama's Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend gained notice internationally as a re-edited theatrical presentation. This pruning, in which much of the more overtly gynaecological material was either aggressively reframed or excised entirely, was something of an attempt to tidy up this sexually violent, disreputable animation into something, in this case a feature, that could be sold around the world. Picked up and released by Manga Video in the UK, after the BBFC had approved their cut, Urotsukidoji broadly fits an acquisition brief (presumably) put in place by the crossover success of Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira with readers of comic anthologies like Deadline, Crisis, or Judge Dredd The Megazine - this is a teen-focused story in which impuissant bodies deform and distend against an apocalyptic backdrop. 

Although furnished with an 18 certificate in Britain (and an NC-17 in the United States), Urotsukidoji has clearly been designed to cater to a much more adolescent perspective than the live action films it was initially released alongside in Japan. Whereas The Devil in Miss Jones or Behind the Green Door at least allude to an idea of female empowerment, if for no other reason than either film is sunk without their subjects Georgina Spelvin and Marilyn Chambers, Urotsukidoji largely reduces its female cast to malleable, and frequently pulverised meat. Really, the only point of connection with Akemi, the weeping female lead, is an acknowledgment that even consensual sex requires a physical vulnerability that can be taken advantage of in the moment. That beloved partners can, quite literally here, transform into something repellent without warning. Instead of an adventurous woman then, attention largely rests with teenage boy Nagumo, an onanistic insert for socially awkward virgins everywhere who, somehow, houses the spirit of a reality-bending super God. 

For a significant portion of the film's running time the realm-crushing power plays that encroach from the metaphysical periphery are illustrated through situations familiar to an arrested audience: bullying, familial abuse, sexual inadequacy, and failing attempts to action personal fantasy. The execution of these themes is, naturally, catastrophically exaggerated. Bodies, usually female, are battered and torn apart by the demonic energies that these young men submit themselves to. In Urotsukidoji the assumption of manhood transforms boys into unfeeling, muscled brutes happy to exert their newfound power over weaker bodies. The film's overt concession to splatter violence plays especially nasty in a piece designed purely as visual stimulation then. As with most other pornography, there is no attempt to depict a realistic interpersonal framework; set-pieces exist within a nightmarishly permissive society in which adults, here most vividly represented by a monstrous, rapist teacher, are basically absent. Therefore (even before Nagumo mutates into a demon that can fell skyscrapers with its explosive ejaculate) dozens of people are dismembered without even notional alarm or repercussion. Rather than work against the whole, this pitiless approach to human suffering ends up foreshadowing the film's conclusion - a particularly despairing, and spectacularly animated, denouement in which a long-heralded messiah fails to deliver paradise, instead reveling in city warping destruction. 

Chainsaw Man - The Movie: Reze Arc

Even without much prior knowledge of the Weekly Shōnen Jump strip (other than a query if the original writer-illustrator, Tatsuki Fujimoto, has ever come across Kevin O'Neill's work on Nemesis the Warlock or, perhaps, looked at Henry Flint's Shakara), Chainsaw Man - The Movie: Reze Arc is still enormously entertaining. Unlike a lot of other big screen spin-offs, which (at least in the shōnen space) tend to riff on manga movements, imagining concurrent adventures that otherwise fail to fit into a wider storyline, director Tatsuya Yoshihara and MAPPA animation studio's film directly adapts tankōbon volumes. So, instead of this manga being reduced to a television schedule filler, where wheel-spinning intrusions can interject and dilute the overall piece, Fujimoto's prized pages are elevated into an adaptation that, inherently, benefits from the larger spend applied to a ticket-printing medium. The really wonderful thing about Reze Arc though is that, at least to this Manga Video obsessed viewer, the film takes two disparate frequencies from the second Devilman OVA, Devilman 2: The Demon Bird, and combines them into one, city-warping hindrance. The shy, teenage love interest and the monstrously powerful adversary are, here, one and the same; an amalgam that mirrors our saw-toothed hero and complicates his ability to compartmentalise his clashing identities. The inching prickles of a first love - and the stinging rejection that often follows - are therefore scaled up into the pitched, apocalyptic battle befitting of these bubbling hormones. 

The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie

One of the few projects spry, or low profile, enough to escape a recent trend at Warner Bros in which the sickly studio permanently shelved completed (but potentially unprofitable) films for a tax write-off, director Pete Browngardt's wonderfully energetic The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie finally makes it to these shores, courtesy of Vertigo Releasing. In fairness then to the shark-eyed and dead inside executives determined to transform all media into an easily digestible grey mulch, The Day the Earth Blew Up is, absolutely, an anachronistic offering. Neither Daffy Duck nor Porky Pig are voiced by bored, slumming celebrities and the overall shape of the comedy on offer is far more indebted to the Golden Age animation of Bob Clampett, and gazing askance at Red Scare science fiction films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, than the instantly dated attempts at tapping into the zeitgeist seen in far more shameless, texture-mapped features. Even the specific characterisations of the Lonney Tunes cast on offer here are frozen in a fixed moment. Daffy, in particular, is locked into the elasticated screwball persona, seen in his early shorts, that allows for the kind of innate sabotage required to keep a ninety minute story about living chewing gum chugging along. The Day the Earth Blew Up is, strangely enough then, emblematic of the sort of niche and inexpensive artistic expression that streaming seemed to be promising, when the giants were setting out their stalls, before everybody realised that their business models were actually based around an ability to assemble agreeable background noise for people paying more attention to their phones. 

Space Warrior Baldios

Space Warrior Baldios, directed by Kazuyuki Hirokawa and Hisayuki Toriumi, was the The End of Evangelion of its day, a feature-length, big screen release designed to tie up the loose ends for an early 80s television series that had attracted a small but dedicated following. Hacked together from 30-odd TV episodes and capped with material rearranged from unaired instalments, Baldios may trudge moment-to-moment but the plotting covers enormous ground, picking up on a seemingly alien planet choked with pollution and ending on an Earth facing a similarly destitute future. In this telling, Baldios seems notable for being a version of a super robot show that barely features its gleaming mechanoid. Although extraterrestrial sorties and transforming spacecraft are frequently deployed, the story's despondent destination means our heroes are always presented as being on the backfoot - assailed by a dimension-hopping civilisation, originating from the dead planet S-1, who will stop at nothing to claim Earth as their prize. As the conflict grows to include nuclear detonations and city swallowing tsunamis, leaders on both sides of the conflict tune into this apocalyptic death spiral, completely unwilling to take stock or exercise restraint. This mania is complimented by the film's two main characters: the S-1 refugee Marin Reigan, who fights on behalf of Earth and Aphrodia, the adopted daughter of the invading Fuhrer. Although clearly lovestruck from the second they meet, this strange pair bicker across a canvas of human extermination, constantly inventing reasons to prolong, but never consummate, their demented flirtation. 

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. 

Cocoon: From the Girls of Summer

Taken on it own terms, director Toko Ina's Cocoon: From the Girls of Summer is a short, sharp animated look at the Himeyuri students stationed on front-line islands during the Pacific portion of the Second World War. These real-life children, who were told that they were to work in Red Cross hospitals far removed from conflict, were actually bussed directly into battle to build shelters and perform nursing duties for a flagging Imperial army. Ina's piece, a television movie produced for NHK's satellite channel, uses a bright, idyllic colour scheme that suggests a big budget children's fantasy movie. Indeed, Cocoon's animation producer is one Hitomi Tateno, a veteran of massive Studio Ghibli productions like Princess Mononoke or When Marnie Was There (among a great many others). Unfortunately, writer-illustrator Machiko Kyo's serialised manga, on which this film is based, is a poor match for such a luxuriant approach. Comparatively, Kyo's linework is stark and simplistic; a story constructed around tremoring human outlines and their ghostly patients. 

The frail figures on Kyo's pages are washed in blotted grey and black inks, suggesting an oppressive and all-encompassing fog of soot and death. These deliberately naïve illustrations could very well be a sketchbook diary that has been plucked directly out of this horror. Since the film was produced with a very specific audience in mind, there's a conscious dialing back of the palpable bitterness that underpins Kyo's comic. Although these young women try to power through for the sake of their national pride in both mediums, it's underlined for the reader that these girls are being fed into a meat grinder by the various layers of adults who should be looking out for them - from teachers and soldiers, all the way up to their own government. In the animated setting of Ina's film, insinuations dangle without clarification; the children much more tuned into the wider cultural objective of Imperial Japan. This Cocoon, very much like Kihachi Okamoto's Battle of Okinawa, depicts the American invasion of these islands as anonymous and almost spectral; an ever-present flame that licks at the despairing Japanese. The elisions applied to this adaptation - that jettison, amongst others, inked episodes in which trembling teens are directed to dispose of hacked-off, gangrenous limbs - do end up providing one impressive visual flourish in their efforts to conceal bloodshed: rather than animate youngsters riddled with bullets or rotten injuries that seethe with maggots, Cocoon's gunned-down students instead leak flower petals from their pulverised bodies. 

The Lord of the Rings

Surprisingly, many of the more striking images in director Ralph Bakshi's truncated animated adaptation of JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings revolve around horseback riding, be that our fellowship heroes galloping up an incline while a street artist's spray painted depiction of space swirls in the background or the Ringwraiths cantering in a turbulent, crackling void. In both described instances it's really the backgrounds that sing; tableaux that pulse with cosmic energies that contrast rather alarmingly with the simplicity applied to the majority of the film's characters. In the main, our mix of wizards and warriors are pointedly plain in their rendering, their figures lacking any of the detail you might expect from a piece striving to establish a lived-in setting. At least initially, this cartoonish plasticity works somewhat well in contrast to the enemies our heroes face, who are much more obviously only lightly dressed live action elements. Whereas the movements of Frodo and his friends are the product of the kind of frame-by-frame tracing that Disney's animators employed when arranging their dancing princesses, the massing Orcs seen here are only partially sketched over. This key difference in conceptual execution suggestive of a kind of hierarchical approach to character design, with good guys given the full painted treatment while their slathering opponents are, very obviously, presented as (literal) intruders in this land. Sadly this spell does not last. Once the scale of human movement increases to include armies on horseback the techniques used to illustrate Mordor's massing forces are again employed, regardless of the change in alignment. An approach that belies any creative intent more serious or complicated than simple budget management. 

Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century

Daffy Duck (Mel Blanc) stars in director Chuck Jones' Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century, a delightful vision of the far future in which shaving cream has become a scarce resource and every skewed surface is plugged into the grid, replete with curling wires that hum with incredible electrical energies. In Duck Dodgers all technology is both farcically convenient and fantastically violent. The benefits of the Atomic Age scaled up in such a way as to express a ubiquitous but explosive sense of expedience. So, rather than detonate at the slightest launchpad inconvenience, the rockets in this time are completely invincible. Able to be started in reverse and burrow deep into the ground, without harm, before their gears are correctly aligned to blast off towards uncharted star systems. The Dodgers persona, modelled after the derring-do of serial heroes and (much) later the subject of a short-lived television series, is perfect for a Daffy Duck who has, by 1953, evolved from a screwball foil for dopey hunters into an absurdist leading man. There's enough of a task in place to demand that Daffy continuously try his luck, battling the scuttling Martian competing for ownership of the barren Planet X, but not so much that you feel like any real importance has been attached to the assignment that powers this self-important lunatic. 

Lupin the IIIrd: Zenigata and the Two Lupins

A streaming-only prelude to a forthcoming feature (and itself structured like two episodes of a television series roughly glued together), director Takeshi Koike's Lupin the IIIrd: Zenigata and the Two Lupins sees the gentleman thief framed for a terror attack on a seventies-presenting glimpse of the Soviet Union. Naturally, this detonation occurs on the eve of peace talks with this story's United States analogue. Given the expressive, inky property and the presence of an elasticity specialist like Redline (not to mention several wonderfully springy shorts screened during concerts for the boy band SMAP) director Koike, you'd be forgiven for expecting this net animation to explode into a riot of clashing colours and improbable physical dexterity. In the main though, Zenigata and the Two Lupins is, like its snowed-in setting, a chilly affair; far more excited about replicating the halting rhythms of pre-Glasnost espionage thrillers than cartoonish derring-do. There are a few dangling insinuations about secret islands where the rich and powerful are able to retreat from public life to indulge themselves - seemingly as much a reference to 1978's Lupin movie The Mystery of Mamo as it is the real-life practices of untouchable elites - but, largely, Zenigata and the Two Lupins focuses on stuffy police procedure and playacting politicians. This is not to say that Koike's piece completely fails to acknowledge the more lively, caddish aspects of Monkey Punch's original manga. The scarred double who sullies Lupin's good name is allowed to luxuriate in the kind of violent, sex-pest behaviour that was ironed-out of the character when the series made the jump from early issues of Weekly Manga Action to much more heroic adventures on the big and small screen. 

Elio

The function of an animated film like Elio, co-directed by Madeline Sharafian, Turning Red's Domee Shi, and Coco co-director Adrian Molina, very much seems to be one of affirmation; specifically a message to its young audience (and perhaps a chiding to the less attentive adults within earshot) that all children deserve to feel not just safe but absolutely adored in their home. Pixar's latest then treads similar ground to Disney stablemate Lilo & Stitch - recently promoted to live action status with much of its indigenous identity chipped away - in that a child can become so lonely that the only person who is capable of understanding them lies not just outside the family but might, in fact, be an extraterrestrial silk worm. Elio, voiced by Yonas Kibreab, is an orphan living with his childless, Air Force Major aunt who, after having wandered into a museum exhibit about the Voyager probes, becomes obsessed with the idea of contacting somebody else out there in the void of space. 

Any dangling insinuation that the endless night above us might roughly equate to the afterlife in the mind of a naïve youngster isn't explored here but the kinds of self-aggrandizing fabrication that provide shallow comfort for that same child are everywhere. Contacted by a peaceful federation of lounging aliens, Elio plays along with their assumption that he is Earth's galactic ambassador, eventually agreeing to broker a deal with Brad Garrett's warlike Lord Grigon, while a suspiciously well-behaved clone stands in for Elio on Earth. The latter entertains because its gooey military base antics prickle (presumably) inadvertent memories of Abel Ferrara's Body Snatchers while Grigon, the sourpuss father to Elio's unearthly friend, gets to physically demonstrate the idea that absolutely everything - even bespoke power armour bristling with pistols - pales to nothing when judged against the health and well-being of your child. As with co-director Shi's Turning Red, Elio also looks to be taking further cues from Dr. Slump and Dragon Ball era Akira Toriyama, which is to say Pixar's film is packed with bemused but elasticated figures tinkering around with their obsessively detailed gadgetry. 

Casshern

Director-cinematographer-editor (not to mention co-writer) Kazuaki Kiriya's Casshern is an odd and not entirely enjoyable duck. The film's pacing is glacial, with the overwhelming majority of Casshern given over to solemn but not particularly insightful sermons about the horrors of empire. The front-end of the piece is therefore filled with scenes in which the emotionless instruments of a Soviet-presenting war machine gather to declare their slogans at each other. The acting that takes place on this film's bluescreen backlot is often unduly theatrical in how it communicates its ideas: figures wrap themselves in flags then blast their rhetoric directly at their imaginary audience. The effect is chilly and austere rather than involving. Yusuke Iseya's augmented title character, at least in this theatrical cut, is absent for nearly the entire first hour of the film as well. We do see a few, brief inserts regarding his human life though: Tetsuya as a young man, hell bent on frustrating his father's scholastic ambitions for him, as well as black and white nightmares that depict the young conscript shooting civilians before he is himself killed by a booby trap. 

Resurrected, thanks to his father's pioneering research into inhuman cruelty, the artificial person that eventually takes the name Casshern finds himself, intermittently, fending off the waves of advancing, automated armies that encircle this expanding fiefdom. Technologically speaking, Kiriya's Casshern - adapted from Tatsuo Yoshida's mid-70s, child friendly animated television series - seems a reaction to the digital set-work and computer-generated set-pieces seen in Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones, specifically the moments in which George Lucas completely abandoned staid set-ups featuring human actors, giving the film over to two toy factions blasting away at each other during a sandstorm. Two decades removed from this deliberate unreal approximation of Middle Eastern conflict, and given that similar sequences in modern blockbusters have somehow evolved into perfunctory noise, the blaring falseness of ILM's black blizzard becomes entertaining in of itself. Lucas, unburdened from the human performers he had no interest in directing, was able to lose himself inside his very own polygonal pandemonium. Kiriya is similarly unleashed, applying the eye-catching collage of his Hikaru Utada music videos to this (much more modestly budgeted) visual effects drenched polemic. 

Casshern keys into a similar sense of superimposed overabundance as the Star Wars prequels then, jamming every inch of the screen with incongruous, obviously synthetic accentuation and charmingly primitive mechanical figures. Kiriya arguably even goes a step further than his spotless inspiration by cross-pollinating his special effects plates with the filthy figures seen in Polish science fiction films, specifically the blood and shit-smeared cosmonauts from Andrzej Żuławski's On the Silver Globe. Regardless of advances in grimy spacesuits, it does seem notable that Kiriya and storyboarder Shinji Higuchi, in their thrilling (and, in fairness, fleeting) depiction of man on robot destruction, are communicating the same reaction to Lucas' simulated armies as Cartoon Network wunderkind Genndy Tartakovsky. The second season of the Star Wars: Clone Wars shorts dedicated an entire three-minute episode to a fondly remembered interlude in which Mace Windu's Jedi Master pulverised battalions of action figures with his bare fists. Almost simultaneously, and on the other side of the planet, Japanese theatres were projecting the edge of Yusuke Iseya's human hand cleaving its way through another army of bulbous robots.

Dog Man

Writer-director Peter Hastings' Dog Man, based on a deliberately primitive comic-within-a-comic from Dav Pilkey's Captain Underpants series, comes on like Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop but (explicitly, this time) for children. Officer Knight and Greg the Dog are the law in a marzipan city that is constantly under threat from Pete Davidson's aimlessly evil ginger cat Petey. After coming a cropper during a bomb defusal, thanks in part to Greg the Dog's colour blindness, what's left of Knight and his canine friend is sown together to create the mute but energetic title character. Although the primary dramatic knot in Dog Man belongs to Petey and his clone kitten Li'l Petey, as they slowly undo the despairing self-image that has been passed down to them by an indifferent parent, Hasting's film doesn't shy away from suggesting the horror experienced by the chimeric Dog Man, even if such interludes are largely played for laughs. As well as echoing Omni Consumer Product's fragrant disregard for bodily autonomy, Hastings' Dog Man movie also steers its subject back to their former residence, to mourn a failed relationship and recall the happier times both components of this new composite identity experienced in a now hollowed-out household. In that respect Dog Man wields the same kind of power as a vintage The Simpsons episode: this is homage deployed with an intent that goes beyond just absurdist reproduction, managing to retain some, prickly remnant of real human sentiment. 

X: The Movie

What does a person wear if their bodies are possessed of supernatural abilities that allow them to dart up and down delicately painted skyscrapers or conjure enormous, lapping flames out of thin air? In writer-director Rintaro's X: The Movie, the answer is, essentially, whatever they want. Rather than pull on coloured spandex or create some other kind of on-brand iridescent costume, a character like Karen Kasumi, voiced by Mami Koyama, simply walks around in the clothes she feels comfortable wearing. In this case black lingerie and a pink robe de chambre. Many of the characters in X take a similar approach to their presentation, projecting the archetypes that both exemplify their position in society and belie their importance to an unfolding apocalypse. Hideyuki Tanaka's Aoki is a stable salaryman, and so he dresses in a smart but increasingly distressed two piece suit. Similarly, Emi Shinohara's Arashi and Yukana Nogami's Yuzuriha remain in their school uniforms. Whereas an American superhero might feel the need to compartmentalise or obfuscate the part of themselves that wields incredible powers, in Rintaro's film their Japanese counterparts don't have the energy for that kind of pantomime. They are knowing props in a cosmological shake-up that cannot be averted, only experienced. 

These champions have therefore accepted their place in these proceedings without protest. The heroes and villains of X meet their ends as they are then, proudly blasting holes in each other while dressed in their civvies. Preceded by CLAMP (an all-female collective consisting of writer Nanase Ohkawa, as well as artists Mokona, Tsubaki Nekoi, and Satsuki Igarashi)'s unfinished manga and followed by a twenty-four episode television series, this X is incredibly truncated in its storytelling. We are instantly at this story's conclusion and all drafted parties must scramble to keep up. Given this expedience, there's a palpable sense of impatience, or even callousness, in how enthusiastically these super-beings are pruned. This effect is only amplified by CLAMP's beatific character designs: teenagers with flowing hair and enormous eyes would seem to be a better fit for the more romantic end of the anime spectrum, as opposed to the eviscerations depicted here. This enjoyable sort of dissonance carries over into how some of these characters are portrayed, particularly Ken Narita's Fuma, a subordinate (or subordinated) player who eagerly embraces his role as a sword-wielding Antichrist. Fuma's backstory is paper thin, the childhood playmate of Tomokazu Seki's Kamui, the teenage wunderkind that the film's various factions battle to win favour with. Fuma's place in the story is that of a cosmic counterbalance, a tuned-up shade for Kamui to duel atop a collapsing radio tower. 

Quite why Fuma is so quick to accept such a despondent, bloodthirsty calling is something of a mystery, especially since the weapon he will use to confront his pal must be drawn from his sister Kotori's dying body. Our only real insight into whatever thoughts or feelings bubble inside a tight-lipped Fuma is a repeated snippet of dialogue, a lingering memory of an innocent promise made in childhood. Kamui, presumably prepared from birth to assume the role of planetary saviour, promises to protect this beloved brother and sister. Fuma counters by saying if Kamui can keep Kotori safe, he will then act as his friend's shield. Does it chafe Fuma to be considered lesser then? The assumption that he will need his friend to defend him seems to sting this young man. Perhaps Fuma is also jealous that his sister is so clearly in love with Kamui? Certainly, Fuma's envy does not seem to be specifically incestuous in nature, given that he happily casts Kotori aside to assume a state of violent equality with Kamui. Perhaps he views her as his property then, for him to do with as he pleases? The presumption then is that the energies that Fuma wields are separate from any specific feelings regarding Kotori. They are instead a demand to be noticed or feared by those who would presume to think of him as someone who needs to be sheltered. Although reserved before his activation by Atsuko Takahata's Kanoe (who looks very much like Vampire Hunter D illustrator Yoshitaka Amano interpreting Elvira), the aloofness and placidity that Fuma projects actually conceals a person desperate to be as powerful and pivotal as the boy who has stolen his sister away from him. 

Mononoke The Movie: The Phantom in the Rain

A ghost story designed around extreme emotional denial and stifling tradition that expresses itself with pulsing backgrounds and unnatural colour. Nominally, Mononoke The Movie: The Phantom in the Rain revolves around an impending celebration in a highly ordered harem that is being disrupted by supernatural events. The reason for this ceremony, the birth of a child, is of zero concern to director Kenji Nakamura's film. There is no wailing to be heard; and no danger directed at this infant. There are whispers that perhaps the baby will be an unsuitable heir, thanks to their gender, but that is simply muttered to massage the ascension of a different concubine to the lord's bedchamber. Glimpses of either the sitting power that conducts hundreds of women in total fealty or that of the uncanny underside that swallows up their dearest possessions are so brief as to be absent. Instead we are focused here on the human churn that caters to the uninterpretable. Adapted from a Toei Animation television series about a travelling spiritualist who is little more than an observer here, Phantom in the Rain is reminiscent of the work of Mahiro Maede, specifically his Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo TV series, in that every inch of every surface is alive with textured information. Patterns clash and combine, travelling over an environment that refuses to offer the viewer any space that could be considered safe or even normal. Everything here is blaring and aggressive, a setting of kaleidoscopic intranquility that crushes pleasant young women, transforming them into faceless automatons. 

Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths - Part Three

The present phase of the DC animated universe limps to its own, reality collapsing conclusion with Jeff Wamester's Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths - Part Three, a flat finale that is presented to us, almost exclusively, through crowd shots and cameo appearances. Notionally a victory lap for a recent spate of direct-to-streaming releases that have very much failed to capture any past glories, Part Three of this multiverse-spanning saga has to delve deeper into the pre-history of the so-called Tomorrowverse to arrive at any genuine pathos. Before every major character is compelled to willingly have their identity crushed into a gestalt, 'prime' version of their super-persona, Crisis on Infinite Earths visits Earth-12, the home of the heroes who began their adventures with Fox Kids' Batman: The Animated Series and Superman: The Animated Series on Kids' WB before burning out brightly with Justice League and Justice League Unlimited on Cartoon Network. 

This belated appeal to one of the deepest veins of branded nostalgia that the DC animated stable has to offer is (despite any associated cynicism at either end of the exchange) comfortably Crisis on Infinite Earths - Part Three's highlight. Although the dark deco establishing shot used to introduce this brief sequence lacks the pearlescent pow of the original opening title image, the short punch up that follows is, compared to the static posturing that surrounds it, actually quite thrilling. The brawl, between Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski's take on The Joker and The Caped Crusader, beautifully describes how a Clown Prince of Crime might stumble on his feet following some sizable and sustained head trauma. Animated flourishes aside, this clip also contains the late Kevin Conroy's final line reading for his signature role. Hissing through his teeth, the voice actor reaffirms his inextricable connection to the Batman character. It's a performance that spanned multiple decades and creative teams but remained so perfect and singular that Conroy could, if heard at the right time in your life, capture your imagination forever.

Inside Out 2

Amy Poehler, and hardly anybody else from the original cast, return for Kelsey Mann's Inside Out 2, another Pixar adventure set amongst the personified emotions that rule the interior landscape of an adolescent girl named Riley. Whereas before the action focused on a depressive episode for the child, one made possible thanks to disruption caused by the absence of Poehler's Joy and Phyllis Smith's Sadness to oversee a cross-country move from somewhere in Minnesota to San Francisco, Inside Out 2 revolves around a coup d'état engineered by new, invading emotions led by Maya Hawke's Anxiety. Explosively energetic and teeming with schemes, Anxiety initially seems better placed to traverse the creep of puberty, and the interpersonal complications that come with it, than the comparatively one-note Joy. This sequel, something of a star vehicle for Poehler and the fusspot persona she cultivated on television's Parks and Recreation, organises the little yellow sprite as the foundational tenant of Riley. 

Joy is the aspect that rules all the other emotions and holds sway in times of crisis, vanquishing negative thoughts and feelings to the darkened rear of Riley's mind. Whereas the central clash between Joy and Anxiety would seem to suggest that a more unified, complementary approach might result in the most complete being, Inside Out 2 still ends with Joy ruling the roost. This despite Anxiety being equally able to conjure up an incandescent flower that pulses with Riley's (wavering) inner monologue. Really the only real challenge to Joy's continued governance is the inner turbulence suggested by a brief meltdown in which the emotion reveals a self-awareness that seems to indicate that she herself is being piloted by competing senses of self. Unfortunately, Inside Out 2 isn't particularly interested in pursuing these kind of farcical, metatextual concepts, preferring instead to treat a prolonged hockey try out with the paralysing solemnity being experienced by a youngster taking their first steps into a wider world. 

Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths - Part Two

How many times have we seen a batarang strike the shoulder of a brawny supervillain? How often do these branded shurikens find their way into the unguarded rear of some advancing threat - who barely even acknowledges they've been pinned - before the device beeps then explodes, stunning the creature in question? Cartoon Network's Justice League and Justice League Unlimited were pulling this stunt (equalising the earthbound heroics of the caped crusader when considering the character on a cosmic level) over twenty years ago; delivering the detonations with far more aplomb too, it has to be said. Significantly less animated than your average motion comic, Jeff Wamester's Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths - Part Two grinds through a middle act for this multiverse-spanning saga, offering up excruciatingly static sequences in which characters sit across from each other and broadcast, monotonously. This straight-to-streaming adventure begins with two such conversations curling around each other from opposite ends of the galaxy. In one corner there's an omniscient being experiencing a glacial emotional awakening; the other a Golden Age master criminal delivers an extended, forensic monologue to a captive audience. The latter, obviously the stronger of the two, reaches for the insistent rhythms of an Alan Moore subject but the staccato situations used to illustrate these ramblings never rise above perfunctory. The real worry throughout Infinite Earths Part Two though is that these desultory chats are leaps and bounds more engaging than the battles with massing shadow monsters that succeed the chinwags. 

Whisper of the Heart

Rather than the Alice's Adventures in Wonderland-style whimsy promised by a theatrical release poster that depicts our teenage heroine ascending into the sky, a dandified feline on her arm, Whisper of the Heart is instead locked, with its feet firmly on the ground. Although dreamy landscapes untroubled by gravity do (briefly) appear in Yoshifumi Kondo's film, for the most part Whisper exists in packed and cluttered urban spaces. These environments do slowly take on a picturesque quality though, partially thanks to the beautifully painted medium presenting them but also the ups and downs experienced by the lovebird protagonists. Nostalgic in terms of depicting a bygone emotional bandwidth for an older viewer rather than any specific kind of toy. Whisper then deals in contrasts: the physical restraint of living in a box room, trapped under piles of books, or the freedom felt when traversing the vaulting greenery of a nearby hill, tamed by winding, concrete embellishments. 

Whisper does tell its story with the odd fairy tale flourish - bookworm Shizuku Tsukishima follows a haughty cat through the back alleys surrounding an educational campus, pressing deeper into dark, unclaimed scrubland - but these journeys only ever take her from her own, cramped working class neighbourhood to a staggered, upper middle class conclave. The jewel of this gated community is an antique shop that hardly ever seems to be open. Peering though the window, Tsukishima spies all sorts of treasures and claimed curios that immediately fire her idling imagination. Written by Hayao Miyazaki and based on a manga written and illustrated by Aoi Hiiragi, Whisper is a patient, empathetic look at the listlessness experienced by children fast approaching adulthood and not really having any idea what they want to do with themselves. It's not that Tsukishima is a dull person either, she's fit to bursting with ideas inherited from a childhood spent checking out books from her local library. 

Tsukishima feels a responsibility to do something with the incredible creative faculty that she has cultivated, one that isn't always compatible with more immediate concerns, such as the high school entrance exams that are creeping ever closer. As well as exploring and legitimising her own aspirations through sustained hard work, there's also a hint of penance in the punishing schedule that Tsukishima sets for herself when writing her own fantasy story. This contrition apparently some sort of atonement for thinking so little of a boy, Seiji Amasawa, who was (at first) a confounding presence in her life before he, very casually, revealed some deeply romantic hidden depths. Tsukishima seems to note some deficit in herself when considering her prospective boyfriend; some way in which he has raced ahead of her with his own dreams. Come the finale, when Amasawa attempts to gallantly bike the pair up a steep incline, Tsukishima dismounts and begins pushing, stating that she will not be a burden to any man. 

Lily-CAT

An unapologetically derivative anime from Studio Pierrot that cross-contaminates the winding, industrial corridors of the Nostromo with the precocious critters that stalked Outpost 31. The OVA's most original aspect then is the dress sense of the doomed passengers: instead of overalls spotted with personal effects, the crew of this deep-space cruiser are bright and preppy; voluminous sweaters are tied over the shoulders of corporate princesses and a pump-action Pinkerton noses about dressed in a Varsity jacket. Hisayuki Toriumi's Lily-CAT (viewed here lumbered with an English language dub courtesy of Carl Macek and Streamline Pictures) often seems to be presenting scenes either out of order or without the kind of connective tissue that, usually, knits a narrative together. So, cats die horribly then reappear as snooping cyborgs or bodies bulge, fit to bursting, clearly intended to be located inside an explosive decompression event before we're reassured that these figures are simply rattling around while an untethered escape vessel tumbles away from its mooring. Confrontations between the expendable, unlikable crew and the pulsing alien infection are blocked strangely too, often without any real sense that the static, gawping figures and the writhing tentacles that menace them are occupying the same space. It's as if Lily-CAT has been constructed by two different teams - one flicking through issues of Olive magazine; the other trying to top the slimy special effects of Rob Bottin - then rudely spliced together.