Keep On Callin' (for help)

You know, I had planned to write something positive in here soon. I have a half-finished write-up of Valkyrie Profile sitting on my hard drive (both at work and at home). I've been thinking all week, "I need to finish that and post it." So far, I haven't touched it.

I also plan to talk about more than anime here at some point, but there's a reason I haven't followed through with that, either. It's easier to bitch about things than praise them. And when it comes to anime, there is a lot - and I do mean a lot - to bitch about.

The first anime I ever watched - not including shows like Ronin Warriors which were broadcast on afternoon television - was Ninja Scroll, when I was about fourteen or fifteen years old. The first anime I ever owned, however, was Fatal Fury: the Motion Picture.

Now, I didn't really own it in the strictest sense of the word. What I did was record it off of the Sci-Fi Channel back in the summer of (I think) 1998. They did an Anime Week which lasted four days, so I also recorded Galaxy Express 999, Adieu Galaxy Express 999 and Urusei Yatsura Lum the Movie 2: Beautiful Dreamer.

Fatal Fury: the Motion Picture is based on SNK's like-titled series of fighting games, and is the third of three movies. The previous two, Legend of the Hungry Wolf and The New Battle, were made-for-TV movies, while the third was actually released in theaters.

I used to love this movie. I watched it so often when I was younger that I pretty much burned myself out on it. I bought it on DVD less for any liking I still had for it, and more from a sense of obligation. I don't quite have the movie memorized, but it got to the point where watching the DVD was actually a jarring experience. I kept expecting it to occasionally lapse into the two-second, not-quick-enough-to-pause-recording commercial break fragments that lurk on my original VHS.

I watched it because it was (at the time) relatively new, flashy and, well...comfortably mindless. It was a ride, basically, and if it wasn't exactly a great one, it was the only one I had at the time.

The story follows Terry and Andy Bogard, Joe Higashi and Mai Shiranui, all signature characters from the Fatal Fury games. It involves their attempts to stop a man named Laocorn Gaudeamus from collecting the six pieces of the Armor of Mars, which will turn him into some kind of all-powerful battle-god. His reason for doing this is sort of hazy. It seems to have something to do with getting revenge for his ancestors being conquered - never mind that this happened in the time of Alexander the Great. My own personal theory is that it's his revenge for the no-doubt plentiful childhood abuse he received at the hands of his peers for being saddled with the name Laocorn. That does things to a kid, you know?

Masami Obari directed the movie, which also sports his character designs. He hasn't really directed anything that's been of much interest to me, and strikes me as pretty strictly a B-grade director. I'm not a big fan of his artwork, either. His men straddle an uncomfortable line between "bishounen" and "macho" that looks about as awkward as it sounds. He also has a serious fixation on scantily clad women with bustlines that cannot naturally be achieved without silicone. I can never decide if he does it because he likes it, for the sake of fanservice, or because he just needs to distract the audience from how mediocre everything else is. It doesn't help that his characters never look quite the same way twice, but maybe that's just the animation studio.

This isn't so much a martial arts movie as it is a fighting game movie. The distinction is important.

The only "real" martial arts battle occurs toward the beginning, when Muay Thai master Joe Higashi has a tournament bout with another fighter of the same style. It's actually a pretty good fight, too: well-animated, properly tense. It's all about an exchange of physical blows. It's the only fight like this in the movie.

The rest of the battles are mostly about the characters flinging blasts of energy at each other in various ways. Presumably, Joe doesn't indulge any of his ring-destroying "special moves" during the tournament bout because they would be against the rules. I'm pretty sure destroying the ring is an automatic disqualifier.

Fanservice abounds, and I don't just mean Mai. There are all sorts of shout-outs and call-backs to events of the previous movies, and characters from both the other movies and the games. Some of it is relevant, and most of it is harmless - fun for the fans, not terribly mystifying for the newcomers. This comes mostly in the form of the characters' moves. Terry, I think, manages to showcase all of his. But at a certain point, it stops being pointless and starts being a burden on the plot. There's a brief scene featuring Geese Howard - the games' recurring villain and the ultimte foe of the first movie - which literally serves no purpose at all. He doesn't do anything, except spout some pointless and generic villain dialogue. Maybe he's plotting somcthing for a later movie. Maybe it's just bad storytelling.

There is a sort of tradition with the Fatal Fury movies. Each of them features one fight scene in which the animation quality inexplicably takes a sharp nosedive. We're talking Saturday-morning-cartoon quality here. Both Legend of the Hungry Wolf and The New Battle do this in the climactic final battle, for reasons that have always mystified me. You would think that they would save their budget specifically to dump it into the ultimate fight scene of the movie, right? I mean, these are movies based on fighting games. You're not here for the intricate plot or the deep characterization (which is good, because they lack both). You're here to watch Terry, Andy and Joe knock the crap out of a bunch of goons.

Well, and also maybe to watch Mai jiggle, if that's your thing.

The Motion Picture at least manages to get its single low-budget fight scene out of the way early on, during Terry's fight in the arcade (a Neo-Geo land, of course), and it's not quite as bad as the similar scenes of the previous movies. It's still pretty puzzling, though, and I'd really like to know why there's a scene of this sort in every one of these movies.

Fatal Fury: the Motion Picture maybe isn't quite as bad as I'm making it sound, though. My opinions on the character designs aside, the artwork is well-executed, fairly well-animated for the time, and some of the visual effects are pretty nice for their day. And the music isn't half-bad, either. But this is all presentation. There are a lot of movies which are less technically impressive that I would consider better movies overall.

To me, presentation is really a pretty minor thing. Style over substance is fine, but the underlying substance still has to be something better than mediocre. And in the end, as hard as it tries, it's all Fatal Fury: the Motion Picture can do to manage even mediocrity.

Already Dead

The first manga I ever bought was the first volume of Fist of the North Star. There were four reasons for this.

1) The pickings at the local comic shop were pretty slim, and it was the only place near my home that sold manga.

2) I wanted to be sure of what I was getting into, and between the cover art and the rear-cover blurb, it was all pretty obvious.

3) It was the thickest manga in the store, and I wanted something that was going to keep me reading for a while.

4) I was totally unfamiliar with Fist of the North Star, with the lone exception of the old NES game, which I had rented once and been only too happy to return.

The manga wasn't bad. I'm not saying it's good, and I'm not saying it doesn't have problems. But it wasn't terrible. The artwork was better than average, well-detailed, and things were more or less well-proportioned. And if there were occasionally characters who stood twelve feet tall, well, hey, it was a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Lots of weird things could happen. Besides, I was at a point in my life where I was prepared to excuse just about anything, providing it looked cool enough.

So, yes, the manga was okay. I didn't know how much of it there was, and so all of my knowledge about Fist of the North Star came from that one volume.

What this means is that, when confronted with the opportunity to buy the anime (the movie, not the TV series released in America by Manga Entertainment), I lacked the crucial knowledge necessary to do what any sane person would do, which is to run screaming in the opposite direction immediately.

So I bought it, misled into the comforting belief that I knew what I was getting into. And then, a few days later, when I knew I had time, I compounded my sin.

I watched it.

At one point during my time in Thailand, my friend Steve and I were discussing anime. He asked me what I thought was the worst anime I'd ever seen, and I didn't hesitate with my reply.

"Fist of the North Star," I said.

"How bad is it?" he asked.

"It's an atrocity against film in general, and against anime in particular," I said. Those weren't my words exactly, but I did say "atrocity."

Some years later, my girlfriend and I were discussing bad anime. She said she hadn't heard of Fist of the North Star.

"Then you don't know what bad anime is," I said, and loaned it to her. She said she'd watch it at some point, but wasn't sure when she'd get around to it.

I knew she had watched it when, coming home from work one morning, I saw that she had left a message on my answering machine. The first words of said message?

"You bastard."

This all took place before we started actually dating. That we started dating despite this incident is a mark either of my sadism, her masochism, or a more general mutual lunacy.

But what makes Fist of the North Star so bad?

The movie, like the manga, is essentially Mad Max with martial arts. Its story follows Kenshiro, master of the martial art known as the Fist of the North Star in the dub and Hokuto Shinken in Japanese. His fighting style concentrates on manipulating 108 pressure points in the human body which cause it to destroy itself from within. To simplify: Kenshiro punches people in the face, and a few seconds later, their heads explode.

He is traveling in search of his girlfriend, Julia (Yuria in the manga) who was stolen from him by Shin some years ago, as depicted in the opening scenes of the movie. Shin was once Kenshiro's closest friend, but his desire for Julia drove him over the edge. So he did the natural thing, of course, thrashing Kenshiro to within an inch of his life and then abandoning him in the desert, where one of Kenshiro's traitorous brothers was then able to finish him off.

It's hard not to admire Shin, really. Oh, sure, he has a girly-man haircut, but anyone who can conquer wide stretches of a post-apocalyptic desert, command legions of oversized goons and inspire terror in minions and foes alike, all while wearing a tight pink jumpsuit... Well, a man like that is really in a league all his own.

But pinning down exactly what makes this movie so terrible is difficult.

For starters, the English dub is pretty awful. Of course, this is one of the old Streamline dubs, so there shouldn't be any surprises there. There's nothing quite so horribly amusing as listening to Kenshiro's normally deep voice rapidly ascend into a series of glass-shattering mock-Bruce Lee screams.

The artwork is a mess. Everything is extremely detailed, but people are so poorly proportioned. Kenshiro's biceps are larger than the average human head, but he looks absolutely sleek compared to some of his opponents.

The plot is pretty generic. As stated above, it follows Kenshiro's efforts to find his girlfriend, and right the wrongs he comes across on the way. The "righting wrongs" bit usually involves making people explode messily.

The music is... not bad, actually. It's all pretty fitting. There's one song, "Heart of Madness" that's actually kind of good, in an '80s butt-rock sort of way.

And the action... Well, it beggars belief. As I mentioned, one of Kenshiro's brothers finishes him off (after Shin beats him to a pulp) by throwing him to the bottom of a deep canyon, and then causing a large chunk of the cliff face to collapse on top of him. Yet somehow, Kenshiro survives. He reappears a few scenes (and presumably a few years) later, when a mute girl's telepathic cry for help wakes him from his slumber inside a statue. The only indication of how much time has gone by is Kenshiro's big, bushy beard. He looks like a mountain man, someone who could pimp-slap grizzly bears without a second thought.

But never mind the beard. How did he get in the statue? Why is he in it?

Apparently it doesn't matter, because it never gets explained.

And on and on it goes. I think what makes it so bad is that so many people, both its creators and its fans, take it so seriously. There is a contingent of people out there who believe this is great stuff, maybe even art.

It's a scary world.

Fist of the North Star is a classic in its way, though. You see parodies of it in all sorts of other shows. Excel Saga, Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi and Great Teacher Onizuka are just some of the series that have referenced it for instant laughs.

And actually, I have to be thankful. Fist of the North Star helped me to define what a bad movie really was.

Dusk, or something like it.

The problem with Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire is that it became an inspiration. I’m not talking about a few books, either, but a whole genre devoted to exposing the ennui of the modern vampire. Because as we all know, eternal life, youth and beauty, and the ability—hell, the (super)natural mandate—to stay up all night, every night, and party is absolutely the worst thing that could happen to anyone.

In all seriousness, it would be perfectly fine if there were only one or two books of that sort. But Ms. Rice herself has made the idea the crux of her career (well, until recently), and there is no shortage of people who think this genre is just about the best thing ever.

True, I’ve been known to indulge in a little bit of this Sympathetic Vampire phenomenon myself. I enjoyed the Interview With the Vampire movie (never read the book), and Robin McKinley’s Sunshine is fairly excellent as well.

Then there are the Legacy of Kain games, although those aren’t so much interested in giving you sympathetic characters as they are in giving you characters interesting and cool enough that you don’t care that they are Magnificent Bastards, one and all.

All of this is what’s meant to pass for a preamble of some kind.

I’ve been reading Twilight lately.

Maybe you’ve heard of it? Series of vampire-and-werewolf romance novels by Stephenie Meyer, set (or at least begun) in high school? This couldn’t possibly be a bad idea. Not at all.

You may well ask why I’m doing this to myself. It’s all part of a Faustian deal I made with my sister, a deal brokered by my girlfriend. I wanted my sister to try reading The Hobbit a year or so ago, when she was twelve. This was about the age I was when it was first recommended to me. I’m twenty-seven now, and she’s thirteen. I loaned The Hobbit to her, and she returned it after about a month, saying it was too long. Then she turns around and reads all the Twilight books. Considering that the first of those is 498 pages long, this seemed a little ridiculous to me. You can argue that The Hobbit is a more difficult book, I guess, and I was (and am) a lot more inclined to read than my sister is, but still. So the agreement suggested by my girlfriend is that I read Twilight and my sister reads The Hobbit.

Now, I’m about 120 pages in, and these are some of my thoughts so far:

Isabella Swan is the main character. She prefers to be called Bella.

I loathe Bella.

She starts off bitching about having to go live in Forks, Washington, which is apparently the ass-end of nowhere. Of course, we’re supposed to understand that, since Bella grew up in warm and sun-drenched Arizona, this exile to Washington is completely unjust. There’s also the minor fact that she doesn’t have very many happy memories of Forks, but that tends to get buried under complaints about the weather (not enough sun, too much rain, too cold), the people (how could anybody possibly want to live here? How can anybody manage to be happy here?) and the overall inconvenience of the place. Apparently, the library is so poorly stocked that the only solution is to go to Seattle, never mind that both Olympia and Tacoma—decent-sized cities—are mentioned as being on the way. No, no, only Seattle will do.

Then there’s the issue of Bella’s complete and total lack of anything vaguely resembling physical coordination.

Bella is unrealistically clumsy. She is seriously concerned about falling over herself wherever she goes, and her frequent and innumerable spills apparently result in injury for herself and others. Now, a good writer (Robin McKinley, maybe) would play this for the occasional laugh, understanding that even a perfectly serious story has room for a reasonable amount of comedy. But no, Stephenie Meyer plays it completely straight. She evidently thinks this makes Bella more endearing to us in some fashion, probably by making her seem more vulnerable. Personally, I’ve never found poor motor skills to be a turn-on, but I’m strange that way. I also hesitate to make such direct connections between vulnerability and desirability, but I don’t want this to devolve into an argument on feminist theory. This is the Internet. I’m sure somebody has already done that by now.

Anyway, Ms. Meyer seriously expects us to believe in a girl who cannot manage anything faster than a brisk walk without tripping and falling at least a couple of times on her way from Point A to Point B. This is part of why she feels she shouldn’t have to participate in P.E. The other part of it is that, back in Arizona (here we go again), two years of P.E. were the only requirement, yet four years of it are required here. Clearly, this is a hideous injustice.

I am very strongly reminded of Sarah, from Labyrinth. “But that’s not faaaiir.” At least that movie had Muppets and a David Bowie soundtrack going for it.

And then there’s Edward Cullen. He starts off being a creep in order to distance himself from Bella, a measure apparently calculated to keep her safe in some way. Then he decides, nah, fuck it. It’s too hard to exercise restraint, so he’s just going to give in and do whatever the hell he wants. It wouldn’t be a bad thing, I guess, except he seems thoroughly convinced that he will be a danger to her. He’s just stopped caring. So, as of about a quarter of the way into the book, he’s a cryptic, self-indulgent bastard masquerading as an aloof and still-cryptic jerk-ass.

And girls like this?

Oh, wait, how could I forget? He’s beautiful. Never mind, then. All is forgiven.

By way of justifying all of the above, my sister tells me that this is a book meant for teenage girls. I suppose that works, so long as you view “writing for the teenage demographic” as a perfectly acceptable excuse for featuring complete assholes with faulty reasoning (who are meant to be likeable and sympathetic) in both of the most important roles. Personally, I’m of the opinion that just because you’re writing books for children or teenagers, you don’t have any less an obligation to tell your story well. But that’s just me. I’m old-fashioned like that.

Will I finish Twilight? Sure. I want my sister to read The Hobbit, but that’s the only reason. The rest of Stephenie Meyer’s “work” can go take a long walk off a short dock for all of me.