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PachiSlo Kizoku Gin

2001. jpn: Pachisuro Kizoku Gin. aka: Pachinko Slot Aristocrat Gin. TV series. dir: Hidehito Ueda. scr: Hiroyuki Hoshiyama, Tsunehisa Ito. des: Junichi Haneyama. ani: N/C. mus: N/C. prd: A Line, Atlas, Fuji TV. 25 mins. x 23 eps.

University student Ginya Otonashi writes articles for a pachinko magazine, but would really prefer to be a famous novelist. He discovers a new and unexpected skill when he finds himself taking part in a secret pachinko contest run by the “Slotium” pachinko consortium. The authors suspect that a “Pachislo Aristocrat” is something similar to a “Pinball Wizard,” but there is no direct connection to Ken Russell’s rock musical Tommy (1975), which was released in Japan under its original title. The name Gin, however, literally means “silver,” as in the silver balls of both pursuits.

Pale Cocoon

2005. Video. dir: Yasuhiro Yoshiura. scr: Yasuhiro Yoshiura. des: Yasuhiro Yoshiura. ani: Yasuhiro Yoshiura. mus: Toru Okada. prd: Studio Rikka. 23 mins.

In a claustrophobic future world Ura reconstructs old images and archives from the past. His latest project turns out to be a music video, whose singer offers up a message from the Moon, where she has just arrived, to dwellers on “the rust-covered Earth.” Realizing that the location of the recording seems familiar, the archivist resolves to climb through the abandoned upper levels of his underground home to see for himself, in an interesting, albeit derivative, sci-fi short. Made over a two-year period, and largely the work of a single creator, Pale Cocoon’s clearest debt is to Voices from a Distant Star, whose attitude, length, and tone it often mirrors. As with so many modern “home brew” anime, it lifts plot elements from earlier fan favorites—in this case the Cowboy Bebop episode “Speak Like a Child” and the underlying conceit of Megazone 23. A singer’s trip to the Moon is also the starting point of A.Li.Ce, although this is probably a coincidence. The final moment refers, perhaps inadvertently, to the closing shot of the first-ever straight-to-video anime, Mamoru Oshii’s Dallos. Pale Cocoon is also a creation of its time—its action reflects the sedentary computer-bound life of modern teenagers (and of modern animators!), its setting a world in environmental crisis, and its ending, a note of mournful hope, with a noninterventionist tone familiar from many other ecological anime. The creator’s website gives a 2005 copyright date, although the DVD only appeared in Japanese stores in the early weeks of 2006. LNV

Pa-man

1967. jpn: Pa-man. TV series. dir: Tadao Nagahama, Eiji Okabe, Shinichi Suzuki. scr: Fujiko-Fujio, Tadao Nagahama, Masaki Tsuji, Koji Miharu, Tatsuo Tamura. des: Fujiko-Fujio. ani: Shinichi Suzuki, Tsutomu Shibayama. mus: Hiroshi Tsutsui. prd: Studio Zero, Tokyo Movie Shinsha, TBS. 25 mins. x 54 eps. (b/w; two stories per episode), 25 mins. (m1), 15 mins. x 526 eps. (TV2), 32 mins. (m2), 33 mins. (m3).

Four children and Boobie the chimpanzee are recruited to protect their hometown by a mysterious masked man. He gives them helmets that endow the wearers with superstrength and cloaks that let them fly at 91 kph. Lead male Pa-man #1, chimp superhero Pa-man #2, token female Pa-ko, Osaka-born miser Pa-yan, and baby Pa-bo must try to solve the town’s problems, great and small, and help its people. After a brief cameo in the final episode of the same creators’ Qtaro the Ghost, Pa-man got his own series in order to keep money rolling in from the TBS sponsors. The franchise was revived many years later for a short film, Pa-Man: The Coming of Birdman (1983), directed by Shinichi Suzuki, a former animator on the original series. Inevitably, the film was revealed as a preview of a coming series, the extremely long-running New Pa-man that began soon after on TV Asahi. The update revealed Pa-ko’s real identity (she is really the pop star Sumi Hoshino) and introduced a new character, Yuki. Paman the Movie (2003) followed.

Panda and The Magic Serpent*

1958. jpn: Hakujaden. aka: Legend of the White Serpent; Tale of the White Serpent; The White Snake Enchantress. Movie. dir: Taiji Yabushita. scr: Taiji Yabushita, Soichi Yashiro. des: Akira Daikuhara, Yasuji Mori. ani: Yasuo Otsuka, Kazuko Nakamura, Reiko Okuyama, Taku Sugiyama, Gi­saburo Sugii. mus: Masayoshi Ikeda. prd: Toei. 78 mins.

The beautiful snake princess Bai-Niang falls in love with the young boy Xu-Xian. His parents make him put the snake back in the fields where he found her, but he never stops missing his pet. Years later, magically transformed into a beautiful girl during a storm, the snake goddess changes a rainbow fish into her handmaid Xiao Chin, sets up house in the town, and seeks Xu-Xian out again. Both grown up, the two fall in love. Local wizard Fa Hai, convinced Bai-Niang is a vampire out to harm Xu-Xian, tries to break up their romance, and banishes Xu to hard labor in a distant city, reasoning that it’s the only way to save him. Xu’s two clever pets, Panda and Mimi, set out to follow him and become the leaders of the local animal Mafia, using the gang’s skills to find him. Determined to save Xu from what he sees as a terrible supernatural evil, Fa whisks him off to his castle by the ocean, and the devoted Panda and Mimi follow him again through a terrible storm. Xiao has to intervene with the gods to save them, while Bai-Niang fights Fa for Xu’s freedom. Even after saving Xu from death, she must give up her magical powers and become human before Fa accepts that her love is genuine. The two young lovers can finally marry, Xiao returns to her true form as a pretty fish, and Panda, Mimi and their animal friends all live happily ever after.

Often regarded as the “first” modern anime, this variant on Little Mermaid was originally adapted from Chinese mythology as a story by Shin Uehara. Featuring uncharacteristically “oriental” character designs and serious trials and hardships for the young lovers and their animal friends, it inspired many others to become animators, including the young Hayao Miyazaki, on whom it made a deep impression. It won honors at the Venice Children’s Film Festival in 1959 but reaction to its U.S. release in 1961 was disappointing. Mimi, a small “red” panda, is mistakenly referred to as a cat in some sources.

Panda Go Panda *

1972. jpn: Panda Kopanda. aka: Panda; Panda Cub; Panda and Child. Movie. dir: Isao Takahata. scr: Hayao Miyazaki. des: Hayao Miyazaki. ani: Yasuo Otsuka, Yoichi Otabe, Yoshifumi Kondo, Seiji Kitara, Takao Kasai, Minoru Maeda. mus: Teruhiko Sato. prd: A-Pro, Tokyo Movie Shinsha. 33 mins., 38 mins.

Miyazaki’s first original work as a screenwriter is a charming tale of a little girl who befriends a panda and his cub. Left home alone when her grandmother has to go away for a few days, little Mimiko is surprised to find a panda and his cub moving in. They very soon form a little family of their own, with Father Panda offering the fatherless Mimiko the paternal affection she’s always wanted, and Mimiko mothering the motherless cub. Everything is going well until the local policeman discovers exactly who Mimiko’s houseguests are. The father-bear, a model of good parenthood foreshadowing Miyazaki’s ongoing concern with the parent/child relationship, can also be seen as one of the stages in the creation of My Neighbor Totoro, and the young protagonist has much in common with the heroine Miyazaki had sketched for TMS’s abortive Pippi Longstocking project. The sequel, Panda Go Panda: Rainy Day Circus, also directed by Takahata, followed a year later. Pandas were big box office in the 1970s after the arrival of a Chinese panda at Tokyo Zoo, and other unrelated appearances during the period included Yugo Serikawa’s Panda’s Great Adventure (1973) and the Sino-Japanese coproduction Taotao the Panda. The following decade would see a similar obsession with koalas—see The Noozles.

Panda-Z The Robonimation *

2004. aka: Robonimal Panda-Z. TV series. dir: Mamoru Kanbe. scr: N/C. des: Shuichi Oshida. ani: N/C. mus:
Panda-Z Band. prd: Bandai Visual, Dynamic Planning, Megahouse Corp., Kid’s Station. 5 mins. x 30 eps.

In Robonimal World, where robots are shaped like animals, seven-year-old Pan Taron finds a Super P-Z engine under the research facility headed by his grandfather Doctor Pan Ji, a mad scientist complete with lightbulb on his head to show when he has a really bright idea. The Doctor and Pan’s father use it to build superrobot Panda Z, complete with flying fist to deliver a rocket punch, abdominal missiles for a really powerful six-pack, and a bright red jet-pack to fly with. Aimed at younger children, but also exploiting the retro interests of fans-turned-parents who yearn for the pre-Gundam days of mighty robot action, the characters are named in simple, picture-book fashion—Denwan the telephone dog gets his name by crashing the Japanese words for “phone” and “bark” together, Rabinna is a pink rabbit nurse, Etekki the monkey is named for the sound monkeys make in Japanese, lumbering Zoutank’s name starts with the word for “elephant,” and Moo-Gyuu’s ends with the Japanese word for cow.

Taron, however, is the only one who can bond with Panda-Z to battle the evil machinations of SkullPanda. Like the Emperor in Go Nagai’s puppet show Star Fleet (*DE), SkullPanda’s body is entirely hidden under a long cloak; he commands his forces from a mobile floating fortress. His chief henchman is evil mustachioed Doctor Jangar, who leads the Warunimal forces in his deadly Black Ham Gear, a giant robot hamster. Warunimal is a hybrid of the Japanese word warui (bad) and animal.

Created by Mazinger Z fan Shuichi Oshida when he was learning Adobe Illustrator on his Mac, this Go Nagai–inspired heroic robot and his cohorts were picked up by Megahouse when he went freelance, and appeared as a highly successful merchandise line before they were animated. Go Nagai’s name appears on the show credited with “original concept,” in reflection of the number of distinct Nagai ideas that Oshida lampoons.

Pani Poni Dash

2005. TV series. dir: Akiyuki Shinbo. scr: Kenichi Kanemaki, Katsuhiko Takayama. des: Kazuhiro Oda. ani: Kazuhiro Oda. mus: Kei Haneoka. prd: Gansis, Shaft, TV Tokyo. 25 mins. x 26 eps.

Rebecca “Becky” Miyamoto is a diminutive 12-year-old genius shorter than the children she is supposed to teach at Momotsuki High School. Pretty girls and a rabbit, with occasional swimsuits. Suspiciously similar to Doki Doki School Hours, but why not just keep wringing that idea until it’s totally dry?

Panzer Dragoon *

1996. jpn: Panzer Dragoon. Video. dir: Shinji Takagi. scr: Yosuke Kuroda. des: Atsushi Takeuchi, Kazuhiro Kishita. ani: Atsushi Takeuchi. mus: Azuma. prd: Production IG. 30 mins.

Kyle’s girl is stolen from him by the Black Dragon, which also kills his obviously expendable fat friend. When he meets blue dragon Blau, Kyle is suspicious, but only Blau can help him save Alita, who will otherwise be enslaved by the Dark Tower and become the catalyst for the destruction of the entire world.

If a bored director and crew copied a few pages from the Beginner’s Book of Fantasy Gaming, then lost the important bits like plot and characterization, this is what might emerge. The Sega game’s distinctive look is matched by what, at the time of release, must have been a truly innovative combination of cel and digital animation. There are set pieces that recall the game itself and quirkily mismatched compositions of technology and magic, setting up a damsel in distress, cross-species buddy business, a rescue, and a big fight in just 30 minutes.

With a fallen empire, a blind sorceress, human/dragon symbiosis, and a quest to defeat the ultimate evil, Panzer Dragoon had truly epic potential. People have spun trilogies out of less, but the paltry running time isn’t up to it. What little space there is for dialogue that doesn’t advance the plot, writer Kuroda fills with poetic meditations on sight and seeing. The blind Alita cannot see the color red, instead she must experience it. “So this is what the sky feels like!” proclaims Kyle during his first dragon flight—a throwaway line that belongs in a much better story.

AD Vision’s dub is far better than the spartan original deserves, but this remains a heroic rescue attempt by both Japanese and U.S. crews, fighting impossible odds of budget and (lack of) inspiration. V

Panzer World Galient

1984. jpn: Kikokai Galient. aka: Mechanical Armor World Galient. TV series, video. dir: Ryosuke Takahashi. scr: Ryosuke Takahashi, Hajime Yadate. des: Norio Shioyama. ani: Norio Shioyama. mus: Toru Fuyuki. prd: Sunrise, Nippon TV. 25 mins. x 26 eps., 55 mins.

Young Jordy is fighting his father, Madar, who is bent on world domination using giant robots. His brother, Hai Shartart, is also fighting Madar, but not to save the people from dominion; instead he plans to take his father’s place, and so he sees Jordy and their sister, Chururu, as rivals. Legend tells of a mysterious avenger, known only as the Iron Giant, who will come to overthrow the tyrant. The video, subtitled Iron Emblem, covered the same dramatic ground two years later: ruthless ambition, family conflict, and massively overspecified armor.

The golden age of the robot was in full swing in 1984; God Mazinger (see Mazinger Z) and Southern Cross among the multitude onscreen, Macross in the theaters, and toys everywhere. Takahashi is renowned as one of the prime movers of the “real robot” style spun off from Tomino’s Gundam, but the introduction of more realistic elements into future fantasy didn’t preclude designs of baroque splendor. The Galient robots are among the best—a magnificent fusion of futuristic technology, steampunk weightiness, and off-the-wall neoclassical design. Robot centaurs—you gotta love ’em. V

Papa Mama Bye-Bye

1980. jpn: Papa Mama Bye-Bye. Movie. dir: Hiroshi Shidara. scr: Atsushi Yamagata. des: Katsumi Aoshima. ani: Katsumi Aoshima. mus: Tadahito Mori. prd: Toei. 75 mins.

Dungaree-wearing teenage tomboy Kaori lives next door to the brothers Ko and Yasu. One day they find an injured pigeon and nurse it back to health. As Kaori is walking to school soon afterward, a U.S. Phantom jet screams overhead and crashes near the boys’ house. A heavy-handed juxtaposition of animal hospital and international friendship, inspired by a real-life incident in 1977 when a U.S. jet did indeed make a forced landing in Yokohama. For another U.S. plane ending up where it shouldn’t, see Sea of the Ticonderoga.

Papua-kun

1992. jpn: Nangoku no Shonen Papuwa-kun. aka: Southern-Kingdom Boy Papua. TV series, video. dir: Jun Takagi, Masahiro Hosoda. scr: Nobuyuki Fujimoto. des: Hiroshi Takeuchi, Ken Kawai. ani: Satoshi Takeuchi, Takao Osone. mus: Nobuyuki Nakamura. prd: Nippon Animation, TV Asahi. 25 mins. x 42 eps. (TV), 30 mins. x 2 eps., 25 mins. (v).

Papua is a little boy living a quiet life with his dog Chappy on a small island in the South Pacific. Then Shintaro turns up. Not only is he carrying valuable jewelry, but he’s being chased by gangsters. When Chappy steals the jewel, the stage is set for insane high jinks of a kind not normally associated with the creators of World Masterpiece Theater. This anime was based on a 1991 manga by Ami Shibata, who also created Jibaku-kun, though a similar dogs-and-jewels caper can be found much earlier in Honey Honey. The series returned on video with the two-part Papua-kun Encyclopedia (1993, Papua-kun Daihyakka), which included an “extra” episode, the pilot film for a nonexistent sequel, and some interviews with the cast and crew. A final video release in 1994 comprised an unbroadcast “dream” episode, in which Papua-kun gets a fever and hallucinates a bizarre journey among the stars.

Parade Parade *

1996. Video. dir: Motoaki Isshu. scr: N/C. des: Toshimitsu Kobayashi. ani: N/C. mus: N/C. prd: Pink Pineapple, AIC. 30 mins. x 2 eps.

Two short stories, supposedly of an erotic nature, based on Satoshi Akifuji’s manga exposé of the entertainment world. In the first, a pop star and her manager pleasure each other after her first concert. In the second, rival stars play a dangerous game that involves avoiding the toilet for as long as possible, with a payoff that may indeed be erotic for someone, somewhere. A similar stretching of the boundaries of good taste can be found in Professor Pain. N

Paradise Kiss *

2005. TV series. dir: Osamu Kobaya-shi. scr: Osamu Kobayashi. des: Nobu-teru Yuki. ani: Nobuteru Yuki, Yuichi Tanaka, Akiko Asaki, Hiroyuki Hashimoto. mus: Hiroaki Sano. prd: Madhouse, Twinkle, Fuji TV. 25 mins. x 12 eps.

Teenager Yukari thinks that she spends her whole life trying to live up to the expectations of her pushy mother. Her life of books and constant studying is interrupted by the not entirely unwelcome attentions of a group of fashion students, who think that she would make an ideal model for their clothes label, the titular Paradise Kiss. She initially refuses their offer, although they are able to blackmail her into her first show by threatening to reveal the identity of her secret crush, which they have discovered by reading her mislaid notebook. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

Yukari begins to hang out at a bar with the bad boy, the pretty boy, the mysterious girl, and the one who is supposed to be cute. Before long, however, she begins to appreciate that these people are more than just another rack of off-the-peg schoolday archetypes, there is more to life than school, and that even if these misfits are not behaving conventionally, they are nevertheless choosing their own path. In becoming their muse, Yukari is inspired to become her own person. Combining the fashion obsessions of Cosplay Complex or Mon Cherie Coco with the questionable associates of Boys over Flowers, this series is actually a sequel of sorts to TV Asahi’s Neighborhood Story, and is similarly based on a manga by Ai Yazawa. The closing theme of the Japanese broadcast is “Do You Want To?” by Franz Ferdinand, liable to secure more interest from outside anime fandom than one might normally expect—compare to Interstella 5555.

Paradise Without Stars

1991. jpn: Hoshikuzu Paradise. Video. dir: Masato Namiki. scr: Takuya Kubo. des: Fumio Sasaki. ani: Fumio Sasaki. mus: Takeshi Kusao. prd: OB Planning, Pastel. 55 mins.

A love comedy about Hiroshi, a normal teenage boy who discovers after his mother’s death that his real father is a famous singer. Moving in with his new-found parent, Hiroshi must cope with having a stepmother who is closer in age to himself than her husband, and who until the previous week, he used to fantasize about whenever he saw her on TV. Based on a Shonen Sunday manga by Katsu-Aki, who would also draw the manga adaptation of Escaflowne several years later. N

Paranoia Agent *

2004. jpn: Moso Dairinin. aka: Paranoia. TV series. dir: Satoshi Kon. scr: Seishi Minakami, Tomomi Yoshino. des: Masashi Ando. ani: Akiko Asaki, Hideki Hamazu, Mamoru Sasaki, Toshiyuki Inoue, Satoru Utsunomiya, Hisashi Eguchi, Tadashi Hiramatsu. mus: Susumu Hirasawa. prd: Madhouse, WOWOW. 25 mins. x 13 eps.

Detectives Keiichi Ikari and Mitsuhiro Maniwa are assigned to the case of Tsukiko Saki, the designer of a popular cute animal character in the style of Hello Kitty, who has been the victim of a vicious attack. They are not the only people on Tsukiko’s trail; so, too, is tabloid journalist Akio, although he soon falls prey to the same criminal. The attacker is “Li’l Slugger,” a shadowy vigilante wielding a battered metal bat (some might say, a Golden Bat), who stalks a series of victims in a dark and forbidding Tokyo. What the investigators fail to realize is that they may not be hunting a single human at all, but a complex social malaise, starting with one small exaggeration that gets progressively larger until the victims’ stories of a baseball bat and golden in-line skates feed an urban myth that rampages out of control. Is the kid real, or is he called into being by the stress, unease, and sheer paranoia of living in the big city?

The first TV project from Satoshi Kon is a masterpiece of urban legend, combining the psychological knots of Kon’s earlier Perfect Blue and the perverted gamesmanship of David Fincher’s Se7en (1995). Kon exploits the longer running time of TV for all it’s worth, setting up supposedly disconnected events that soon reveal a mortifying ripple effect. What at first seems to be a simple police procedural soon gains new complexity. The viewer’s attention is drawn first to clues in the background and script, such as the relationship of character names to phases of the moon or the names of animals hidden in their names. This, too, is a red herring, as later episodes reveal PA to be an involved meditation on the futility of false hopes and sanitized dreams. As with Perfect Blue and Millennium Actress, PA often makes the entertainment industry itself the subject of its ire, with suspicious deaths at an anime studio and later satirical references to superheroics. But Kon also homes in on more general modern issues, opening with crowds of commuters in the style of Gantz, each studiously ignoring the other while yammering inanities on a mobile phone to a distant listener. Asides and moments in each episode point to a series of unseen connections between the characters in the style of Human Crossing, particularly with relation to an Internet chatroom in which three buddies make a suicide pact, only for one of them to turn out not to be a dying man, but a young girl—shades here of Hiroshi Shimizu’s movie Ikinai (1998). Kon also loves postmodern angles on familiar clichés, focusing in one episode on a day in the life of a cop whose main contribution will be to apprehend a character later on. LV

Parappa the Rapper

2001. jpn: Para Parappa. TV series. dir: Hiroaki Sakurai. scr: N/C. des: Rodney Alan Greenblat, Takayuki Goto. ani: N/C. mus: Masaya Matsuura. prd: JC Staff, Production IG, Fuji TV. 25 mins. x N/D eps.

The adventures of a happy dancing dog in his ongoing attempts to impress a flower called Sunny. Based on the surreal 1996 PlayStation game, the series features new characters and music from the original designers.

Parasite Heaven

1996. jpn: Isoro Tengoku. aka: Home­stay Heaven; Heaven of a Hanger-on. Video. dir: Teruo Kigure. scr: Satoshi Aoyama. des: Teru Aranaga. ani: Kazuyoshi Ota. mus: N/C. prd: Beam Entertainment. 30 mins., 40 mins.

Eighteen-year-old Masahiko Kisugi is sent to stay with his Aunt Mizuhara so he can study at a nearby college. In an erotic anime based on the manga by Teru Aranaga in Comic Lies magazine, he soon begins an affair with his aunt, and with her three daughters. N

Parasol Henbe

1989. jpn: Parasol Henbe. TV series. dir: Masakazu Higuchi, Takami Fujikawa, Shigeru Fujikawa, Masaya Mizutani, Yugo Serikawa. scr: Megumi Sugiwara, Aya Matsui, Satoru Akahori. des: Motoo Abiko. ani: Takao Yamazaki. mus: Reijiro Komutsu. prd: Fujiko Studio, NHK. 8 mins. x 109 eps.

Japanese boy Megeru meets Henbe, a strange hippo-like creature from another world. Henbe and his trademark magical parasol have many adventures with Megeru in this series for the very young, with episode titles such as I Can’t Stand the Rain, A Broadcast from Parasol World, A Butterfly from Another World, and The Flying Bicycle. Based on a manga by Billy Dog–creator Fujiko-Fujio “A,” and featuring the screenwriting debut of Satoru Akahori, whose “zany” output would dominate comedy anime for the coming decade.

Pastel Yumi

1986. jpn: Maho no Idol Pastel Yumi. aka: Magical Idol Pastel Yumi. TV series. dir: Akira Torino, Yutaka Kagawa, Hiroshi Yoshida, Mitsuru Hongo, Toshio Okabe, Miho Maruo, Kazuyoshi Katayama. scr: Shoji Imai, Azuma Tachibana, Yoshiyuki Suga, Yoshihisa Araki. des: Yumiko Hirosawa. ani: Yumiko Hirosawa. mus: Koji Makaino. prd: Studio Pierrot, Nippon TV. 25 mins. x 25 eps.

Schoolgirl Yumi Hanazono lives happily with her parents. She loves nature and all living things. On carnival day, two little imps called Keshimaru and Kakimaru give her a magic baton and a magic ring; anything she draws in the air now becomes real. Using their power, she can transform into the magical idol Pastel Yumi. Another magical-girl story from the people who brought you Creamy Mami.

Pataliro

1982. jpn: Pataliro! Boku Pataliro! aka: Pataliro! I’m Pataliro!. TV series, movie. dir: Nobutaka Nishizawa, Satoshi Hisaoka, Yugo Serikawa, Hiroshi Shidara, Yasuo Yamayoshi. scr: Masaki Tsuji, Akiyoshi Sakai, Tomomi Tsutsui, Tomoko Konparu. des: Mineo Maya. ani: Yasunori Kanemori. mus: Nozomu Aoki. prd: Toei, Fuji TV. 25 mins. x 49 eps. (TV1), 48 mins. (m), ca. 9 mins. x 24 eps. (TV2), ca. 9 mins. x 2 eps. (v).

Based on Mineo Maya’s 1978 manga in Hana to Yume magazine, the series was the first to introduce homosexuality to TV anime audiences, and the nudity is reasonably tasteful (allowing for some floral backgrounds) and mostly male. A fantastical plot revolves around Jack Bankolan, a former British agent licensed to kill, who has somehow ended up working on the fabulously wealthy diamond-trading South Sea island of Marinera as a nursemaid to Pataliro VIII, the superpowered brat who is head of state. The joke is that this 007 is gay and the foes he faces are gorgeous men, transposing the machismo of the Bond mythos into lighthearted camp. Originally called just Pataliro!, the longer version of the title was used from episode 27 on. Nishizawa’s movie, Pataliro: Stardust Project (1983), featured the titular plan by the international Tarantella crime syndicate to raid Marinera’s diamond vaults. Typically, they send in an advance assassin to remove Bankolan, but the tall, handsome Andersen instead falls in love with his quarry.Kenichi Maejima’s Pataliro Saiyuki (2005) remodeled the characters as the cast of Journey to the West. N

Patlabor *

1989. jpn: Kido Keisatsu Patlabor. aka: Mobile Police Patlabor. Video, TV series, movies. dir: Mamoru Oshii, Naoyuki Yoshinaga, Fumihiko Takayama, Yasunori Urata. scr: Kazunori Ito, Mamoru Oshii, Michiko Yokote. des: Akemi Takada, Yukata Izubuchi, Hiroki Takagi, Yoshinori Sayama. ani: Hiroki Takagi, Hiroyuki Kitakubo, Kisaraka Yamada. mus: Kenji Kawai. prd: Headgear, Sunrise, Nippon TV. 30 mins. x 7 eps., 30 mins. x 16 eps. (video), 25 mins. x 47 eps. (TV), 118 mins. (m1), 113 mins. (m2).

At the close of the 20th century, a rise in global sea levels forces a massive building program in Japan, causing the creation of new “labor” construction robots. In a series that effortlessly incorporates human drama and comedy with hard science fiction, the police set up a Pat[rol] Labor division to deal with the new crime that the new technology brings.

The team behind Patlabor is arguably the finest assembly of talents in modern anime, rivaled only by Hayao Miyazaki’s cohorts at Studio Ghibli and the erratic Gainax collective. Written in direct opposition to the gung ho conflicts of Gundam and the postapocalyptic violence of The Road Warrior, Patlabor’s creators posit a future world where humanity muddles through regardless, and being a giant-robot pilot is just another job—taken, as with the space-force in Wings of Honneamise, by misfits unable to secure work in more glamorous sectors. The tribulations of Special Vehicle Division 2 are consequently dogged by idle bureaucrats, budget cuts, interfering R&D officers, and feuds within the group. Girlish rookie Noa Izumi, disaffected techno-millionaire’s son Azuma Shinohara, and ultracool Captain Goto occupy central stage, though the other cast members are some of the most well-realized characters in anime. From bad-tempered gun-nut Ota to henpecked husband Shinshi, down to the gentle giant Hiromi and competent-but-snooty half-American visitor Kanuka Clancy (whose role was greatly expanded from the original manga), all contribute to a truly marvelous ensemble. The series is loaded with subplots that put many live-action shows to shame, including the unrequited love of Goto for his better-qualified opposite number Shinobu (hilariously telegraphed in a spoof episode that featured the pair forced to share a room in a love hotel), Ota’s desperately lonely existence (in a Blade Runner pastiche scripted by Oshii), and Noa’s deeply respectful love for her “pet” labor Alphonse. Made on video because sponsorship was initially unavailable to make it for TV, the show was soon heading for broadcast and movie success. Some of the TV and video stories are downright goofy, like the white-alligator-in-the-sewers urban myth and a ghost story with spirits that need to be appeased; but there’s also a long and carefully evolved story line about industrial espionage between rival labor manufacturers, the exploitation of children, and the lengths people go to for money.

Theatrical outings extend this dark agenda further. Patlabor: The Movie (1990), directed by Oshii, uses a threat of destruction by a suicidal visionary terrorist to examine the extent to which man depends on technology and the dangers involved in that dependency. Noa and the returning American labor captain Kanuka have to overcome their antagonism to save Tokyo from flood and disaster. Patlabor 2 (1993) rounded off the series in a brilliantly contrived manner. Set in 2002, after the original team members have gone their separate ways, it features the attempt of a disaffected ex-soldier to orchestrate a military coup. The former members of the Patlabor team reunite one last time to stop him, and the film includes some real treats for long-term fans, including an explanation for Shinobu’s eternal spinsterhood and the rare sight of Goto losing his temper. The second movie secured Oshii’s chances of directing Ghost in the Shell and shares with its successor a similar mood, pace, and political cynicism. It also features chilling images of a Japan returning all too swiftly to martial law, a topic that Oshii would approach again in Jin-Roh, as well as “guest” designs from Shoji Kawamori and Hajime Katoki.

Christophe Gans, who directed the live-action movie of Crying Freeman, has reportedly optioned Patlabor 2 for a remake, impressed with its ability to involve its cast in action to which they always seem to arrive a minute too late. This marginalization of the “little people” is a motif that runs through the en­tire series and adds to the realism. It is also a fundamental feature of the third Patlabor movie WXIII (2002), in which Tokyo is threatened by a mutant monster. With Oshii conspicuously absent as director (as he was from the inferior Jin-Roh), WXIII re­tells an early story from Masami Yuki’s Patlabor manga but concentrates on the “guest stars,” relegating the central cast almost completely to cameo roles.

Sadly for Patlabor, accidents in rights acquisitions have had a similar effect on the series itself. The two movies were well dubbed and promoted by Man­ga Entertainment but reached a far larger audience than the video and TV incarnations, which were sold to the smaller distributor USMC. The series was also lampooned in the erotic pastiche Tokio Private Police.

Paul’s Miracle War

1976. jpn: Paul no Miracle Daisakusen. aka: Paul’s Miraculous Adventures. TV series. dir: Hiroshi Sasakawa, Mizuho Nishikubo. scr: Junzo Toriumi, Masaru Yamamoto. des: Akiko Shimomoto. ani: Hayao Nobe. mus: Shunsuke Kikuchi. prd: Tatsunoko Pro, Fuji TV. 25 mins. x 50 eps.

Little Paul has a very special cuddly toy—Pakkun is really a spirit from an alternate world under threat from the evil invader Belt Satan. Pakkun has come in search of help from Earth, and Paul is obliged to get involved when Belt Satan kidnaps his friend Nina. This charming series is hardly in the traditional science-fiction mold of the studio known as the “home of heroes,” but for younger viewers, it’s magic.

Peacemaker Kurogane *

2003. aka: Peacemaker; Peacemaker: Gunning For Trouble. TV series. dir: Tomohiro Hirata. scr: Naoko Hasegawa, Hiroshi Yamaguchi. des: Akemi Hayashi. ani: Tadashi Hiramatsu. mus: Keiichi Oku. prd: Gonzo Digimation, Imagica, TV Asahi. 25 mins. x 24 eps.

In the 1860s, as disorder and unrest signify the imminent fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate and the end of the Edo period, an elite military corps of skilled and ruthless swordsmen becomes a major force in Kyoto. When 15-year-old Tetsunosuke Ichimura’s parents are killed by Choshu revolutionaries, he and his elder brother Tatsunosuke join the Shinsengumi, the elite band of warriors in Kyoto. Employed as a page to Toshizo Hijikata, he vows to acquire the skills to avenge his parents’ murder. Vice Commander Hijikata is a stern, seemingly cold leader. His underling, Captain Souji Okita is a complete contrast, a cheerful, laid-back type—until he unsheathes his sword, when he shows himself to be the deadliest fighter of them all. The diminutive Tetsunosuke is reckless, unsophisticated, and often mistaken for someone younger than his years. He befriends another orphan, Suzu Ichimura, not realizing that their lives mirror each other, since Suzu’s parents were killed by the Shinsengumi. Ichimura senior was devoted to peace; the man who brought about his death was devoted to political reform, and in that cause he is willing to do anything, even burn Kyoto to the ground.

Drawing, like Shinsengumi Farce, on real historical events, director Hirata focuses on a very minor character from history, using Tetsunosuke as a sort of everyman, in much the same way as Tree in the Sun, exemplifying the need to find one’s own center in the confusion and danger of life in interesting times. A number of famous people play roles in the story—including Ryoma Sakamoto of Oi Ryoma!, who appears under an alias and wearing dreadlocks in a manner more befitting Samurai Champloo, and Sanosuke Harada and Hajime Saito, who also show up in Ruro ni Kenshin—but, just as in life, great events and political change occupy Tetsunosuke’s mind far less than his personal concerns. A mix of broad comedy, violent action, and vivid characterization helps maintain interest in the journey of the sympathetic but not very original young hero, with his height hang-up, attitude problem, and thirst for revenge, allied to the perky klutziness of a magical-girl show heroine.

Based on the manga by Nanae Chrono, the anime’s soft, earthy color palette gives a period feel without looking too much like a history lesson. After this show, the Gonzo studio stayed with the martial theme for Samurai 7. It represents a return to swordplay for designer and animation director Hayashi, whose resumé of gentler shows like Fruits Basket also includes a stint on Utena. The DVD box in some territories left the Kurogane part of the title in Japanese, leading many to assume that the title was simply Peacemaker, with an inscrutable squiggle next to it. V

Peach-colored Sisters

1998. jpn: Momoiro Sisters. TV series. dir: Bob Shirahata. scr: Satoru Akahori, Satoru Akahori Office. des: Masaaki Kawanami, Tomoko Kosaka. ani: N/C. mus: N/C. prd: Studio Deen, TBS. 7 mins. x 24 eps.

A love comedy about Momoko (“peach girl”), a hapless 17-year-old who can’t seem to snare herself a man, and whose Office Lady sister is very little help at all. Broadcast as part of the Wonderful program on TBS, this series of shorts was originally based on a 1993 manga by Tamami Momose. N

Peacock King *

1988. jpn: Kujaku-o; Shin Kujaku-o. Video. dir: Katsuhito Akiyama, Ichiro Itano, Rintaro. scr: Sho Aikawa, Hajime Inaba, Tatsuhiko Urahata. des: Takuya Wada, Takahiro Kishida, Ken Koike. ani: Masahiro Tanaka, Takahiro Kishida. mus: Satoru Kogura, Kit Kat Club, Yas-Kaz, Toshiyuki Honda. prd: AIC, Studio 88, Madhouse. 55 mins., 60 mins., 50 mins., 45 mins. x 2 eps. (True PK).

Kujaku is a young monk and an avatar, the incarnation of a god. His friend and cute blonde fellow-avatar Ashura, his teacher Ajari, and the leather-clad biker/magic master Onimaru band together to fight the demons released by Tatsuma from the ancient temple statues at Nara. Tatsuma is a powerful psychic, but he’s never learned proper control of his abilities, and in seeking to test his powers, he puts humankind in terrible danger in the first episode, Feast for Returning Demons. In the second story, Castle of Illusion, Onimaru and graduate student Hatsuko are the sole survivors of a team digging up relics of medieval warlord and supposed black magician Nobunaga Oda (see Yotoden). If the two scrolls found by the team are joined, Azuchi Castle will rise again and the warlord will unleash hell on Earth. For the third story, Harvest of Cherry Blossoms, the threat is undead shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa, who has joined forces with the restless ghost of an actress murdered during WWII and intends to sink Japan beneath the waves.

The story of Kujaku-myo’o (to some esoteric Buddhist sects, a manifestation of Gautama Buddha often depicted riding on a giant peacock) was updated by Makoto Ogino for his 1985 manga in Young Jump, using the idea of avatars of the gods as inspiration for a modern-day adventure. The franchise returned as True PK (1994, Shin Kujaku-o), more faithful to Ogino’s original, and it replaced the Madhouse-look-alike animation of AIC with actual animation from the Madhouse studio itself, under veteran director Rintaro. His versions throw much of their budget into the movie-quality opening scenes, creating impressive images that soon devolve into less expensive animation. Trawling outside Japan for villains, it features twin avatars, a boy and a girl, born to reincarnate god of light Kujaku-o and god of darkness Tenja-o. The boy, Akira, is a member of a Buddhist sect charged with guarding the Dragon Grail, a mystic vessel that has the power to release Tenja-o into the world. Power-crazed neo-Nazi Siegfried von Mittgard plans to steal the grail and reincarnate himself as Tenja-oh; this will prevent Akira’s twin, Tomoko, from fulfilling her destiny, but Siegfried has another role in mind for her.

Like the director’s earlier Doomed Megalopolis, PK suffers in English simply through the weight of the original source material—American actors, working with the Japanese names for the Chinese versions of Buddhist takes on Hindu gods, create a predictably confusing roster, though translators Bill Flanagan and Yuko Sato make a heroic effort to incorporate the original Sanskrit. A live-action Japanese–­Hong Kong coproduction, PK: Legend of the Phoenix (1988), was directed by Story of Riki’s Nam Nai Choi and starred martial-arts legend Yuen Biao. Another Kujaku appears in CLAMP’s Rg Veda. LNV

Pekkle *

1993. jpn: Ahiru no Pekkle. aka: Pekkle the Duck. Video. dir: Akira Shimizu. scr: Mitsukuni Kumagai. des: Toshikazu Ishiwatari. ani: Takashi Asakura, Kennosuke Tokuda. mus: Yasunori Honda. prd: Sanrio. 30 mins. x 4 eps.

Another of Sanrio’s cute kiddie characters, this time a sweet little duck, accompanied by his girlfriend, Ruby, reenacts tales from the Arabian Nights for his U.S. video release—PtD: Aladdin and the Magic Lamp and PtD: Sindbad the Sailor. The final two adventures, unreleased in the U.S., were the shark-infested PtD: Trouble at the Swimming Gala and the Indiana Jones pastiche PtD: In Search of the Secret Treasure. The character, however, was a lame duck when compared to the successes of his Sanrio stablemate Hello Kitty.

Pelican Road Club Culture

1986. jpn: Pelican Road Club Culture. Video. dir: Eiichi Yamamoto. scr: Eiichi Yamamoto. des: Koichi Igarashi. ani: Kazuhiko Udagawa. mus: Kazuo Kogure. prd: Studio World, Nippon Columbia. 55 mins.

High school boy Kenichi Watanabe is crazy about his MBX50 motorcycle. He and his buddies organize a motorcycle club, which they call Culture. In among the engine oil and spark plugs, however, they begin to learn that there’s more to life than bikes, chiefly when they are approached by reporter Kanako, who is interested in their stories . . . particularly Kenichi’s. Based on Koichi Igarashi’s 1982 manga Pelican Road, which was a contemporary of Bomber Bikers of Shonan in the same Shonen King magazine.

Pendant

1997. jpn: Pendant. Video. dir: Yoshihiro Oka. scr: Kaori Nakase, Takao Nitta. des: Masaki Takei. ani: Akio Watanabe. mus: N/C. prd: Beam Entertainment. 30 mins. x 3 eps.

Tales of young love, based on a computer game by Masaki Takei, creator of End of Summer, starting with a lonely summer holiday enlivened by a chance meeting of an old flame and building up to a romantic “climax” on Christmas Eve. Unlike many adaptations of games that simply dump a male protagonist into a sea of women in the style of Tenchi Muyo!, this one separates the various female characters into separate stories with different male love interests, which is slightly more realistic, if no less boring. N

Penguins Memory

1985. jpn: Penguins Memory Shiawase Monogatari. aka: Penguins Memory Happy Tale. Movie. dir: Satoshi Kimura. scr: Hiroshi Kawano, Ryo Yamazaki, Rei Kuno, Dodekagon. des: Ginjiro Suzuki. ani: Norio Hikone, Akinori Nagaoka. mus: Seiko Matsuda. prd: Animation Staff Room, CM Land. 101 mins.

Mike, a traumatized penguin who once fought in the Delta War, returns to his hometown of Lake City and takes a job as a librarian. He falls in love with Jill, a would-be singing penguin who is the daughter of the owner of the local penguin hospital. Jill meets a record producer and embarks on a successful career, but Mike waddles away alone—he has discovered that she is engaged to marry Jack the penguin doctor, and he doesn’t wish to get in the way.

A film made to cash in on the unexpected popularity of a 1984 series of Suntory Beer commercials that replayed famous American films such as Casablanca and The Deer Hunter but with a cast of cartoon penguins.

Pepelo, Boy of the Andes

1975. jpn: Andes Shonen Pepelo no Boken. aka: Adventures of Pepelo the Andes Boy. TV series. dir: Kazuhiko Udagawa, Yasuo Hasegawa, Seiji Okada, Takashi Anno, Fumio Ikeno. scr: Shunichi Yukimuro, Soji Yoshikawa, Masaki Tsuji. des: Yasuhiro Okaoi. ani: Moriyasu Taniguchi, Yasuhiro Okaoi. mus: Takeo Yamashita. prd: Wako, Telescreen, NET (TV Asahi). 25 mins. x 26 eps.

In the 19th century, Pepelo’s father sets off to find the mythical city of Eldorado and the Golden Condor, said to lie in Central America. When he hasn’t returned a year later, Pepelo sets out to find him. On the way, Pepelo joins forces with Titicaca, an old man, Quena, a girl who has lost her memory, and an Aztecan boy called Azteco. They walk into the Andes using only a condor talisman as a guide. With a certain resemblance to From the Apennines to the Andes, this series was a reasonable success in Europe, but largely eclipsed seven years later by Mysterious Cities of Gold, which revisited many of its themes. Perhaps the strangest name on the credits, though, is lyricist Kazuo Umezu, who went on to fame as a writer of gory manga like The Boy with Cat’s Eyes.

Perfect Blue *

1997. Movie. dir: Satoshi Kon. scr: Sadayuki Murai. des: Hisashi Eguchi, Hideki Hamazu, Satoshi Kon. ani: Hideki Hamazu, Hisao Shirai. mus: Masahiro Ikumi. prd: Madhouse, Oniro. 82 mins.

Singer Mima Kirigoe leaves the pop trio Cham to become a serious actress. Her change in careers causes a slow decline into insanity, as forces conspire to keep her from changing her public persona, to the extent of interfering directly in her private life. Matters aren’t helped by a murderous stalker, egged on by e-mails from someone claiming to be the real Mima. Eventually, Mima’s hold on reality is thoroughly undermined as she sinks into the mother of all neuroses. And she’s not on her own—this film is told from the viewpoints of three characters, and each one of them is going slowly insane.

Based on a novel by Yoshikazu Takeuchi and originally planned as a live-action film, PB features obvious influences from Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Stage Fright (1950), and Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977), but it has ultimately a less bleak and more humane agenda. Murai’s script, which adds the film-within-a-film Double Bind to really confuse matters, remains one of anime’s best since Kazunori Ito’s for Patlabor. The obsessive fan stalker, who was merely a red herring in the novel, is given a succession of actual murders to perform in the anime version, though the blurred line between fantasy and reality is one of PB’s greatest achievements—the director deliberately cut all transition shots that signified dream sequences or flashbacks, leaving the audience floundering in a confused world cleverly matching the protagonists’ own. Kon, the former animator on the surreal Jojo’s Bizarre Adventures who created environments full of faux-live-action clutter in Roujin Z, makes a virtue of a limited animation budget, depicting crowd scenes with empty faces and playing up the ghostly pallor of fluorescent lighting. The cinematography is gorgeous, as loving a rendition of real-life contemporary Tokyo as the dark, glittering forward-projection of the city in Akira (whose creator Katsuhiro Otomo has a production credit for introducing the producers to his protégé Kon, although some press releases implied his involvement in PB was far greater). The increasing influence of the Internet and cyber-reality on mass perceptions is seriously examined here (and further explored on TV in Serial Experiments Lain), but PB is also strong on traditional story values—beautifully paced plot development and a craftsman’s ability to subvert the conventions of the medium. Most notable and controversial remains a scene in which Mima’s character is raped, played out as a pastiche of The Accused (1988) but continually taunting the viewer with the question of whether this time it is really for real. The prosaic movements of lights and camera, and the whispered apologies of the actor playing one of the rapists who has to stay in position during a shooting break, heighten the surreality precisely because they remind us that Mima is being assaulted in a “respectable” professional context—later in the movie, she is attacked for real.

The English version is excellent despite some inevitable losses in translation. Japan may look like every other modern, industrialized, media-led country, but both language and social interaction are hugely important in this tale of fishes out of water. Some of the bowing, scraping, and statement of the obvious (culturally, an attempt to ingratiate oneself by appearing more clueless than the next person) just seems insincere with American voices. Mima’s oft-repeated “Who are you?” loses some of its clout when lip-synching considerations force the actress to add a mitigating “Excuse me.” The English dub also loses an extra level of emphasis—two scenes when Mima slips into her native dialect, demonstrating to the Japanese audience that not even the girl we see in private is the real Mima. The city girl-next-door whom the fans worship is actually another mask—a pretty country maid who forgets her elocution lessons when Mom phones from back home. This shift is also heard in the film’s final line, when Mima announces that she is “herself” at last (and uses her native accent, not the well-spoken Tokyo dialect she’s been taught to use on TV). Despite these minor cavils, PB remains one of the best anime of the late 1990s. The remake rights were optioned by director Darren Aronofsky, who lifted a shot from the film (of Mima crouching in her bathtub) for his live-action movie Requiem for a Dream (2000). Director Kon and writer Murai would return with another peek behind dramatic masks: Millennium Actress. Sequences from PB were shown onstage by Madonna as part of her Drowned World concerts in 2001. The live-action movie Perfect Blue: If This Is a Dream Wake Me Up (2002) is based on a later book in the series, and not the one that informed the anime production. LNV

Pet shop of Horrors *

1998. TV. dir: Toshio Hirata, Norihiko Nagahama, Yoshiaki Kawajiri, Satoshi Nishimura. scr: Yasuhiro Imagawa, Matsuri Akino. des: Hisashi Abe, Hiroshi Kato. ani: Hisashi Abe. mus: N/C. prd: Madhouse, TBS. 25 mins. x 4 eps.

In Chinatown, in a generic U.S. city (on the Japanese release, Newtype magazine claimed it was New York, but Animage and AX both noted the visual references to Los Angeles), “Count D,” a fey Faustian pet shop owner, sells personified desires as “pets” to society’s misfits, including a mother who refuses to accept that her own weak will turned her daughter into a drug addict, a faithless husband who cannot admit he drove his bride to suicide, and a proud gangster who wants people to fear his power. Signing deceptively simple contracts, they discover that deals made with the supernatural should never be taken lightly. Leon, a loud-mouth cop who encapsulates several anime stereotypes of Americans, is convinced that the count is up to something, but the count is strangely welcoming and hospitable toward him. The “horrors” happen when purchasers ignore the strict instructions provided for the care of the unusual creatures they buy—Gremlins parallels are obvious. Old meets new and East meets West, not just in the mixture of mythologies, but in the mismatched central characters. Everyday laws cannot touch these criminals, but the count cuts through the red tape and delivers punishment where Leon cannot, without fear or favor toward a would-be president, or even a child star prepared to sell his soul for adult fame. Though our wiseacre policeman is too boneheaded to realize it, the count is on his side, transforming the story from a humdrum chiller into a moral X-Files, in which hell’s own angel teams up with an earthy cop to mete out peculiar justice.

Matsuri Akino’s original 1990 manga ran for over a dozen volumes in Mitzi Comics DX, and yet this 1999 TBS series was never planned as more than four episodes. Limited animation is bolstered by flashy effects (from some big names, including Doomed Megalopolis–director Rintaro on the opening animation), but the biggest mystery is why there was no more. Perhaps wisely, the show canceled itself before the “sin of the week” angle could become too predictable. Compare to similar rough justice in Judge. V

Perverted Thomas *

2004. jpn: Chikansha Thomas. aka: Thomas the Pervert Train. Video. dir: Kenji Matsuda. scr: Hiroshi Sasaki. des: Hirotaka. ani: Takashi Tsukamoto. mus: N/C. prd: Dream Entertainment, Studio March, Milky, Museum Soft. 30 mins.

A man with nothing better to do tries to “teach the women of the world about the pleasures of sex” by feeling them up on a crowded train. He has a special technique, it says here. Based on a computer game by Xuse. Compare to Midnight Sleazy Train and Xpress Train. LNV

Peter Pan and Wendy *

1989. jpn: Peter Pan no Boken. aka: Peter Pan’s Adventure. TV series. dir: Yoshio Kuroda, Fumio Kurokawa, Kozo Kusuba. scr: Shunichi Yukimuro, Mi-chiru Shimada. des: Takashi Nakamura, Shohei Kawamoto. ani: Hiro­tsuge Kawasaki, Tomihiko Okubo, Moriyasu Taniguchi. mus: Toshiyuki Watanabe. prd: Nippon Animation, Fuji TV. 25 mins. x 41 eps.

J.M. Barrie’s 1911 novel is given a new twist as Wendy, not wanting to grow up, travels with her two little brothers and Peter Pan to Never Land where he must fight the terrible pirate leader Captain Hook and face many other perils, including Darkness, an evil sorcerer who joins forces with Hook. Nakamura’s presence may surprise those who know him only from Akira and Robot Carnival, as would that of future Spriggan-director Kawasaki. A compilation video of the first three episodes was released in the U.K. on an obscure children’s label, featuring new music from Haim Saban and Shuki Levy.

Petite Cossette *

2004. jpn: Cossette no Shozo; Le Portrait de Petit [sic] Cossette. aka: Portrait of Little Cossette. Video. dir: Akiyuki Shinbo. scr: Mayori Sekijima. des: Hirofumi Suzuki. ani: Hirofumi Suzuki. mus: Yuki Kajiura. prd: Aniplex, Studio Hibari. 38 mins. x 3 eps.

Art student Eiri Kurahashi works part-time in his uncle’s Tokyo antique shop, where he finds an antique Venetian glass goblet in which he can see visions of a beautiful young girl with long blonde hair. Her name is Cossette d’Auvergne and she’s been dead for 250 years. She’s looking for someone to help her—a man with the courage to risk everything, even his own life, to release her from her prison. Eiri’s friends start to notice he’s acting strangely; previously his life has been bound up with his art, and though he has lots of female friends there hasn’t been a special girl. He becomes completely absorbed by his visions and fantasies, losing track of where his life ends and Cossette’s begins. His best friend Shoko Mataki is so concerned that her aunt, the local doctor, gets involved, along with tarot reader Michiru and priestess Shakodo. Meanwhile Yu, a young girl with latent talents and a secret crush on Eiri, is drawn into Cossette’s dangerous web. Her sweet face hides a calculating heart and an insatiable lust for vengeance. Eiri can only free her by atoning for the betrayal of her former lover through a blood pact, swearing to love her and her alone and taking on another’s soul—compare to similar entrapment in Memories.

Putting a Gothic spin on both the harem show and the magical girlfriend theme reprised in Moon Phase the following year, PC plays elegantly at darkness and foreboding. The three video episodes were edited together into a TV movie, Le Portrait de Petit Cossette, in 2005. Based on the manga by Asuka Katsura in Magazine Z. Part of the relatively recent “Gothic Lolita” subgenre of anime, based on the fashion fad of the same name, also found in Rozen Maiden and Moon Phase.

Petite Princess Yucie *

2002. jpn: Petit Puri[ncess] Yushi. TV series. dir: Masahiko Otsuka. scr: Hiroyuki Yamaga. des: Kazuko Tadano. ani: Hideaki Anno, Mitsuro Obunai, Tadashi Hiramatsu. mus: Seiko Nagaoka. prd: Gainax, AIC, NHK. 25 mins. x 26 eps.

Yucie lives long ago and far away, in a Ruritanian magical land with her foster father and the family’s young but fiercely loyal butler, Cube. She’s 17 years old, but because of a magical curse, she looks like a 10-year-old girl—compare to Nanaka 6/17. Her positive attitude makes her seem even cuter and perkier—she never lets anything get her down, although she desperately wants to look her real age and become a beautiful, elegant lady with a handsome husband of her own. She has the chance to make her dreams come true when she’s chosen as a Petite Princess, one of the elite girls from many different realms who will be trained in the ways of femininity and elegance. If she can defeat the competition, she may even become the Platinum Princess, and win the prize of a magic tiara that will grant her any wish—no prizes for guessing what Yucie’s wish will be.

Takami Akai, who created the Princess Maker game series in which Cube first appeared, isn’t about to let a winning concept drop. Crashing the countless fairy tales of enchanted princesses into every little girl’s impatience to acquire those arcane skills that define a grown-up woman, she’s produced the finishing school version of Dragon Ball. Our heroine is trying to find her true self. Along the way, just like Toriyama’s perky hero Son Goku, she makes loyal friends and converts former enemies to friendship.

Petopeto-san

2005. TV series. dir: Akira Nishimori, Tetsuya Endo, Tamaki Nakatsu, Yasu-yuki Shinozaki, Toru Kitahata, Satomi Nakamura, Kenichi Ishikura. scr: Megumi Ikeno. des: Mari Tominaga. ani: Mari Tominaga, Masakazu Iguchi, Hiroyuki Shimizu, Miwa Oshima. mus: Masami Kurihara. prd: Xebec M2, TV Saitama. 25 mins. x 13 eps.

After centuries of antagonism and misunderstanding, the Japanese finally welcome “monsters” into their community. In an attempt at species integration, normal children begin attending school with paranormal creatures—see similarly unlikely acceptance of foreigners, sorry, otherworldly creatures, in DearS. Japanese boy Shingo Ohashi finds himself developing feelings for Hatoko “Petoko” Fujimura, a girl from the sorcerous realm whose main power appears to be the ability to make anything she regards as “cute” cling inescapably to her bare flesh until she falls asleep—compare to Urusei Yatsura.

Phantom Buster Miko

2000. jpn: Reino Tantei Miko. aka: Spirit Investigator Miko. Video. dir: Hiroshi Furuhashi. scr: Tetsuo Tanaka. des: Masashi Kojima. ani: Waki Noguchi. mus: N/C. prd: Maxam. 30 mins.

This is a sexually charged variant of the ghostbusting anime typified by Phantom Quest Corp or Ghost Sweeper Mikami, as a sexy exorcist takes on the legions of hell. N

Phantom Heroes

1991. jpn: Phantom Yusha Densetsu. aka: Legend of the Phantom Heroes. Video. dir: Satoshi Dezaki. scr: Kazumi Koide. des: Keizo Shimizu. ani: Toshifumi Takizawa. mus: Kyan Marie with Medusa. prd: Magic Bus. 45 mins.

Yazawa, a former aircraft carrier F4 Phantom pilot, becomes embroiled in a South American coup when his lover is killed during a CIA operation in El Salvador. A violent thriller based on a best-selling novel by Dark Warrior–creator Sho Takejima, this video was rushed out in the year of his untimely death. NV

Phantom Master

2004. jpn: Shin Angyo Onshi. aka: Phantom Master—Dark Hero from a Ruined Empire; New History of the Dark Ways. Movie. dir: Joji Shimura. scr: Joji Shimura, Mitsuru Hongo. des: Hideki Takahashi. ani: Hideki Takaha-shi. mus: Ko Otani. prd: Klockworkz, Oriental Light & Magic, Character Plan. 87 mins.

A Korean-Japanese coproduction based on a Korean comic by author Youn In-Wan and artist Yang Kyung-Il, this is a reversioning of an ancient Asian folktale. In the fictional land of Jushin, the Angyo Onshi are secret agents who roam the land in disguise, rooting out and punishing corrupt officials. Agent Monsu wanders out of the desert into a town where the locals are losing their life forces to a cruel overlord. Justice ensues. The comic was printed in Japan in Shonen Sunday GX. V

Phantom Quest Corp *

1994. jpn: Yugen Kaisha. aka: Phantom Company/Limited Company, Private Company. Video. dir: Koichi Chigira, Morio Asaka, Takuji Endo. scr: Asami Watanabe, Tatsuhiko Urahata, Satoshi Kimura. des: Hitoshi Ueda. ani: Yasuhito Kikuchi. mus: Junichi Kanezaki. prd: Madhouse. 30 mins. x 4 eps.

Ayaka is a modern girl running her own successful business—a freelance psychic agency, supplying the power to deal with any problem. Ayaka is also a hopeless lush who can’t stay ahead of her finances, blows all her money on designer clothes and karaoke bars, and relies on her child butler, Mamoru, to run her home and her life and to make sure she gets up in the morning. The police’s own ghostbusting squad, Section U, headed up by a crumpled-but-cute detective with a soft spot for our heroine, causes even more complications. And as for her staff—she’s stuck with a dropout priest, a twisted firestarter, a psychic who only works to enhance her meager pension, and her own rich family’s hereditary butler.

Like its longer-running contemporary Ghost Sweeper Mikami, PQC is packed with gentle digs at what has become of Japan. The money-culture of the late 1980s produced many un­real phenomena of its own (the bubble economy, Generation X) while simultaneously trying to forget the spiritual past. The title, with a double meaning in the real and ghostly worlds, sets the tone for a witty, wacky post-
X-Files series, but it didn’t get the success it deserved at home or abroad. Takuji Endo and Morio Asaka cram their episodes with innovative jerky camera effects to play up the feel of a horror B-movie, just one of the little touches that made PQC, but somehow failed to ignite the audience. Other noticeable presences include Yoshiaki Kawajiri as a “guest” director for the striking opening credits and future Tenchi Muyo!–director Kimura as a humble scriptwriter. Creator Juzo Mutsuki has several other underrated series—the similar ancient-meets-modern clashes of Devil Hunter Yohko and Cyber City Oedo 808. The dub from Pioneer is of high quality, and even boasts a hilarious English-language version of one of Ayaka’s excruciatingly melancholy karaoke sessions—the single thirtysomething modern girl singing a widow’s song that likens herself to “a riderless horse.”

Phantom: The Animation *

2004. aka: Phantom of Inferno. Video. dir: Keitaro Motonaga. scr: Shoji Harimura. des: Koji Watanabe. ani: N/C. mus: N/C. prd: KSS, Earth Create. 30 mins. x 3 eps.

Teenage tourist Reiji Agatsuma accidentally runs across pretty girl assassin Ai (codenamed Ein, aka Phantom) while out late at night on the streets of Los Angeles. He witnesses her at work, but when she attacks him he evades her. This makes the Inferno organization think he has the aptitude to join her. He is captured, has his memories erased, and is trained as an assassin in the style of Crying Freeman. Given the name Zwei, he struggles to regain his freedom and his memories. As he and Ein grow closer, she begins to look at her own life and question the emotions she has always suppressed—compare to Gunslinger Girl. Initially released as the interactive title Phantom of Inferno (2001), the original involved the use of the DVD remote to steer the course of the game. This adaptation makes all the viewer’s choices for them—if that’s all that was necessary, what was the point of having “interactivity” in the first place? The original game was later bundled with the anime in a single release.

Pharoah’s Seal

1988. jpn: Oka no Monsho. Movie. dir: Daisuke Yasaku. scr: Chieko Hosokawa. des: Chieko Hosokawa. ani: N/C. mus: Joe Hisaishi. prd: Toei. 40 mins.

Two lovers are caught up in civil unrest in 1000 b.c. Egypt. Based on Chieko Hosokawa’s 1977 manga, which has been reprinted over 130 times by its publishers Princess Comics, this is best described as a “costume drama” since, while the setting is ancient Egypt, the characters’ concerns speak to any modern schoolgirl, perhaps explaining the series’ runaway success in manga form.

Photon *

1997. jpn: Photon. aka: The Idiot Adventures. Video. dir: Koji Masunari. scr: Yosuke Kuroda. des: Masaki Kajishima, Shinya Takahashi, Koji Watanabe. ani: Shinya Takahashi. mus: Haruhiko Nishi-oka. prd: AIC. 45 mins. x 6 eps.

On Sandy Planet, where the locals are so stupid they worship Magic Markers, chieftain’s daughter Aun goes AWOL because she’s got a crush on a troubadour, and laconic local boy Photon is sent to find her before she causes trouble. But Photon discovers a crashed spaceship and wakes its beautiful pilot, Keyne, from her cryogenic slumber. Accidentally marrying her by writing the word “Idiot” on her forehead, Photon is forced to protect Keyne from the evil spacefaring prince Papacha.

Planned, like its stablemate Tenchi Muyo!, as a multimedia promotion involving animation, radio drama, novels, and a manga, Photon is distinguished by Battle Athletes–director Masunari allowing the designers free rein with their insane visual conceits, from a girl who can stop time in selected places, to levitation garters, wind-powered landspeeders, and a girl trying to proclaim her love through a mouthful of sand. Sadly, the script doesn’t live up to the visual promise, relying on puerile nudie gags and a charmless lead, though moments remain when it looks as if a mad scientist has combined Dragon Half and Nausicaä in a secret laboratory. N

P.I. Perverse Investigations *

2003. jpn: Sei Sai. aka: Sex Judge. Video. dir: Kanzaburo Oda. scr: Shinji Rannai. des: Ryosuke Morimura. ani: Ryosuke Morimura. mus: Yoshi. prd: YOUC, Digital Works (Vanilla Series). 30 mins. x 2 eps.

When much loved schoolteacher Yuko falls from the roof under suspicious circumstances, four of her favorite pupils form a team to investigate. Their most important clue is her diary, which shows meetings scheduled with seven female students on the night of her death. The boys duly start hunting for further clues among the girls and are prepared to use any methods at their disposal, soon transforming this anime into the usual cavalcade of rape and abuse, particularly over at the photography club and the swimming club. The U.S. release cunningly found a title and font that would recall the TV series C.S.I.: Crime Scene Investigation. Part of the Vanilla Series. LNV

Pia Carrot *

1997. jpn: Pia Carrot e Yokoso. aka: Welcome to Pia Carrot. Video. dir: Kan Fukumoto, Nobuyoshi Ando. scr: Katsu­masa Kanezawa. des: Cocktail Soft. ani: Katsumasa Kanezawa. mus: N/C. prd: Pink Pineapple, KSS. 30 mins. x 3 eps. (v1), 30 mins. x 3 eps. (v2), 30 mins. x 6 eps. (v3 DX), 50 mins. (m).

In an anime based on a computer-dating simulation game, a lusty teenage boy gets a part-time job at a restaurant, where he is soon seducing the waitresses. By episode three, even the crew tired of the setting, and the cast relocates to Okinawa. For the grand finale, manager Kyoko invites the girls back to her place, everyone gets drunk, and formulaic high jinks ensue. After a manga adaptation appeared in Comic Gao, the franchise was renewed for Pia Carrot 2 DX (1999), in which, predictably, a new branch of the restaurant opens up, a new boy gets a summer job, and a new rack of girls finds him irresistibly attractive. Re­leased in the U.S. as Welcome to Pia Carrot (2001). A short Pia Carrot “movie” PC: Sayaka’s Love Story (Sayaka no Koi Monogatari, 2002) was directed by Yuji Muto. N

Piano *

2002. TV series. dir: Norihiko Sudo. scr: Mami Watanabe. des: Kosuke Fujishima. ani: N/C. mus: Hiroyuki Kozu. prd: Marine Entertainment, Animate, Pioneer LDCE, Kid’s Station. 24 mins. x 10 eps.

Eighth-grader Miu Nomura has been taking piano classes since she was small. Her parents, big sister Akiko, teachers, and friends know her as a shy, quiet girl, and she lacks self-confidence. Her music teacher feels that her playing, though almost note-perfect, lacks emotion. As Miu gets older, she finds that approaching adulthood affects her whole life, even her playing. Maybe she’ll be able to let her feelings out on the keyboard if handsome Kazuya Takahashi ever notices her.

Guaranteed almost supernatural prettiness through the presence of Oh My Goddess!–creator Kosuke Fujishima, this series also exploited the persona of its lead—voice actress Ayako Kawasumi supposedly started piano classes in childhood, and both composed and performed the series’ opening theme. Not to be confused with Pianist, which is an episode of the erotic Secret Anima Series.

Piccolino

1976. jpn: Pinocchio Yori: Piccolino no Daiboken. aka: The Adventures of Piccolino, after Pinocchio. TV series. dir: Hiroshi Saito, Masaharu Endo, Shigeo Koshi. scr: Masao Maruyama. des: Takao Kogawa, Michiyo Sakurai, Marty Murphy. ani: Takao Kogawa, Michiyo Sakurai, Koichi Murata. mus: Karel Svoboda. prd: Nippon Animation, TV Asahi. 25 mins. x 52 eps.

Lonely toymaker Gepetto constructs a puppet son to keep him company and names him Piccolino. The boy lives as a normal child but yearns to be real. This German-Japanese coproduction of Carlo Collodi’s 1881 tale involves one of Disney’s stalwarts, Marty Murphy. Despite the renaming, the series remains close to the original, with sculpting by old Gepetto, the learning of worldly wisdom, and achieving real humanity—the story is the same. See also Adventures of Pinocchio.

Pictures at an Exhibition

1966. jpn: Tenrankai no E. Movie. dir: Osamu Tezuka, Shingo Matsuo, Taku Sugiyama. scr: Osamu Tezuka. des: Osamu Tezuka. ani: Akihiro Mori, Shigeru Yamazaki. mus: Modest Mussorgsky. prd: Mushi Pro. 34 mins.

This short film by Astro Boy’s Tezuka sets ten short vignettes of his own devising to music by Mussorgsky originally based on scenes created by a friend of the composer. The Tezuka stories, like the originals, are contemporary social satires: The Critic, The Artificial Gardener, The Plastic Surgeon, The Factory Owner, The Tough Guy, The Champion, The TV Star, The Zen Funeral, The Soldier, and The Finale. The music is an original arrangement of Mussorgsky’s score by Isao Tomita; he was later to make an arrangement of the same work for synthesizer, but this one is fully orchestrated, making for interesting comparisons. Definitely one to file in the “art house” section of Tezuka’s output, here in an unmistakable homage to Disney’s Fantasia (1940).

Piggyback Ghost

1955. jpn: Onbu Obake. aka: Knapsack Ghost; Ghost in a Knapsack. TV series. dir: Ryuichi Yokoyama. scr: Ryuichi Yokoyama. des: Ryuichi Yokoyama. ani: Mitsuhiro Machiyama. mus: N/C. prd: Fuji, Eastman Color, Yomiuri TV (Nippon TV). 55 mins. (m), 25 mins. x 54 eps. (TV).

Green-eyed spirit Onbu is created when lightning strikes jade in a river. He loves swimming through the air but is adopted by Ojie the village blacksmith, who carries him in a knapsack. Onbu plays with the cheeky Kanchan brothers, Ojo the gentle girl, Chinnen the young priest, and the other kindly villagers. Lifting many ideas from Japanese Folk Tales, this series was based on a manga by Ryuichi Yokoyama, who also created Fuku-chan, shared many staff members with the more successful Sazae-san, and was remade for TV by Hajime Watanabe at the Eiken Studio in 1966.

Pikkoman’s Devil Training *

1999. jpn: Pikkoman no Oni Chikudo: Midnight Milk Party. aka: Pikkoman’s Way of Devil Taming. Video. dir: Rion Kushiro. scr: Tedokoro Imaike. des: Piko Fujikatsu (Pikkoman). ani: Ken Raibi. mus: N/C. prd: Tsuyusha, Akatonbo. 30 mins.

Teenager Chiho Chino wants to have an adventure before she leaves her school days behind, so she auditions for a role in a schoolgirl porn video, believing that her performance will be of a wholly solo nature. However, when she reaches the set, she is raped on camera. Another of anime’s more distasteful offerings, this one based on a manga by Piko Fujikatsu. Released in the U.S. in 2002 under the title Midnight Milk Party. NV

Pilot Candidate *

1999. jpn: Megami Kohosei. aka: Candidate for Goddess. TV series. dir: Mitsu­ru Hongo. scr: Akira Oketani, Miho Sakai. des: Shinichi Yamaoka. ani: N/C. mus: N/C. prd: Production IG, Xebec. 25 mins. x 12 eps. (TV), 23 mins. (v).

Rei “Zero” Enna and a group of other teenagers from various space colonies must train together at an interstellar academy in order to protect Zion, the last human colony, from the devastating alien invaders known only as “Victim.” In a setup that will be familiar to anyone who has followed sports anime or military training movies, the teenage pilots soon bond, with the exception of a ruthless candidate determined to out-score everyone else. Typically, they idolize their tough, no-nonsense Coach (compare to Gunbuster) and the upperclassmen who are so good at the tasks which Zero and company are only just learning. Meanwhile, there are hints that something untoward is going on—as in The Matrix (1999), which featured a hero who was “The One,” not a Zero, and a bastion of freedom called Zion—what first appear to be design problems or story inconsistencies take on more sinister meanings. Zero’s offhand comment that he can’t remember his family turns out to be a statement of the literal truth. Meanwhile, the pilots get on with their pilot training, flying five (and only five—why not make more?) robots modeled on Greco-Roman goddesses, color-coded like the creations of a live-action team-show like Goranger (*DE).

This anime was based on a manga in Comic Ga by DNAngel creator Yukiru Sugisaki and influenced by the existential musings of Evangelion, but it features slapstick and a cat-girl thrown in for good measure. As with other anime made at the turn of the century (see Dual), the transition to digital animation makes for clever camerawork but a sanitized, “clean” feel to all the art. Note that the episodes are numbered “00” through “11,” apparently in order to cause confusion to anime encyclopedists. A one-shot 2002 video spin-off retold the TV series story from the point of view of one of the other pilots.

Pinch and Punch

1969. jpn: Pinch to Punch. TV series. dir: Fumio Ikeno. scr: Noboru Ishiguro, Toyohiro Ando. des: N/C. ani: Tadao Wakabayashi. mus: N/C. prd: Fuji TV Enterprise. 5 mins. x 162 eps.

Pinch and Punch are genius twins with a mean streak, easily annoyed with their associates, particularly with the hypocrisy of adults. Their main nemesis is Mamagon, their education-obsessed mother, against whom they soon form a rebel alliance, in the company of their friend Dotako, pet Ijibuta the pig, and little sister Chibigon—note that the gon suffix in Japan is usually only applied to dangerous creatures, such as Monster Tamagon.

Pinch and Punch is, quite literally, an anime that just happened—as Freckles Pooch came to an end, the staff slowly transferred to this new production, which briefly shared FP’s slot before taking it over. The story, so Japanese sources claimed, was not actually pitched to the network; it was simply assumed that a cartoon of equivalent value to FP would replace it, and that’s what occurred.

Ping Pong Club *

1995. jpn: Ike! Inachu Ping-Pong Club. aka: Let’s Go! Inachu Ping Pong Club; Make Way for the Ping Pong Club. TV series. dir: Masami Hata. scr: Sukehiro Tomita, Tsunehisa Ito, Kenji Terada, Yoshihiro Sasa. des: Minoru Furuya. ani: Mamoru Tanaka. mus: Katsuyoshi Kobayashi. prd: Grouper Production, KSS, TBS. 25 mins. x 26 eps.

The boys’ table-tennis club consists of earnest captain Takeda, school dreamboat Kinoshita, and four deadbeats who constantly goof off instead of practicing. Their coach, Mr. Shibazaki, is a pushover for all the other teachers. The girls’ club is a large group of dedicated, gifted young athletes, whose coach, Mr. Tachikawa, despises the boys’ club and covets its premises. But the clubroom is about more than just ping-pong; it’s a refuge for a group of misfits, no-hopers, and adolescents trying to cope with the petty pains and embarrassments of growing up. To keep it, the boys will have to find that old fighting spirit they all seem to lack—a plan helped by the pretty Kyoko, who offers a personal “sex pass” to the highest scorer.

It’s hard to describe this short series, based on Minoru Furuya’s 1993 Young Magazine manga, as anything other than insane. The raging of teenage male hormones and the nonoperational status of the related brain cells is conveyed in a fractured visual and directorial style, complete with a Lupin III pastiche, mom-and-pop gags, enka and taiko, male impersonators, crossdressers, St. Francis Xavier, the legend of Momotaro, volcanic eruptions, smelly foreigners, feats of Endurance, and every conceivable offensive reference to sexual habits and bodily functions. There are more naked penises in this low-rent “buddy movie” series than in many erotic anime—falling out of shorts, stuffed into bird’s heads for a Swan Lake ballet skit, accidentally revealed during exercise—and all the tropes normally used to peek at female nudity, but there’s hardly a hint of any real possibility of sexual action. The overall effect is as directionless and futile as the average teenager’s life, but it’s hard not to feel a creeping sympathy for its hopeless, dogged solidarity with those facing hormonal challenge and social failure.

The throwaway nature is so determinedly pursued as to obscure the solid track record of its crew. This isn’t a team of young punks talking dirty to their peers (see Bite Me!: Chameleon), but a rack of seasoned professionals with an instinct for video sales. Their work is full of knowing nudges and winks, entirely unashamed of itself. Despite the multitude of monocultural references, the overall Beavis and Butthead atmosphere would have spoken loud and clear to legions of hormonally challenged males too young to get most of the cultural digs, but that’s hardly the audience for the subtitled version that was released in the U.S. No relation to the 2002 live-action movie, written by Kankuro Kudo and directed by Fumihiko Sone, which was adapted from a different 1996 manga by Taiyo Matsumoto. LNV

Pink Curtain

1985. jpn: Pink no Curtain. Video. dir: Yoshiharu Kurahashi. scr: Masahito Nishio. des: N/C. ani: Minoru Kichoda. mus: Hikaru Onda. prd: Bip. 30 mins.

Virgin boy Okuyama is a stocker at the supermarket who has no luck with women. His life is thrown upside down when his sister Noriko unexpectedly moves into his house. Okuyama is overcome with lustful thoughts for her, but she regards him simply as a brother. With more incest from the era that gave us Cream Lemon, this story was based on the strip in Manga Action magazine by Joji Akiyama, who also created Koiko’s Daily Life. N

Pinmen

2000. aka: PiNMEN: Workers From Space Video. dir: Bak Ikeda. scr: Bak Ikeda. des: Bak Ikeda. ani: Bak Ikeda. mus: Homo Sapiens Sapiens. prd: Trilogy Future Studio, Pierrot, Animax, Dentsu. 7 mins.

A group of superadvanced, superpeaceful aliens have locked away all knowledge of warfare deep in their distant past—the flipside of the Zentraedi from Macross. Learning of a distant blue-green planet where all kinds of “fun” are available, a group
of them resolve to come to Earth. Since they are industrious, frugal aliens, they intend to work hard so that they can earn enough money to pay for the entertainment they bring back to their homeworld. An innocuous short animation by an artist calling himself Bakuhatsuro “Bak” Ikeda—a pseudonym meaning Explodey Ikeda.

Pipi the Alien

1965. jpn: Uchujin Pipi. TV series. dir: Yuichiro Konnai. scr: Sakyo Komatsu, Kazumasa Hirai. des: Toshikazu Fukuhara. ani: N/C. mus: Isao Tomita. prd: NHK, TV Doga, NHK. 25 mins. x 52 eps.

Toshihiko and Ryoko meet the gnome-like alien Pipi and his friends, who have one year (the length of a lunch break on Pipi’s world) to learn all they can about planet Earth. Since these two Japanese children are the first people they have met who are close to them in size, they tag along with them as they explore their neighborhood, repaying them by taking them on fantastic space journeys during their own school lunch breaks. A series that mixes live action and animation.

Pipi the Flightless Firefly

1995. jpn: Pipi Tobenai Hotaru. Movie. dir: Shinichi Nakada. scr: Yoshimi Kato. des: Akimi Kozawa. ani: Takaya Ono. mus: N/C. prd: Office CHK, Success Road, Mushi. 90 mins.

In a heavy-handed “educational” film that also finds the time to tackle environmental issues, a young firefly is bullied by his fellow insects because he cannot actually fly. Government approved, it says here.

Pipopapo Patrol

2000. jpn: Pipopapo Patrol-kun. aka: Pip Pop Pattle. TV series. dir: Mitsuo Hashimoto. scr: Aya Matsui. des: Birthday, Izumi Todo. ani: N/C. mus: Toshiyuki Takizawa. prd: Toei Animation, BS Fuji. 25 mins. x 65 eps.

In Sunflower City, technology is so advanced that vehicles are able to think and speak. Perky little police patrol car Pattle (Patrol) and his driver Hajime are partners: both rookies, but eager to learn from more experienced officers and vehicles and determined to do their bit to keep the peace on their patch. A show that takes Starsky and Hutch, extracts the cardigans and comedy pimp, and whisks in a dash of Bob the Builder, or if you prefer, Bubu Chacha meets You’re under Arrest. Created by Izumi Todo, who was also responsible for Stumbling Witch Doremi and Precure.

Piroppo

2001. jpn: Aibo. TV series. dir: Katsuhito Ishii. scr: Katsuhito Ishii, Yumiko Fujimura. des: Katsuhito Ishii. ani: Yumi Chiba, Shigeko Sakuma, Rie Nishino. mus: Eiko Sakurai. prd: Studio 4°C, Sony, Fuji TV. 20 secs x 54 eps.

A series based on Sony’s hugely popular range of robot pets, Piroppo stars two new robots, Latte and Macaron, designed by Katsura Moshino, which went on sale in Japan two weeks before the October 11th series premiere. The series was planned as 54 episodes of 20 seconds each, but shown in 5-minute and 10-minute compilations. There’s also a web comic on Sony’s AIBO-Life site. It’s hard to see 20-second animations as anything other than commercials, despite the PR claims of a “lavish anime staff.” The design is deliberately wacky, with references to pop culture icons like masked wrestlers and cowboys, and a collar-and-tie wearing hammerhead shark.

Pita Ten

2002. TV series. dir: Yoshiaki Okamura, Yuzo Ten. scr: Akemi Menda, Yasu-ko Kobayashi. des: Kyuta Sakai. ani: Toshifumi Kawase, Shinichiro Minami. mus: Hikaru Nanase. prd: Madhouse, Broccoli, TV Osaka. 24 mins. x 26 eps.

Kotaro Higuchi has recently lost his mother, and his businessman father works long hours and is only around at breakfast. Kotaro is a quiet boy who looks after the house and hangs out with his best friends from childhood, Takashi Ayanokoji, aka Ten-chan, and Koboshi Uematsu, who has been sweet on Kotaro ever since they were small and he comforted her after she hurt herself playing. Ten-chan is the boy with everything—looks, intelligence, great sporting ability, and a wealthy family—but Kotaro has his own special gift: he can see the supernatural. This leads him into a meeting with apprentice angel Misha, a clumsy, tactless but kind-hearted spirit who succumbs to a huge crush on him and invades his life. She moves in next door to him, starts at his school, and becomes his very own cute and perky stalker. When apprentice devil Shia, who is in big trouble because she’s far too nice to succeed as a demon, gets a crush on Ten-chan and moves in with Misha, the stage is set for a comedy romance based on the manga by Digi Charat author Koge Donbo. All this was done far better in Urusei Yatsura two decades ago, but the twist of adding quasi-infantile cuteness to overt teen sexuality has hooked many fans.

Place Promised in Our Early Days, The *

2004. jpn: Kumo no Muko, Yakusoku no Basho. aka: The Place of Promise in the Clouds; Beyond the Clouds, the Promised Place. Movie. dir: Makoto Shinkai. scr: Makoto Shinkai. des: Ushio Tazawa. ani: Ushio Tazawa. mus: Tenmon. prd: CoMix Wave. 91 mins.

In an alternate universe, Japan is partitioned after WWII. Hokkaido is annexed by the Soviet Union, while Honshu and the southern islands go to the USA. A huge tower is built on Hokkaido, now known as Ezo, which can be seen across the waters of the Tsugaru Strait from Aomori, the northernmost town on Honshu. Four decades later, in 1996, two teenagers vow to take the girl they both love to see the tower’s mysteries in their homemade aircraft, the Bella Ciela. Then Sayuri Sawatari falls ill with a strange narcolepsy and is transferred to Tokyo for treatment by a specialist. Her friends Hiroshi Fujisawa and Takuya Shirakawa abandon their dream and get on with their lives, but when Hiroshi learns that Sayuri is still in a coma three years later, they decide to try and help her. The world is on the brink of war again, and Sayuri’s dreams are the key to a mystery which will bring her two childhood friends in touch with parallel worlds and political tensions as she tries to dream herself back to a place where unfulfilled childhood promises can finally be kept.

Makoto Shinkai has developed greatly since he drafted Voices of a Distant Star virtually single-handed on his home computer. Mixing the Hokkaido quest of Diamond Daydreams with the girlfriend-in-a-coma of The Eternity You Desire and the alternate history of Fullmetal Alchemist, this project shows almost the same level of hands-on control—he created, wrote, directed, and storyboarded, and also handled art direction, color design, editing, postproduction, and sound direction. This, plus the use of elements such as flight and hand-built aircraft with Italian names, has led some critics to make comparisons with Hayao Miyazaki. Beautiful as this second work is, such comparisons are extremely premature. Shinkai the writer is still fixated on the theme of his early work—the agony of loss imposed by time, distance, and age. He creates beautiful characters, real and engaging, but they are entirely caught up in yearning and reminiscence, reluctant to move in any direction except back. His promising plot is simply left to unravel, its threads unresolved. His assured handling of lighting, color, and music creates and sustains atmosphere so well that it seems almost unkind to highlight the deficiency, but this is not yet the output of a mature and rounded creator. Like its story, it’s a youthful promise, a shining dream that still awaits fulfillment.

Planet Busters *

1984. jpn: Birth. aka: World of the Talisman. Video. dir: Shinya Sadamitsu. scr: “Kaname Pro.” des: Koretaku Kaneda, Makoto Kobayashi. ani: Shinya Sadamitsu, Mutsumi Inomata, Shige-nori Kageyama. mus: Joe Hisaishi (Randy Miller in U.S. version). prd: Idol, Kaname. 80 mins.

Namu Shurugi (Prince Talon) and his sister Rasa Jupiter (Princess Rasa) are descended from a race wiped out by the people of planet Aquaroid (Pandora), who are engaged in a devastating global war with the android Inorganics race. They fall into the company of Bao (Mo) and Kim (Keen), two treas­ure hunters in search of the mystic talisman. This planet, it seems, is a “testing ground” to reveal the one destined to become the leader of the Galactic Empire. In an arrangement similar to King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, whoever gets the talisman will become the new ruler. The fight for the talisman is a conflict that begins every cycle of cosmic existence, as factions compete to determine whether the dominant life-form throughout the universe will be flesh or metallic.

Though the American dub unsurprisingly reduces this to the usual simplistic Good Humans vs. Evil Robots, this sci-fi story, which features lots of action, cool machines, and frequent shots of Rasa’s cute rear end, is a paradoxical and densely layered parable of reincarnation. This makes it very unsuitable for the audience of under-fives at whom the U.K. video release was aimed. Even with the script revamped to minimize the spiritual dimension and make the goal of their quest the “Planet Buster,” a secret weapon made by the creator of the universe (who would really need one, right?), it still makes no sense, but it’s fun to watch. Ending with the destruction of this cycle of existence, and only the four main characters preserved in spirit form, it is liable to have befuddled many a preteen viewer, especially with the finale, when two alien superbeings sit down and start debating the transient nature of existence. Made for video but shown in Japanese theaters, a “Special Edition” on video includes the 22-minute Making of Birth documentary.

Planet Mask

1966. jpn: Yusei Kamen. TV series. dir: Yonehiko Watanabe, Tsutomu Yamamoto. scr: Akira Adachi. des: Takaji Kusunoki. ani: Masakazu Tanokura. mus: Hidehiko Arano. prd: TCJ, Eiken, Fuji TV. 25 mins. x 39 eps.

In the 21st century, the discovery of the inhabited tenth planet, Pineron, out past Pluto, is happy news for the solar system. Earthman Johansen and Pineron girl Maria fall in love and become the proud parents of the first mixed-race child, Peter. Fifteen years later, Earth and Pineron are thrown into a state of war when Pineron warships mistake an Earth vessel in trouble for an attack ship. A lone masked figure riding on a rocket tries to keep the spacefaring powers apart. This Cold War superhero thriller was inspired in equal chunks by the troubles in Vietnam, Japan’s conflicts with the USSR over its northern islands, and the children of mixed-race parents after WWII—children who would shortly be entering their teens. With typical TV double standards, the theme song cried “stop the war,” even as the show encouraged kids to go out and fight for peace.

Planetes *

2003. TV series. dir: Goro Taniguchi, Tatsuya Igarashi, Megumi Yamamoto, Hiroshi Ishiodori. scr: Ichiro Okochi. des: Yuriko Chiba, Seiichi Nakatani, Takeshi Takakura. ani: Eiji Nakata, Hisashi Saito, Masashi Kudo, Yuriko Chiba. mus: Kotaro Nakagawa. prd: Sunrise, AD Cosmo, NARA Animation, Bandai, NHK. 25 mins. x 26 eps.

By the year 2075, decades of missions and projects have left Earth’s orbit cluttered with space junk—bits of rocket, defunct satellites, and other debris. Such space garbage needs to be collected, a task farmed out to private corporations such as Technora. Hachirota “Hachimaki” Hoshino is a young employee who has always wanted to own his own spaceship, but now seems stuck in a workaday rut as little more than a glorified dumpster driver. To his annoyance, he is saddled with rookie recruit Ai Tanabe, who has yet to appreciate that life in space is fraught with dangers—the slightest mistake in a jet firing or the smallest tear in a space suit can spell instant death. Their fellow employees include American Fée Carmichael, a compulsive smoker whose habit is doubly dangerous in oxygen-rich environments, and Russian Yuri Mihalkov, a widower whose wife was killed when a tiny screw hit a low-orbit craft’s window at high velocity. Their troubles in orbit include confrontations with illegal dumpers, terrorists who want mankind to stay Earthbound, and lunar eccentrics who use the low gravity to imitate the flying leaps of ninja.

The idea behind Planetes is not new—it lifts elements of both Star Dust and Mighty Space Miners—but its execution is sublime. Its future is not the wish-fulfillment fantasy of Gundam, but a mundane, troubled place like something out of Larry Niven’s Known Space series. Space travel is possible, but only within extremely limited confines—a trip to the Moon still takes several days, and later episodes include the immensely detailed preparations for the first manned flight to Jupiter; compare this to less realistic sci-fi shows like Gunbuster, which can happily encase Jupiter in a steel shell in a simple throwaway gag. Yes, it’s true that anime’s potential is infinite, and creators can show us whatever they can draw. But, like Patlabor before it, Planetes gives equal weight to the science and the fiction, and is all the better for it. Based on a manga by Makoto Yukimura in weekly Comic Morning.

Plastic Little *

1994. Video. dir: Kinji Yoshimoto. scr: Mayori Sekijima. des: Satoshi Urushibara, Studio Nue. ani: Satoshi Urushibara. mus: Tamiya Terashima. prd: Animate Film, SME. 45 mins.

Orphaned teenager Tita takes over her father’s pet shop hunter business, collecting and selling exotic animals from all over the galaxy. In port on planet Yietta (where, to feebly justify the title, there’s very little plastic) she rescues a young girl who is being pursued by the local authorities. Elysse Nalerov is in big trouble; her father designed a new weapon, she has the arming codes, and the government will stop at nothing to get them. Tita and her crew decide to help her out, and mayhem ensues.

A lightweight but enjoyable sci-fi adventure made, like its predecessor Legend of Lemnear, solely to show off the artistic talents of Urushibara and Yoshimoto. While lacking a particularly strong story line, it succeeds most perfectly in the rendition of an individual artist’s style into moving pictures. Unfortunately for the genre, Urushi­bara’s style isn’t SF illustration but cheesecake. The artist on numerous books of cutie-girl illustrations, he renders lush young flesh with glowing perfection. Yoshimoto transfers this perfection exactly to celluloid and puts a remarkable range of motions onto it, so before they take on the evil overlord, the girls can stop for a bath scene where they can compare their breasts. Not only every jiggle of every curve, but the characters’ expressions and movements all give the impression of seeing the creator’s original art come to life on the page. When one considers the violence often done to original design art in the cause of simplifying it enough to animate cheaply (see Vampire Hunter D), the achievement is all the more remarkable.

At the time of its release, the creators claimed that it was only a prequel to a set of other stories—though as time passed, the only evidence was a brief PL audio drama that described Elysse as a “guest star,” thereby implying there was more to come. In 1999, Urushibara and Yoshimoto unveiled artwork from a new project, Femme Femme Buccaneers, charting the progress of Ann and Ricorne, a two-piece idol-singer act known collectively as Virginity. Though they promised that these two girls, along with the unshaven male pirates of the Yiettan isle of Espaniola, would soon grace anime screens alongside Tita and her crew, the wait continues, making PL2 the most delayed project in anime, beating even Otomo’s Steam Boy. Owing to accidents of international pricing and rights negotiation, PL is available in separate U.K. and U.S. translations. NV

Platonic Chain

2003. TV series. dir: Takeshi Okazaki. scr: N/C. des: N/C. ani: Takahiro Goto. mus: N/C. prd: AciD Films, TV Tokyo. 5 mins. x 25 eps.

The day after tomorrow, when videophones and constant Internet access are available to everyone. And where there’s a network, there’s a hacker. Someone has broken into the government’s information archive and created the Platonic Chain website, through which anyone can discover anything about anyone else via his or her cellphone. You can find your double and try a life swap, or find the double of your secret crush and practice on him until you’re confident enough to hit on your love. You can even find out where the cute guy you just passed on the escalator in the mall goes to school. Teenage friends Hitomi Tanaka, Rika Kagura, and Kanae Mizuhara use the site to help them deal with the problems of everyday life—a nicer attitude than that exhibited in the later Hell Girl. Manga artist Okazaki makes his directorial debut on this version of Koji Watanabe’s SF novel, and makes extensive use of CG and motion-capture to help give his characters and settings the Shibuya look. Okazaki and Watanabe have also collaborated on color manga @Run-city, which appeared in Ikki magazine.

Plawres Sanshiro

1983. TV series. dir: Kunihiko Yuyama, Masahisa Ishida, Masamune Ochiai, Osamu Sekita, Katsumi Endo, Susumu Ishizaki. scr: Keisuke Fujikawa, Kenji Terada, Junji Tagami. des: Mutsumi Inomata, Shigenori Kageyama, Shigeru Katsumata. ani: Mutsumi Inomata, Hitoshi Yoshinaga, Kazuhiro Ochi, Hirotoshi Sano, Takashi Sogabe, Satoshi Yamazaki. mus: Yasunori Tsuchida. prd: Kaname Productions, TBS. 25 mins. x 37 eps.

Pla[stic] wres[tlers] are miniature robot toys that can be operated to fight each other. Orphan Sanshiro Sugata (see Sanshiro Sugata) has inherited a superb plawres from his vanished father and wants to make it a champion, while his grandfather wants him to put away childish things and focus on becoming a judo champion.

The conflict between a child’s and an adult’s view of “achievement,” the symbolism of inheritance, and the way in which toys provide an interface with a world that seems too big and scary to handle directly are interesting concepts for a series. Sadly, the need to keep things on a child’s level restricts what Yuyama can do with his material. He can’t have minded, though—14 years on, he made Pokémon. Jiro Uma and Minoru Kamiya produced the spin-off manga in the same year, but strangely enough, the expected toy line didn’t materialize.

Play Ball

2005. TV series. dir: Satoshi Dezaki. scr: Koji Ueda, Makoto Ohama, Mi-tsuya Suenaga. des: Keizo Shimizu, Ryosuke Senbo. ani: Ippei Masui. mus: Kaoru Wada. prd: Eiken. 25 mins. x 13 eps.

Junior-high baseball captain Takao Taniguchi ruins his sporting future when he heroically continues to play a game with broken fingers—compare to H2. Later, as a student at Sumitani High, he is approached by the captain of the soccer club, who sees him watching a baseball game with a sad look in his eye. Takao begins playing on the soccer team, but baseball remains his first love. Eventually, he decides to return to baseball, only to discover a lackluster club full of apathetic, uncaring players. A predictable tale of overcoming sporting odds then ensues. Based on a manga by Akio Chiba, and broadcast in Japan on a series of syndicated channels, including Kansai TV, Kumamoto TV, TV Miyazaki, and Sendai Broadcasting. LNV

Please Open the Door

1986. jpn: Tobira o Akete. Movie. dir: Keizo Shimizu, Tsuneo Tominaga. scr: Kazumi Koide, Satoshi Dezaki. des: Setsuko Shibunnoichi. ani: Toshihiro Kawamoto, Mayumi Hirota. mus: Mark Goldenberg. prd: Kitty Film, Magic Bus. 81 mins.

Miyako Negishi is a seemingly ordinary high school girl but has amazing powers of ESP, while her friend Keiichiro can transform into a were-lion, and her friend Kaori has the power of teleportation. On a night when the moon is full, they are transported to the alternate “Middle Kingdom,” where Miyako is the fair princess Neryura, fighting a losing battle against the Western king Duran III. Forming an alliance with the Eastern king Dimida, Miyako and her friends use their powers to save the world, hoping eventually to return home. Based on an SF novel by Motoko Arai, better known in the English-speaking world for her story Green Requiem. Compare to Fushigi Yugi.

Please Save My Earth *

1993. jpn: Boku no Chikyu o Mamotte. Video. dir: Kazuo Yamazaki. scr: Kazuo Yamazaki. des: Takayuki Goto, Yuji Ikeda. ani: Takayuki Goto. mus: Hajime Mizoguchi. prd: Victor Entertainment. 30 mins. x 6 eps., 30 mins. (music video).

Seven schoolchildren have a recurring collective dream in which a team of alien scientists on the moon gather data about Earth. Seeking each other’s company, they begin to suspect that the dreams are really suppressed memories of their distant past lives. Past relationships replay themselves, as teenage Alice Sakaguchi is desired by eight-year-old Rin, while he in turn is pursued by the mature woman Mokuren. But love is not the only thing that survives reincarnation, as the members of the group discover that their former incarnations ended in tragedy—a tragedy fated to repeat itself.

One of a glut of mid-1990s lunar reincarnation stories, but it is far more mature than the populist Sailor Moon and better executed than the shoddy Bounty Dog. This emotive tale of love, loss, and anger echoing through reincarnation was based on a manga serialized in Hana to Yume by Saki Hiwatari, whose other manga works include A Favor of the Devil and Tower of the Future. Only a fraction of the 21-volume original would fit into the anime, and the story was compressed further into a 100-minute “movie” edit concentrating on the Alice/Rin relationship. There was also an animated music video, comprising eight tracks of the wonderful Mizoguchi music that featured guest contributions from Yoko Kanno. Though released before the series to publicize it, the video actually contained some footage of later chapters and the manga’s conclusion, unseen in the anime series proper.

Please Teacher *

2002. jpn: Onegai Teacher. aka: Teacher, Please. TV series. dir: Yasunori Ide. scr: Yosuke Kuroda. des: Hiroaki Goda, Yasuhiro Moriki, Yoshihiro Watanabe, Taraku Uon. ani: Dome. mus: Kazuya Takase, Shinji Orita, Tomoyuki Nakazawa. prd: Bandai, Studio Orphee. 22 mins. x 12 eps. (TV1), 21 mins. (v), 22 mins. x 12 eps. (TV2), 26 mins. (v).

High school boy Kei Kusanagi lives a quiet life with his feisty aunt and lecherous but kind-hearted uncle. He’s eighteen, but looks a lot younger as a result of a rare disease that put him in a coma for three years and arrested his physical growth. He is prone to passing out anytime his spirits are low. His cute new schoolteacher is a redhead with glasses who is really an alien—Kei knows because they’ve already met by accident. Mizuho Kazami has a spaceship with a living control unit, a tiny yellow-clad gnome named Marie. Mizuho is an observer for the Galactic Federation but she’s come to Earth on a private mission—to try and find out about her human father. Her mother Hatsuho met him when the 2009 expedition to Mars got lost and was rescued by a Galaxy Federation ship. Kei marries Mizuho, purely as a matter of form, to help conceal her secret; but as their families and friends cause endless complications the pair fall in love. Hatsuho, who turns out to be something of a minx, along with her interfering younger sister Maho (Mizuho’s aunt), also make appearances, notably in the 2003 video sequel in which they attempt to engineer a situation so that Kei and Mizuho can finally consummate their marriage. Both the series and its manga adaption with art by Shizuru Hayashiya are out in English, from Bandai and ComicsOne, respectively. There is also an untranslated CD drama spin-off, Onegai Friends.

A second TV series, Please Twins (2003, Onegai Twins), dumped its predecessor’s dogged adherence to a Tenchi Muyo! paradigm in favor of one that owed more to Love Hina—a truly rarefied distinction in harem shows, if you care about that sort of thing. Its protagonist is Maiku Kamishiro, a student at the school where Mizuho teaches and classmate of characters from the previous series, who has no family and is supporting himself through high school by working as a freelance computer programmer. His only memento of his childhood is an old photograph showing two children, a boy and a girl, playing outside a blue house. He hopes that finding the house might help him find his family, so he tracks it down and moves in—the tracking down of a similar domicile forms an important plot point in Popotan. Then two cute girls turn up to visit, both with a copy of the same photograph, each with the same blue eyes as Maiku, and each claiming to be his twin sister. He decides they can both stay until they know for sure which one is his sister. Miina Miyafuji is a feisty redhead, given to saying exactly what she thinks and constantly bickering with Maiku; Karen Onodera is gentle, easily frightened, and ultra-dependent. She’s also fond of a biscuit snack called Prech Salad (a pastiche of Japanese Pretz snacks, whereas Mizuho was obsessed with Pochy, a thinly-disguised homage to the real-world Pocky snack), and this has led to a tiny little gnome-like creature dressed all in yellow (the first serial’s Marie) following her everywhere hoping for titbits. Meanwhile, Maiku must also dodge the amorous intentions of Tsubaki Oribe, a girl, and Kosei Shimazaki, a boy. Fans of this type of anime will recognize the fantasy setup where, without actually having to make any effort to woo a girl, a guy suddenly finds that there’s always one around and she’s always cute—like being a rock star, but without the need for drugs or talent. However, Please Twins is notably more “mature” than others of its ilk, and mercifully lacks much of the endemic male character lechery or indignant female-induced slapstick of similar shows. Instead, Maiku conceals his interest in the female characters so well that some of them wonder if he might be gay, and then, of course, do everything they can to test the hypothesis. N

Plusterworld

2003. jpn: Bouken Yuuki Pluster World. aka: Adventure Bravery Pluster World; Journey of Adventure Pluster World. TV series. dir: Yuji Himaki. scr: Sukehiro Tomita. des: Hiroshi Kugimiya. ani: N/C. mus: Motoi Sakuraba. prd: Nippon Animation, TV Tokyo, Takara. 25 mins. x 52 eps.

Pluster World is a magical realm in which tribes of strange creatures are at war. The tribes resemble various different Earth creatures and are further divided into those who want peace and justice, and those who don’t. The Plusters, heroic creatures to whom legend attributes the power to “plus on,” or merge with humans to create mighty warriors, battle the evil Minusters. Beetma, a Pluster of the Kabuto tribe, sets out to become the strongest Pluster in the world. On his journey he meets Wyburst, of the Grip tribe, who wants to find the legendary Gonggorahgong, a being who can bring peace to Pluster World. Then he is badly beaten in a fight with a Minus beast, and thrown down the fabled passage into the world of humans.There he meets 11-year-old Tohma and “plusses on” with him to become Plust Beetma. Returning to Pluster World, the pair meet Wyburst and join him in trying to find a power that can defeat the Minusters.

The legendary toy company name in the credits is a clue to the show’s intent: to sell as many items of merchandise to children as possible. Like Transformers and Pokémon it’s a 25-minute commercial. While Yoshiyuki Tomino used Gundam to show that a TV series can be something more, rookie director Himaki is not terribly ambitious.

Pochacco *

1992. TV series. dir: Masami Hata, Akira Kiyomizu, Katsumasa Kanezawa, Seiichi Mitsuoka. scr: Kyoko Kuriba­yashi. des: Rie Oshima. ani: N/C. mus: N/C. prd: Sanrio. 10 mins. x 4 eps.

Adventures of a cute little puppy and his animal friends from the team that gave you Hello Kitty and Pekkle. Pochacco rescues tiny chicks, hunts down a carrot thief, looks for a pink mushroom, and has other adventures to thrill the under-threes. Despite the mushrooms, Magic Roundabout fans must look elsewhere for drug references; this is pure, clean, and sweet.

Pokémon *

1997. jpn: Pocket Monster. TV series, movie. dir: Kunihiko Yuyama, Masa­mitsu Hidaka, Yoshitaka Fujimoto. scr: Atsuhiro Tomioka, Takeshi Shudo, Hideki Sonoda, Junji Takegami. des: Satoshi Tajiri. ani: Shunya Yamada. mus: Junji Miyazaki. prd: SOFTX, TV Tokyo. 25 mins. x c.750+ eps. (TV1), 75 mins. (m1/Mew2), 23 mins. (m1s/Vacation), 81 mins. (m2/Lugia), 24 mins. (m2s/Rescue), 74 mins. (m3/Emperor), 23 mins. (m3s/Pichu), 99 mins. (m4/Encounter), 23 mins. (m4s/Hide & Seek), 70 mins. (m5/Heroes), 23 mins. (m5s/Pika Pika), 81 mins. (m6/), 23 mins. (m6s/Dancing), 100 mins. (m7/Destiny), 103 mins. (m8/Mew), ? mins. (m9/Rangers).

Ash (Satoshi) oversleeps and is late for the distribution of the trainers’ manual giving details of how to capture and train wild Pocket Monsters (Pokémon), fighting-pets much coveted by children. Since the manual sets out which Pokémon are most desirable and how to find them, the other kids have all the “best” catches, and he is stuck with the only one he can find without help from the manual, an “electric mouse” called Pikachu. After a shaky start, the two soon become firm friends, as Pikachu helps Ash capture many more Pokémon and head toward his goal of becoming the world’s greatest Pokémon trainer. However, at every turn, Ash and his friends are dogged by the evil Team Rocket, intent on stealing the best Pokémon for themselves. Officially let off school to hunt their Pokémon, they trek around a safe and supportive world, always finding a bed for the night, and a sisterly type to help out with meals and other necessities. It’s a child’s dream, with the joys of independence but without the tedium.

Pokémon is a perfectly average TV anime tied into the huge marketing machine of a successful game and, consequently, immeasurably more successful than its contemporaries. Giving children an ongoing adventure, the chance to pit their monsters against each other, and a vast menagerie of creatures guaranteed to befuddle their parents, the game was an immense success, its cross-promotional anime and manga spin-offs reaching the West in record time, arguably creating the most important influence on the medium since Akira. Though the stars of Tamagotchi Video Adventures can claim to be the first “virtual pets,” it was the interactive quality of Nintendo’s Pokémon game that seized the high ground. First broadcast in Japan in April 1997, the Pokémon phenomenon came to the notice of the West that December in a news item about strobe-like effects in one episode that caused seizures among the Japanese audience (see YAT Budget! Space Tours). Popular myth accords the effects of this as a form of mass hysterics, although subsequent examination of medical records has suggested that perhaps less than a tenth of the alleged “800 cases” required medical attention. Others appear to be viewers who may have felt slightly queasy, jumping on the bandwagon to be part of a national event, and whose experience made for entertaining tabloid journalism abroad, but may not have been quite the broadcasting disaster first reported. Despite this initial stumble, the Pokémon juggernaut descended on the Western world, with millions of dollars in advertising eventually generating billions of dollars in sales. Compare this investment with the desultory way Sailor Moon was dumped on the U.S. Though Pokémon was undoubtedly a hit, it was also something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The transition was not completely smooth—several episodes were “lost,” chiefly for content comprising the womanizing antics of Ash’s friend Brock, or cross-dressing by the zany Team Rocket.

Thanks to the runaway success of Pokémon in English, anime became relatively commonplace on American TV. After years of equating the medium with sex and violence, producers suddenly saw it as a cash cow in the children’s market. Clone shows Digimon and Monster Rancher swiftly followed, along with unrelated serials such as CardCaptors, Gundam W, and Flint the Time Detective. Early attempts at selling anime for an older audience foundered, with Escaflowne flopping on American TV, but the early years of the 21st century could well be characterized by a rush to keep the Western Pokémon-boom generation watching anime as they grow up.

The TV series went through several name changes to reflect the exact brand of game being promoted. After the initial 82 episodes, it became the more U.S.-friendly Pokémon: Orange Island until episode 118, when it returned to previous form in Pokémon G[old &] S[ilver]. The franchise also reached theaters in several film outings. Pokémon the Movie: Mew vs. Mew-two (1998) gained Japan’s second-largest domestic box office for an animated film, at least for a while, until it was beaten by Princess Mononoke and then Spirited Away. It featured a fight against an embittered mutant monster, crazily flipping from promising, cautionary SF in the style of Tezuka’s Baghi, through cartoon comedy, to a patronizing moral ending that weakly argued against fighting all the time, even though such activities characterize the rest of the series! The 70-minute film was shown accompanied by the saccharine “let’s cooperate” children’s short, Pikachu’s Summer Vacation(Pikachu no Natsuyasumi). Despite a slow decline of interest, the film series continued with Revelation Lugia (1999, aka Power of One), anime history’s third-largest Japanese box-office draw, in which yet another very, very rare form of Pokémon is the object of the quest. This time, Lugia can only be called forth by bringing three sacred birds together in one spot. The show was accompanied by the short film Pikachu’s Rescue Adventure (Pikachu Tankentai). A year later, the Pokémon movie was Emperor of the Crystal Tower (2000, translated in 2001 as Spell of the Unown [sic]), a fairy-tale variant of Sleeping Beauty about an imprisoned princess accidentally kidnapping Ash’s mother when she wishes for one of her own. The film was accompanied by another short for toddlers, this time Pichu and Pikachu, displaying “baby” versions of some of the lead Pokémon. A fourth film, Encounter Beyond Time (aka Pokémon 4Ever, 2001) features the very, very, very rare Pokémon Celebi from the GS game, accompanied by the short Pikachu’s Hide and Seek (Pikachu no Doki-doki Kakurenbo). Pokémon Heroes Latias and Latios (Mizu no Miyako no Mamorigami, i.e. Guardian Spirits of the Water Capital) accompanied by the short Glittering Starlit Sky Camp (Pika Pika Hoshizora Camp, both 2002); Pokémon Jirachi Wish Maker (Nana-Yo no Negai Boshi Jiraachi) and the short The Dancing Pokémon Secret Base (Odoru Pokémon Himitsu Kichi, both 2003); Pokémon: Destiny Deoxys (2004, Rekku no Homonsha Deokishisu, aka Visitor from Above, Deoxys), Pokémon: Mew and the Wave Hero (2005, Myu to Hado no Yusha), and Pokémon Rangers and the Sea King (2006, Pokémon Ranger to Umi no Oji) continue the franchise, while on television, the Pokémon GS season transformed into Pokémon Ranger and Pokémon Advanced Generation.

Often held in snooty disregard by a hard-core anime fandom that would prefer its hobby to be forever outside the mainstream, Pokémon is nevertheless the most commercially important anime of the 1990s in terms of brand recognition and the investment it attracted to the medium—many more obscure anime and manga translations were funded with Pikachu’s profits. As befits a cultural icon, the series has been mercilessly lampooned in other media, most notably as the “Battling Seizure Robots” in an episode of the The Simpsons, and the brainwashing Chinpokomon in South Park.

Pokonyan

1993. aka: Raccoon Miaow; Rocky Rackat. TV series. dir: Hiroshi Sasakawa, Seitaro Hara. scr: N/C. des: N/C. ani: N/C. mus: Man Brothers Band. prd: Nippon Herald, NHK. 8 mins. x 170 eps.

A Japanese girl discovers a tanuki (a Japanese raccoon dog; see Pompoko) in her backpack during a camping trip. He proclaims that she is his sister and follows her everywhere. He can use his powers to turn Amy’s dreams into real-life adventures, though his good intentions, like those of the creators’ earlier Doraemon, do not always work according to plan. Based on a manga by Fujiko F. Fujio, this anime was also spun off into the Pokonyan Christmas and Pokonyan Summer Holiday specials.

Pollon

1982. jpn: Ochamegami Monogatari Korokoro Polon. aka: The Story of Little Goddess Roly-Poly Pollon; Roly-Poly Pollon: The Tallest Tales of the Gods; Little Pollon. TV series. dir: Takao Yo­tsuji. scr: Masaru Yamamoto, Kenji Terada, Tomohiro Ando. des: Toshio Takagi, Tsutomu Fujita. ani: Hirokazu Ishiyuki, Toshio Takagi. mus: Masayuki Yamamoto. prd: Kokusai Eiga, Movie International, Fuji TV. 25 mins. x 46 eps.

Pollon, the little daughter of the God Apollo, wants to be a powerful and beautiful goddess when she grows up. Somewhat neglected by her single godly parent, she often assists him in his womanizing ways in the vain hope that she will get a new mommy. With her little friend Eros, she plagues the Olymp­ians in various comical ways as she at­tempts to earn the trappings of godhood. Sadly (if predictably), her good deeds often backfire, leaving her in hot water with some deity or other and causing chaos for gods and humans alike. But, because she’s a kindhearted girl, she will eventually achieve her aim and become a proper, respectable grown-up goddess. This sweet little series for children was the first to be produced in its entirety by Kokusai, based on the manga Pollon of Olympus by Nanako SOS–creator Hideo Azuma, originally serialized in 100-ten Comic. Combining stories about the Greek and Japanese sun gods (with Apollo taking the role of Japan’s female Amaterasu for a few tales), the story also contained comic-relief characters absent from Greek mythology, such as the Hollywood-stereotype mad scientist Dr. Nya-ha-ah. Compare to Bit the Cupid.

Pollyanna

1986. jpn: Ai Shojo Pollyanna Monogatari. aka: The Story of Loving Child Pollyanna. TV series. dir: Kozo Kusuba, Norio Yazawa, Shigeo Koshi, Fumio Kurokawa, Harumi Sugimura. scr: Saiko Kumasen, Tamao Kunihiro. des: Yoshiharu Sato, Ken Kawai. ani: Yoshiharu Sato. mus: Reijiro Komutsu. prd: Nippon Animation, Fuji TV. 25 mins. x 51 eps.

Eleven-year-old pastor’s daughter Pollyanna is sent to live with her aunt, Polly Harrington, after her father’s death in 1920s America. Auntie doesn’t like children at all and is brusque and distant, but Pollyanna is an irrepressibly buoyant child and softens her aunt’s hard heart with her affectionate, gentle personality. Then she has a tragic accident and loses the use of her legs. After a dangerous operation, and with the help and encouragement of the friends she’s made in her new life, Pollyanna recovers and is able to join the party for her aunt’s wedding.

Based on the 1913 novel and its sequel by Eleanor Hodgman Porter, this is part of the World Masterpiece Theater series, and in the true WMT tradition, ends in happiness all around after a touching, not to say tear-jerking, series of trials. Sato went on to work with Studio Ghibli and has built on his U.S. links, most recently with work for Disney on The Tigger Movie (2000).

Poltergeist Report *

1992. jpn: Yu Yu Hakusho. TV series, movie. dir: Noriyuki Abe, Masakatsu Iijima, Shigeru Ueda, Katsunori Mizuno, Akiyuki Shinbo. scr: Yoshiyuki Ohashi, Sukehiro Tomita, Katsuyuki Sumizawa, Yoshihiro Togashi. des: Minoru Yamazawa, Yuji Ikeda. ani: Saburo Soya, Yoshinori Kanno. mus: Yusuke Honma. prd: Studio Pierrot, Fuji TV. 25 mins. x 112 eps. (TV), 25 mins. (m1), 93 mins. (m2).

Middle school tough-guy Yusuke Urameshi is killed trying to save a child in a car accident. In a fustily bureaucratic hell, his name is found to be missing from the Big Book of Dead People, and his “application” is rejected. The son of the ruler of hell (see Dororon Enma) comes to his rescue and offers him a chance to return whence he came. Repatriated to Earth, he teams up with Death, two demons, and his former rival and becomes a psychic investigator, fighting battle after battle against evil spirits.

Based on the 1990 Young Jump manga by Hunter x Hunter–creator Yoshihiro Togashi, PR sets up a milieu not dissimilar to the background of Urotsu­kidoji. The human, spirit, and demon worlds coexist, along with a more nebulous, barely glimpsed hell said to be worse than all the others combined. Like the “Wandering Child” Amano, Yusuke does good deeds in the human world, but there the resemblance ends, since PR is far more interested in fight-of-the-week standoffs in the manner of Dragon Ball. A very successful series, particularly by the short runs of many 1990s anime, PR returned in the 30-minute short PR: The Movie (1993). Shown as part of a triple bill of TV tie-ins, it took the traditional summer-special route, as Yusuke’s vacation is interrupted by the kidnapping of his boss, Koenma. The kidnappers demand the King of Hell’s seal as ransom, and Yusuke is torn between his loyalty to his friend and savior and his fears of what will happen if the seal falls into the wrong hands.

A full-length feature, PR: Fight for the Netherworld (1994), featured the Lord of the Netherworld returning after several millennia to conquer Earth by seizing five power sites around Tokyo. The lush, rich, expensive animation was almost totally wasted on a tired plot, making the PR feature look remarkably like a bad remake of several other shows, some of which it actually predated—geomancy from Silent Möbius, a demon invasion à la Sailor Moon, and modern-day ghostbusting straight out of Ushio and Tora. Sadly, this suffered the usual flaws of movies released out of context: the overlarge, idle cast of Tenchi Muyo! and the missing backstory of Patlabor. PR isn’t an outstanding show of its type, but the TV series might well have fared better than the movie on English release.

There were also several half-hour spin-off videos, whose self-indulgence only goes to show just how popular PR was in Japan. The best fight scenes were excerpted on the two-part video compilation PR: Image Report (1994; YYH: Eizo Hakusho), followed swiftly by five themed clip-shows, compiled as PR: Image Report II (1995; YYH: Eizo Hakusho II), one for each of the leads.  For the ultimate in futile nostalgia, the “next episode” bumpers that closed each episode were released in their own three-part set, PR: In Next Week’s Episode (1992-94), allowing viewers to spend 90 minutes watching nothing but ads. V

Pompoko *

1994. jpn: Heisei Tanuki Gassen Pompoko. aka: Heisei [Modern-day] Raccoon Wars Pompoko; Defenders of the Forest. Movie. dir: Isao Takahata. scr: Isao Takahata. des: Megumi Kagawa, Shinji Otsuka. ani: Shinji Otsuka. mus: Joe Hisaishi. prd: Studio Ghibli. 119 mins.

A group of tanuki (Japanese raccoon dogs) finds its country life threatened by the construction of a human New Town. At the instigation of the town elder, these tanuki use their powers of transformation to oppose the human encroachment. Unwilling to declare all-out war on humans (they would miss human food), they fake ghostly hauntings, though the supply of human construction workers appears inexhaustible. An 800-year-old super-tanuki orchestrates a ghostly parade down the main street, but the humans are more intrigued than scared—possibly because some of the “ghosts” include cameo appearances from the stars of Hayao Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso, My Neighbor Totoro, and Kiki’s Delivery Service. Any spooky effects are ruined when a local theme park takes credit for the parade, falsely claiming that it was a stunt to showcase its special effects technology. The horrified tanuki discover that the theme park is run by foxes, who have given up fighting humanity and instead live among them in disguise. After outwitting the foxes, the tanuki meet for one last trick, transforming the built-up landscape all too briefly into the virgin countryside it once was. Admitting defeat, they scatter among the human race, though sometimes they meet in secret to briefly walk once more in tanuki form.

Familiar characters from Japanese Folk Tales, the mischievous tanuki are used here to tell a touching variant of Studio Ghibli’s oft-repeated ecological message—supposedly inspired by the 1960s real-life construction of a suburb in Tama Hills, west of Tokyo. Lamenting the destruction of a way of life in much the same way as Nausicaä and Princess Mononoke, it also recalls the happy pastorals of Totoro. Tanuki were certainly “in” at this point in the 1990s—the unrelated Pokonyan was a big hit at the same time. An English-subtitled print was shown in very limited release in American theaters in advance preparation for a failed attempt to gain the film an Oscar nomination. However, unlike the universal Totoro, Pompoko’s appeal is, to some extent, ethnocentric. Gags come at the expense of Japanese history and folklore, and some of the humor is a little too earthy for the sanitized Disney market. The end result is often a foreign-language variant on Watership Down (1978), with time out for wacky satire, tear-jerking whimsy, and an unforgettable scene in which a tanuki distracts a driver by flattening his testicles against the windshield. Ghibli’s usual standard-setting art direction and design are much in evidence. “Pompoko,” by the way, is the sound you get when you tap gently on a tummy stretched full of food. The Tama Hills development also featured in Until the Undersea City and Whisper of the Heart.

Pony Canyon

Formed in 1966 as Nippon Broadcasting System Inc., a record label subsidiary of the radio station NBS, the company’s name was changed to Pony in 1970 and, following a merger with the record company Canyon, to Pony Canyon in 1987. The company was an early innovator in the field of computer games, but its chief involvement in the anime world is as the music producer on many titles, contributing to such unlikely bedfellows as Aim for the Ace, Emma, and Mad Bull 34. As Pony Canyon Enterprises, it has also become more directly involved in anime production on titles including Green Green.

Popotan *

2003. TV series. dir: Shinichiro Kimura. scr: Jukki Hanada. des: Rondo Mizukami, Poyoyon Rock, Haruka Sa-kurai. ani: Haruka Sakurai. mus: Osamu Tezuka (b). prd: SHAFT, Bandai, BS-I. 24 mins. x 12 eps.

Sisters Ai, Mai, and Mii and their android housekeeper Mea live in an old house which travels through time, jumping ahead on each occasion. The sisters are searching for someone, but the search means constantly having to leave the friends they make behind. Based on the erotic PC computer game of the same name, which is a play on tanpopo, the Japanese word for dandelion, Popotan features nudity in keeping with its original incarnation, but also an intriguing variant on a perennial anime theme. Whereas childhood memories of a beloved location or friend form background elements in many harem anime such as Love Hina, Popotan’s periodic temporal relocations allow shifts in relative ages and perspectives like those found in Gunbuster and Voices of a Distant Star. At its heart, it reflects a yearning for a carefree childhood and a terror of creeping age that feature in many anime for an audience on the cusp of adulthood. N

Porco Rosso *

1992. jpn: Kurenai no Buta. aka: The Crimson Pig. Movie. dir: Hayao Miyazaki. scr: Hayao Miyazaki. des: Hayao Miyazaki, Megumi Kagawa, Toshio Kawaguchi, Katsu Hisamura. ani: Megumi Kagawa, Toshio Kawaguchi, Katsu Hisamura. mus: Joe Hisaishi. prd: Studio Ghibli. 93 mins.

The Adriatic, 1929—the Balkans may go up in flames at any moment, and the Fascists are on the rise in Italy. Mercenary pilots, survivors of the last Great War, work for hire defending transports from marauding pirates, and Marco is the best of them. But as his idealistic youth fades behind him, the former handsome flyer has undergone a strange transformation. He has literally turned into a pig, but nobody seems to mind, least of all him. His life is tranquil and simple; he owns a tiny island and when he isn’t flying, he’s dozing on the beach with his radio, a newspaper, and a cigarette, or he’s meeting his childhood friend, Gina, now a beautiful widow. But Marco’s own world is tipped out of balance by the arrival of an American cad, Curtis, who sets out to make his name by shooting down the Crimson Pig. Taking his beloved plane to Milan for repairs after their duel, Marco meets the irrepressible Fio, just 17 but already an aircraft designer of formidable talent. He also finds the secret police are on his tail, along with a gang of angry aerial pirates who want Marco out of the sky for good. Fio mollifies the pirates by appealing to their sense of pride, reminding them that it took an American to shoot down Marco. The pirates, mortified at this threat to their Italian spirit, wager on a rematch, with a victorious Marco winning the costs of his repairs, whereas a victorious Curtis (already rebuffed by Gina) would win the hand of Fio. As the Italian air force arrive to break up the illegal match, Marco and Curtis prepare to hold them off while the others escape. An epilogue implies that Marco has returned to human form, and that he and Gina live happily ever after.

Miyazaki’s most “adult” film, initially conceived for an audience of middle-aged men who had forgotten their youthful aspirations, PR was the fourth-biggest animated box-office draw ever in Japan, beaten only by two Pokémon films and Princess Mononoke. By turns touching, comic, romantic, and edge-of-the-seat gripping, it is a grown-up’s fantasy with a child’s directness and innocence. It reflects many of its creator’s passions and obsessions and also restates many of his central themes, yet the film has its own freshness and originality. Based loosely on a three-part series Miyazaki wrote in 1990 for Model Graphix magazine, PR was originally planned as a 45-minute in-flight feature for Japan Air Lines. Eventually produced as a full-length movie, a dub was prepared for the English-language audio channel on JAL flights, and subsequently broadcast on British TV. The idea of porcine transformation would return in Miyazaki’s Spirited Away in which a girl must restore her parents to human form.

Portriss

2003. jpn: Mugen Senki Potriss. aka: Tank Knights Portriss; Infinite Military History Portriss. TV series. dir: Akira Shigino, Nam Jong-sik. scr: Shinzo Fujita, Junichi Iioka. des: Yoshikazu Takaya. ani: N/C. mus: N/C. prd: Bandai, NAS, Sunrise, TV Tokyo. 25 mins. x 52 eps.

Long ago, Portriss Planet was hit by a meteor, and its humanoid population was almost wiped out. To cope with the changed environment, the few survivors evolved into a race of beings with body chemistry based on heavy metallic elements. An elite fighting sect, the Portriss Knights, rose to fight a dictator, and several hundred years later they continue to protect freedom. They have evolved the Portriss Rise function, which enables them to convert their bodies into humanoid tanks during battle and incorporate more weapons. When another evil dictator, Dark Portriss, appears and sets out to construct the ultimate weapon, three Knights stand ready to thwart his plans. Dragon Blue, the leader, Tiger Barrel, the muscle, and birdlike female Rozze Kyaree, who can split into two separate beings with different weapon functions, infiltrate the enemy headquarters at Babel Tower. Dragon Blue loses his Portriss Rise function after a direct hit from Dark Portriss’ superweapon, but in Babel the team encounter a boy with no memories who can merge with Dragon Blue and restore his full functions. They name the boy Yue-ma. Dark Portriss is out to find four mythical ultimate weapons evolved by their ancient humanoid ancestors, and, analyzing Yue-ma’s DNA, he uses the boy’s strange powers to produce a new life-form with the same abilities as the Portriss Knights. He names it Black Dragon and sends it to destroy the Knights and their Resistance supporters.

A coproduction with South Korea, based on an online computer game, this has tank-tread robots and quasi-comical design aimed at a child audience. Codirector Nam has direction credits for the Korean animated SF TV series BASToF Syndrome and movie Armageddon. The Gundam and Transformers influences are obvious in design and plot, with a love child of the Guntank leading a group of young people to change the world, but the nods to Star Wars are also unmissable.

Potomas the Hippo

1988. jpn: Kaba no Potomas. Movie. dir: Taku Sugiyama. scr: Hitoshi Yokota. des: N/C. ani: Shunji Saita. mus: Takeo Watanabe. prd: OH Pro. 25 mins.

Potomas the Hippo has a secret—he can speak like a human being, but only the young kids Maki and Toshi realize it. He also wears a bright green T-shirt with a giant letter “P” on it, but this is supposed to be nicely inconspicuous. Momentarily forgetting to keep quiet, Potomas speaks to a child he has just saved from drowning. Rumors soon spread about a talking hippo, and Potomas is forced to go on the run.

Power Dolls *

1995. Video. dir: Tsuneo Tominaga, Masamitsu Hidaka. scr: Midori Uki, Atsuhiro Tomioka. des: Masayuki Goto, Yasuhiro Nishinaka. ani: Masayuki Goto. mus: Hiroto Saito, Innerbrain. prd: Kogado Studio, Artmic, VAP. 25 mins. x 2 eps.

It’s a.d. 2540, and rebels on the colony world of Omni have been holding out against the Terran government for five years. Without a standing army, the breakaway colonists have fought back by adapting robotic Power Loaders. Originally used to unload spaceships, the machines have been turned into humanoid battle-tanks. A handful of young female pilots (who serve in the Detachment of Limited Line Service to justify the title acronym) is assigned to blow up the dam at Chatteau Village.

Based on a Japanese computer game of the same name, PD taps into many well-established conventions designed to appeal to male fans: girls in battledress, girls in robots, girls with guns, girls sniping at other girls. The characters and situations are all stolen stereotypes, and not especially well handled, with competent but limited animation. There’s a heroic effort to establish character depth by delving into the parental relationships of one of the lead characters, and there’s a passable fight toward the end, but since its appeal in Japan was predicated on a love of the game, it’s difficult for a foreign audience to feel anything except cheated. None of them would stand a chance in a fight with Ripley from Aliens, however big their power loaders.

A sequel, PD2, reunited the girls in another adaptation of a game scenario, this time a mission to recapture a stolen prototype. This episode in particular was further damaged in the English-language version by an overdose of reverb effects in the dubbing studio, though the pointlessly flashy audio matched the halfhearted attempt by the original crew to polish the visuals with some unnecessary digital effects. In 1997, the series continued in Japan on CD-ROM with a story set after the war, as the newly free state starts to pick up the pieces. The Power Dolls unit is disbanded but antigovernment rebels start causing trouble, and former leader Hardy Newland starts gathering the old crew for one more mission as poachers-turned-gamekeepers.

Power Stone *

1999. TV series. dir: Masahiro Omori. scr: Shikichi Ohashi, Masashi Yokoyama, Kenichi Araki. des: Tadashi Shida. ani: Yuji Moriyama, Kazuya Miura, Hideyuki Motohashi. mus: N/C. prd: Kokusai Eiga, Studio Pierrot, TBS. 25 mins. x 26 eps.

Fokker is on a quest to retrieve the mystical power stones hidden by his father. In a 19th-century world modeled on the foggy London of Sherlock Hound and an olde-worlde Tokyo populated by ninja, Fokker’s quest brings him into contact with the British princess Julia, the ninja-girl Ayame, Ryoma the samurai (see Oi! Ryoma), Wang Tang the Chinese brawler (actually Won-ton in Japanese, but the jokey name was altered), Garuda the Red Indian [sic], and Rouge the belly-dancing dusky maiden. Then they fight.

Based on a popular game from CAPCOM, creators of Street Fighter II, PS began as a launch title for the Sega Dreamcast, featuring a true 3D environment packed with useful items and a “power stone” collection theme that allowed the players to transform into more powerful versions of themselves. A few years earlier, such a concept might have barely made it straight to video, but in the late 1990s climate heavy with gaming money and short on options, PS became a TV series shown in the prime five-o’clock slot, with the characters regressed from the game to create a slightly younger look designed to appeal to children.

Precure

2004. jpn: Futari wa Precure. aka: Together We’re Precure; Together We’re Pretty Cure; Pretty Cure TV series. Movie. dir: Daisuke Nishio, Akinori Yabe, Takao Iwai, Takenori Kawada, Toru Yamada, Yasuo Yamayoshi. scr: Ryo Kawasaki. des: Akira Inagami. ani: Hiroyuki Kawano, Masumi Hattori, Mitsuru Aoyama, Toshie Kawamura, Yasuhiro Namatame. mus: Naoki Sato. prd: ABC, Asatsu DK, Toei Animation, TV Asahi. 25 mins. x 49 eps. (TV1), 25 mins. x 37 eps. (TV2), ?? mins. (m1), ?? mins. (m2).

Athletic, energetic Nagisa Misumi and her schoolmate, bookish Honoka Yukishiro have nothing in common until they see a shower of shooting stars, and find that two otherworldly visitors have invaded their lives. Pretty pink Mipple and heroic yellow Mepple are refugees from the Garden of Light, which has been overrun by the forces of darkness led by the wicked king Dusk Zone. But instead of a standard trawl through the tropes and clichés of magical-girl anime, this series owes a substantial debt to martial arts serials, such as director Nishio’s earlier Air Master. Dusk Zone wants to steal seven magical life-stones that will make him immortal, and the Queen of Light has sent the girls to find help from humankind, with special powers to transform into Cure Black and Cure White, defenders of light. Together, they are Pretty Cure, or Precure—compare to the Beauty Pair, the wrestlers who ultimately inspired the Dirty Pair. The forces of evil infiltrate their school disguised as student teachers and transfer students, but are no match for Precure, especially when one of them falls for Honoka. The second half of the first series was particularly influenced by Dragonball Z (another Nishio production), with the appearance of muscle-bound warriors that could power-up with a glowing aura, just like Super Saiyajins.

At the end of the first season, the wicked King was defeated and the amnesiac Queen came to Earth in the shape of a 12-year-old girl named Hikari Kujo, or Shiny Luminous in her magical incarnation. The second season, Pretty Cure Max Heart (2005), featured the return of Nagisa and Honoka, complete with new powers and new costumes, to help her find 12 new magic artifacts. Two months after the second series premiered, Pretty Cure Max Heart The Movie (Eiga Futari Wa Precure Max Heart) hit Japanese cinemas, and a second movie, Pretty Cure Max Heart The Movie 2: Friends of the Snow-Laden Sky (Eiga Futari Wa Precure Max Heart 2: Yukizora no Tomodachi), followed in October 2005. The show was created by Stumbling Witch Doremi’s Izumi Todo.

Prefectural Earth Defense Force *

1986. jpn: Kenritsu Chikyu Bogyo Gun. aka: Earth Defense Force. Video. dir: Keiji Hayakawa. scr: Kazunori Ito. des: Katsumi Aoshima. ani: Katsumi Aoshima. mus: Kentaro Haneda. prd: Shogakukan. 49 mins.

A parody anime in the spirit of writer Ito’s Urusei Yatsura about schoolyard feuds being blown out of all proportion—compare to Project A-Ko. Realizing that the ominous-sounding Telegraph Pole Society (who wish to conquer the world) are probably students at his school, Mr. Roberi forms a Defense Force. Students Shogi Morita (the handsome blond), Kuho Tasuke (his beefy dark-haired pal), and token girl Akiko Ifukube are ranged against an army of inept ninja. Meanwhile, the high school’s mad scientist, Dr. Inogami, has turned local boy Kami Sanchin into a cyborg, and both sides try to recruit him. While the TPS boasts an army of ninja, the pretty pink-haired Captain Baradaga, and “Scope” Tsuzaki, a hulking brute with many high-tech devices, the EDF is somewhat underfunded—after initial promises of supervehicles and amazing gadgets, the best Roberi can rustle up for the fighters is a ramen cart. The two organizations attempt to steal each other’s secrets and poach each other’s members, while, amid much comic angst about his condition (see Casshan or Cyborg 009), Sanchin tentatively falls in love with the professor’s daughter, Yuko, who has been similarly cyberized. Their romance is truncated by their unerring habit of setting off their built-in military hardware anytime they get angry. Once the TPG have been defeated, the professor reluctantly concedes that he can return the couple to human form, but the reversion process accidentally switches their genders. The couple get used to it, while Morita starts going out with his former enemy Baradaga. Based on the 1983 Shonen Sunday manga by Koichiro Yasunaga, this send-up was presented as three fake episodes and a fake preview for a nonexistent episode four.

Pretear *

2001. jpn: Shin Shirayuki Densetsu Preytia. aka: New Snow White Legend Pretear. TV series. dir: Kenichi Tajiri, Kiyoko Sayama, Yoshitaka Fujimoto, Yoshimasa Hiraike, Takaaki Ishiyama, Yukio Nishimoto. scr: Hiroyuki Kawasaki, Kenichi Kanemaki, Yoshimi Narita. des: Akemi Kobayashi. ani: Itsuko Takeda, Nobuhito Akada, Michinori Chiba, Megumi Kadonosono, Akemi Kobayashi. mus: Toshiyuki Omori. prd: Digimation, Group TAC, Anime R, Hal Filmmaker. 25 mins. x 13 eps.

The happy life of 16-year-old Himeno Awayuki is thrown into turmoil when her hard-drinking author father marries a wealthy fan who is so obsessed with his work that she has named her own daughters after characters in his books. Shunned by her snobbish new stepsisters, Himeno drifts into depression until she meets a group of seven young men on the grounds of the family mansion. They are the Leafe Knights, denizens of the land of Leafeania, here to save the world from the evil Princess of Disaster and her Demon Larva. The Princess has come to Earth to suck all the Leafe—the life-force of all living things—out of the world and use it for her own ends. The Knights are looking for a special girl, the Pretear, who has the ability to merge with any one of them and become a single, all-powerful defender of life. Although the leader of the Knights, hunky 18-year-old Hayate, doubts it, it seems Himeno is the Pretear. His six companions, cute guys aged from 17 down to 5, all take to Himeno; instead of two snooty sisters she suddenly has a band of brothers.

Based on a manga by Junichi Sato and Kaori Naruse, Pretear deliberately invokes fairy-tale antecedents, chiefly Cinderella and Snow White. The style is generic girl’s fantasy, with absurdly nasty siblings and cookie-cutter guys, from the moody but fiercely loyal loner playing hard to get to the adorable surrogate kid brothers for mothering practice. The show has a certain amount of charm, but not many outside its target audience of 10-year-old girls will find much to impress.

Pride the Master thief

1965. jpn: Kaiketsu Pride. TV series. dir: Yuichi Fujiwara. scr: Takehiko Maeda. des: Yuichi Fujiwara. ani: Taku Sugiyama, Motoyoshi Matsumoto, Noboru Ishiguro. mus: Seiichiro Uno. prd: TV Doga, Fuji TV. 5 mins. x 115 eps.

Professor Pride and his faithful dog Dry are masters of crime who boast that they can steal anything from the Eiffel Tower to Mount Fuji itself. Pursued across the world by the hapless Detective Scope, Pride stars in the first-ever crime-caper anime, a distant ancestor of the later Lupin III and Cat’s Eye. The first anime made by TV Doga, a company formed in 1963 by a coalition between the Tokyo advertising company Koei and Fuji TV. The black-and-white series was completely remade in color in 1967 but never broadcast.

Prime Rose

1983. jpn: Time Slip 10,000-nen Prime Rose. aka: 10,000 Year Time Slip Prime Rose. TV special. dir: Osamu Dezaki, Naoto Hashimoto. scr: Keisuke Fujikawa. des: Osamu Tezuka. ani: Keizo Shimizu, Yukari Kobayashi, Kenichi Onuki. mus: Yuji Ono. prd: Magic Bus, Tezuka Pro, Nippon TV. 98 mins.

An accident on the orbiting military satellite Death Mask wipes out cities in Japan and America, but the occupants have not been killed. Danbala Gai, a member of the time patrol, travels 10,000 years into the future, when Earth is ruled by strange creatures, and the occupants of the two cities have formed their own nations. Though he is not supposed to interfere, Gai becomes involved with Prime Rose, a girl who vows to avenge the murder of her fiancé by learning to fight and killing his murderer, Prince Pirar. But the time patrolman shares her ultimate goal—the restoration of true peace to the world. Based loosely on his manga serial in Shonen Champion, creator Tezuka intended the title to refer to the “primrose” flower, though his pronunciation recalls the old English origins of the word, not its modern spelling.

Prince of Snow Country

1985. jpn: Yukiguni no Ojisama. Movie. dir: Tomoharu Katsumata. scr: Yugo Serikawa, Tadahiro Shimafuji. des: Takao Kasai. ani: Takao Kasai. mus: Seiji Yokoyama. prd: Shinano, Toei. 88 mins.

Koichi and his sister Yuki befriend Hanaguro, a swan who has flown to Japan from Siberia. Hanaguro is attacked by a dog, and the cowardly Koichi flees, but that night he has a dream in which he is whisked away to the Kingdom of the Snow Prince, where he finds the bravery to help the other swans. A moral fable from the Buddhist Soka Gakkai leader Daisaku Ikeda, who also created Rainbow Across the Pacific and Fairground in the Stars.

Prince of Tennis *

2001. jpn: Tennis no Ojisama. aka: TeniPuri (short for Tennis Prince). TV series, movie. dir: Takayuki Hamana. scr: Jun Maekawa. des: Akiharu Ishii. ani: Trans Arts. mus: Cheru Watanabe. prd: NAS, Production I.G., JC Staff. 22 mins. x 178 eps. (TV) 40 mins. (v) 65 mins. (m).

Ryoma Echizen is a tennis prodigy, haunted by the fame of his father, a former top player who retired unexpectedly at the height of his career—compare to Yawara. With four championships under his belt after several years in America, Ryoma returns to Japan to join Seishun Gakuen (Youth Academy) because of its reputation as one of the best junior high schools for tennis, but also because it was Dad’s old school. Not everyone else in the school is as focused on the game or as driven by family rivalry, but there’s plenty of competition, and he is the first freshman to make it onto the squad. Ryoma is ambidextrous and often switches hands during a game; he’s also a loner, and can come across as arrogant, but his veneer of coolness is ignored by friendly Takeshi Momoshiro, who takes him under his wing, and wise-cracking Eiji Kikumaru. Most high school and sports-show tropes make an appearance, but the talented crew gives the show genuine freshness and charm.

Based on a manga by Takeshi Konomi in Shonen Jump, with a huge number of characters and the constant challenge of new teams to face, sports soap opera PoT replicated the success of basketball series Slam Dunk for the female market. A video followed: PoT: A Day on Survival Mountain (TnO: Sonzokuyama no Hi). In the movie PoT: The Two Samurai: The First Game (2005, TnO: Futari no Samurai: The First Game), Ryoma and his classmates play an exhibition game on a luxury cruise ship, only to learn that they’re being used as pawns in a corrupt millionaire’s web of gambling and deceit, while Ryoma meets his supposed brother. LV

Prince Pirate

1966. jpn: Kaizoku Oji. TV series. dir: Yoshio Kuroda, Kimio Yabuki, Kenji Araki. scr: Jiro Yoshino, Minoru Hamada, Hiroyasu Yamaura, Yasuo Yamaguchi, Okichi Harada, Ichiro Wakabayashi. des: Shotaro Ishinomori. ani: Tameo Ogawa, Eisuke Kondo, Shinichi Suzuki, Hiroshi Wagatsuma. mus: Hisayuki Miyazaki. prd: Toei, NET. 25 mins. x 31 eps.

Kidd’s dying father tells him of Morgan, a pirate who yearns to rule the seven seas. Kidd tracks down Morgan’s ship, the Hurricane, wins over its skipper, an old sailor called Crapp, and becomes the new captain. However, his dreams of a life on the open sea are soon scrapped by the arrival of the Barracuda and its nasty captain, Fugg Hook.

Mixing equal parts of Peter Pan and Wendy with Sindbad the Sailor, and adapted from Cyborg 009–creator Ishinomori’s manga in Shonen King, PP also featured a genuine kid playing Kidd—the lead voice actor was the 13-year-old Satoshi Furuya, better known today as King Philip in Alexander. Captain Kidd’s treasure would also feature in Dagger of Kamui.

Prince Planet *

1965. jpn: Yusei Shonen Papi. aka: Planet Boy Papi. TV series. dir: Tsutomu Yamamoto, Yonehiko Watanabe, Tadao Wakabayashi, Takeshi Kawauchi. scr: Ichiro Kanai, Jusaburo Futaba, Satoshi Ogura. des: Hideoki Inoue. ani: Tadao Wakabayashi. mus: Keiro Miki. prd: TCJ, Eiken, Fuji TV. 25 mins. x 52 eps.

Unwilling to admit Earth into the Galactic Council of Planets until its warlike ways are curbed, the council appoints a prince from the pacifist planet Radion as an Earth-based ambassador. Crash-landing in the American Southwest, he befriends local oil heiress Diana Worthy, who helps him blend in with Earth society. Before long, “Bobby,” as he is now known, moves to the urban sprawl of New Metropolis, where his superpowered pendant from Radion bestows superhuman strength and the ability to fly. With his sometime associates Ajababa the magician and wrestler Dan Dynamo, he fights crime in a predictable but earnest cross of Amazing Three and Astro Boy. Based on a manga by Hideoki Inoue, a former assistant of Mitsuteru Yokoyama. As was customary in the American market at the time, the original Japanese theme was replaced with a new track, on this occasion by the Carol Lombard Singers.

Princess Anmitsu

1986. jpn: Anmitsu Hime. TV series. dir: Masami Annai, Rei Hidaka, Taka­aki Ishiyama. scr: Yoshio Urasawa, Tomoko Konparu, Hideo Takayashiki, Yoshiyuki Suga, Masaru Yamamoto. des: Shosuke Kurogane. ani: Yoshiyuki Kishi. mus: Hiroshi Ogasawara. prd:Studio Pierrot, Fuji TV. 25 mins. x 51 eps.

A cheeky, vivacious little medieval Japanese princess is bored with life in her father’s castle of Amakara. With her best friend Takemaru in sometimes reluctant pursuit, she sets about livening things up. Luckily, as her father’s sole heir, she’s unlikely to get into real trouble, and since she really loves Takemaru, she’ll try and make sure he doesn’t either.

Shosuke Kurogane’s original manga began in 1949 in Shojo Comic magazine, finished in 1955, and was first approached as an anime project in 1961. Abandoned by the inexperienced team because of soaring costs, it took Studio Pierrot to give it all the charm and energy the author hoped for 25 years later, presenting a sweetly fantasized picture of the ideal Japanese childhood, in which preschool- and kindergarten-age children are secure, loved, and much indulged, and their little naughtinesses always innocent and always forgiven.

Princess Arite

2001. jpn: Arite-hime. Movie. dir: Sunao Katabuchi. scr: Sunao Katabuchi. des: Keiko Morikawa. ani: Kazusane Ozaki. mus: N/C. prd: Studio 4°C, Omega Project. ca. 90 mins.

Princess Arite, a little girl who lives in a small room on top of a tower, yearns to learn magic and escape to the town below. This fairy tale from Katabuchi, former assistant to Miyazaki on Kiki’s Delivery Service, was made inside a computer, though it retains the appearance of traditional cel animation. Based on the novel The Clever Princess by Diana Coles.

Princess Army

1992. Video. dir: Osamu Sekita. scr: Miyuki Kitagawa. des: Yumi Yamada. ani: Yumi Yamada. mus: Yuichi Takahashi. prd: Group Tack, Animate Film. 30 mins. x 2 eps.

Rescued from a drunken attacker by a judoist, Aida Nonoka resolves to become as good as her savior, hoping one day to recognize him by the scar on his back. Transferred to a new high school, she meets two older boys who could possibly be the person to whom she owes her life and wants to give her heart—see Utena. Multiple unrequited yearnings as three judo girls and three judo boys fall in and out of love while they’re supposed to be throwing each other around a room—with matters greatly exacerbated by the sudden arrival of a forgotten fiancé from Holland. Based on the manga in Shojo magazine by Miyuki Kitagawa, this is an even gentler judo soap opera than Yawara, whose earlier success it was doubtless trying to emulate.

Princess Knight *

1967. jpn: Ribon no Kishi. aka: Knight of the Ribbon; Choppy and the Princess; The Adventures of Choppy and the Princess; Princesse Saphir. TV series. dir: Chikao Katsui, Nobuo Onuki, Yoshiyuki Tomino, Masami Hata, Ryosuke Takahashi, Hideo Makino, Seiji Okuda, Norio Hikone. scr: Osamu Tezuka, Masaki Tsuji. des: Kazuko Nakamura, Sadao Miyamoto, Minoru Nishida. ani: Sadao Miyamoto. mus: Isao Tomita. prd: Tezuka Pro, Fuji TV. 25 mins. x 52 eps., 25 mins. (pilot).

Thanks to an accident in heaven, where the mischievous cherub Tink is responsible for giving out hearts to babies, Princess Sapphire of Silverland is born with two—a man’s and a woman’s. This is fortunate for her father the king, who proclaims to the populace that the new child is a boy, and, consequently, that any succession problems are over. The secret is kept, since if it becomes known that the heir is a girl, the succession will pass to the corrupt Duke Jeralmin. She grows up as a boy, learning all the masculine skills and doing her utmost to excel and make her father and her people proud. But when she falls in love with the charming prince Franz Charming, she faces a terrible dilemma. Revealing her womanhood would throw away her own achievements, her father’s dreams, and the stability of her country—but staying a man means she must sacrifice her dream of love forever.

Beginning as a 1953 manga in Nakayoshi, Osamu Tezuka’s PK was the Astro Boy–creator’s tribute to the many Takarazuka musical revues he saw as a child, where the all-female cast made cross-dressing a narrative necessity. This gem of a series, much loved in Europe, is less well known in the English-speaking world despite several English-language releases, but its enduring influence can be seen in the massive success of its immediate heirs Rose of Versailles and Utena, as well as in the prevalence of cross-dressing battle-babes throughout anime. It also has powerful links with the magical-girl shows in the princess’s masquerade under another identity, her fight against supernatural evil, and her friend and protector-sprite Tink. Its style and pace seem dated now, but the themes, ideas, and plots Tezuka generated are still being reexamined by modern directors and writers who were not even born when it was first broadcast. Versions of PK will probably go on being retold forever, but however modern the trappings, they will stand or fall on how they measure up to the power and simplicity of Tezuka’s original.

It had a limited American TV release in 1972 under the title Princess Knight. Licensees Joe Oriolo and Burt Hecht did better with three episodes edited into a movie entitled Choppy and the Princess. With Tink renamed Choppy, this was shown frequently on syndicated TV throughout the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s. The series also made it onto Australian screens under the PK title, and a number of 25-minutes episodes were released on British video by two different distributors. Movie Makers released seven episodes under the general title The Adventures of Choppy and the Princess and at least three more under individual episode titles without the AoCatP surtitle. Tasley Leisure of Leeds released six episodes as Choppy and the Princess, Adventures 1–6. The English dubs lose one of Tezuka’s beloved jokes—he named the good characters and countries in his fable after precious stones and metals, with the bad guys named after cheap synthetics like nylon and plastic, but the names have been mangled in translation. Following Tezuka’s death in 1989, the series was released on Japanese laser disc in 1991, with the original unbroadcast pilot included as a bonus extra.

Princess Memory *

2001. Video. dir: Ko Tomi. scr: Mirin Muto. des: Akira Kano. ani: Yuji Ushijima. mus: N/C. prd: Lemon Heart. 30 mins. x 2 eps.

Collin is a serving boy in a tavern, haunted by dreams of a naked pink-haired damsel in distress, begging for him to rescue her. His fellow workers, pretty girls Pony and Sallion, refuse to take him seriously and force him to get on with his chores until flame-haired adventurer Lily arrives. She has come into town to explore a forbidden cave on its outskirts. Deciding to accompany her on her quest, Collin discovers that there was an element of truth in his dreams—one Felina is being held captive, but her soul has been split into separate personality shards, each of which must be collected like Pokémon. If he is able to win them all over, then she shall be restored and accept him as her knight in shining armor, but not before he has had sex with the other cast members—compare to Dvine [Luv]. N

Princess Minerva *

1995. Video. dir: Mihiro Yamaguchi. scr: Hideki Sonoda. des: Tokuhiro Matsu­bara. ani: Tokuhiro Matsubara, Hanchi Rei, Hokukan Sen. mus: Kenji Kawai. prd: Pastel. 45 mins.

Without a male heir, the kingdom of Wisler has a girl for its next leader. Minerva is a vain, headstrong, selfish princess who’s bored with her role and wants to excel at combat and spellcasting. Despite the best efforts of her chief guard, Blue Morris, to keep her safe (and keep her in check), she disguises herself to fight in a big tournament for girl fighters. Unfortunately, evil sorceress Dynastar hates Minerva and sets out to kidnap her, but grabs Blue Morris instead. The Princess realizes the error of her ways, gets the warrior girls to help her, and sets out to rescue her long-suffering bodyguard.

PM is sweetly predictable, signaling its next move so far ahead that suspense is not one of its outstanding qualities. Based on a computer game/manga/novel multimedia offensive by Ko Maisaka and Run Ishida, its origins are betrayed in an outsized cast to showcase everyone’s favorite from the original. Gently poking fun at Princess Knight and other tomboy heroines (at one point, the narrator tries to explain how kindhearted Minerva is, only to choke on his own words), the result is a lackluster cousin to Dragon Half but without its predecessor’s insane charm. The character designs are cute but not very original; ditto the story. Uncritical fans of babes in battle bikinis may be amused.

Princess Mononoke *

1997. jpn: Mononoke Hime. aka: Princess Ghost; Phantom Princess. Movie. dir: Hayao Miyazaki. scr: Hayao Miyazaki. des: Hayao Miyazaki. ani: Masashi Ando, Kitaro Kosaka, Yoshifumi Kondo. mus: Joe Hisaishi. prd: Studio Ghibli. 133 mins.

Young Prince Ashitaka defeats a supernatural beast plaguing the remote Eastern lands in which his tribe dwells but is left with a wound that refuses to heal. Because its origin is supernatural, it has a strange effect that gives Ashitaka superhuman strength and accuracy, enabling his arrows to take the heads or arms off his enemies, but it will also kill him, slowly but surely. Finding that the beast was maddened by an iron ball in its flesh, he goes in search of the culprits, hoping they can provide some way of curing him. As he wanders through the Western forests, he finds a village of ironworkers, the source of the bullet. Tataraba, the ironworkers’ fort, is in conflict with both the local overlord and the creatures of the forest, which are led by a wild girl who rides on a wolf. San, an abandoned child adopted by the wolf god Moro and raised as one of her own cubs, now hates the humans who abandoned her. All her loyalty and devotion is given to her new family, the ancient beast gods whose lands are threatened by the incursions of the growing human population. Eboshi, the tough, pragmatic leader of the ironworkers, is consumed with hatred for San, and Ashitaka, a natural peacemaker whose wish is to see everyone live in harmony, tries in vain to settle their differences. He has another agenda; apart from his hope that he may find healing in the forest, he is falling in love with San. The distant, unseen emperor, who claims to be the Son of Heaven, authorizes the death of Shishigami, the woodland god who is responsible for the natural (and supernatural) resistance to Tataraba. Stealthy humans massacre many of the forest creatures, but the wrath of Shishigami is unstoppable . . . almost.

Purportedly set in medieval Japan but depicting a symbolic neverwhen clash of three proto-Japanese races (the Jomon, Yamato, and Emishi), PM is the ultimate prequel to Studio Ghibli’s ecological concerns in films such as Nausicaä and Pompoko. It is set at the very point in time when humankind pushed Nature into submission, toppling the old “natural” order and starting the long chain to the present day, when Nature itself seems under threat of extinction. Twenty years in conception and three in production, the highest-grossing Japanese movie in any genre at least until Spirited Away beat Miyazaki’s own record, and the first of Miyazaki’s films to be released theatrically in America through the Disney/Tokuma marketing deal, PM has built a cinematic legend of its own. Born from the creator’s own dissatisfaction with the end of Nausicaä, which required a miraculous deus ex machina to resolve the human/nature conflict, PM is consequently far more downbeat and melancholy. Though a minority of critics still regard it as a tedious harangue, even the many who call it Miyazaki’s masterpiece agree it’s a difficult film for U.S. movie audiences, who are simply unaccustomed either to animation as polemic, or to the level of violence depicted. Preview audiences, not expecting a Tarantino image in a Disney movie, reacted with nervous laughter to a sequence where a man gets his arm shot off. Producer Toshio Suzuki’s strict and noble “no cuts” policy may have preserved Miyazaki’s creative vision but made the film difficult to sell into markets that still believed cartoons were kids’ stuff. Technically, PM is a remarkable achievement, especially on the level of art direction and design; the primeval forests of Japan and the first stirrings of industrial society are depicted with ravishing realism. The characters are well drawn in every sense, each with his or her own motivations and needs, not cardboard heroes and villains but humans struggling to get by in a hostile world. This is a grown-up fantasy, and unlike the vast run of anime that gives us stock figures in pretty clothes and wish-fulfillment situations, PM presents real people in a real world that is beautiful and fascinating but must be taken on its own terms.

The U.S. dub, which featured a script rewrite by Sandman author Neil Gaiman, was the first theatrical anime production since the Armitage III movie to use “name” actors, with a cast including Billy Crudup, Claire Danes, Minnie Driver, and Gillian Anderson. PM was widely reported as being Miyazaki’s last film, but he has since completed Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle. V

Princess Nine *

1998. TV series. dir: Tomomi Mochizuki. scr: Hiro Maruyama. des: Akihiko Yamashita, Yoshimi Hashimoto. ani: Yoshimi Hashimoto. mus: Masamichi Amano. prd: Phoenix/NEP21, NHK2. 25 mins. x 26 eps.

Girls don’t play baseball, they play softball. But 15-year-old Ryo Hayakawa is a natural ace pitcher, just about to finish junior high and leave so she can help her widowed mother with the family noodle bar. Instead, Mrs. Himuro, Chairperson of the prestigious Kisaragi High School, persuades Ryo to continue her education by handing her a scholarship. Keiko Himuro plans to take on the male-dominated “hard” sports with an all-girl team, deliberately designed to irritate the snooty and chauvinistic male teachers and staff who think that a girl’s education should only aspire to motherhood and housewifery. But sporty girls are competitive by nature, and Ryo is soon butting heads with Izumi Himuro, the prideful, overly competitive daughter of the chairwoman and the school’s tennis champion. Despite her initial opposition, Izumi eventually joins the team, adding much-needed batting power. Rivalries soon break out on and off the field, as the girls fight over token boy Hiroki and corporate sponsorship comes attached to corporate scandal. This typical baseball anime in the fashion of H2 was dumped onto satellite TV in the impecunious late 1990s as the post-Evangelion anime TV boom turned into a slump.

Princess Rouge *

1997. aka: Legend of the Last Labyrinth. Video. dir: Isato Date. scr: Mamoru Takeuchi. des: Minoru Yamazawa. ani: Minoru Yamazawa. mus: N/C. prd: Beam Entertainment. 30 mins. x 2 eps.

Recently orphaned teenager Yusuke Mizuki struggles to live alone, until a dimensional portal opens while he is cycling to school, literally dumping a pretty girl in his lap. Reluctantly he takes care of the amnesiac green-haired girl who can only remember her name, Rouge. As a mawkish romance develops between them, Oh My Goddess! comparisons become actionably obvious, as the couple is besieged by Rouge’s supernatural sisters, Kaige and Meige. Discovering that Rouge is a princess of the underworld, the pair is forced to flee from other family members, chiefly a man called Raiga and his sword-wielding minions. Raiga wants Rouge to help him unseal Gaia’s Sword, an artifact of great power. As with so many video anime, the cliffhanger ending and lack of follow-up aren’t the fault of Western distributors. Six episodes were projected, but after poor sales, only the two on the American video release were ever made.

Princess 69 *

2002. jpn: Shintaiso Kari. aka: New Gymnastics Kari (i.e., Rhythmic Gymnastics Kari). Video. dir: N/C. scr: N/C. des: N/C. ani: N/C. mus: N/C. prd: Pink Pineapple. 30 mins. x 2 eps. (v1), 30 mins. x 2 eps. (v2)

In an erotic pastiche of the school sports genre of Aim for the Ace, rich, privileged Tomomi is the star of her school gymnastics club, determined to break the will of shy, innocent new arrival Miku by indoctrinating her in the sadistic rituals of the Gymnastics of Darkness. This involves torture and bondage after school, both at the hands of Tomomi and her sometime lover, the coach Nikasuke. Other girls are soon recruited, some willingly, some less so, such as Madoka, who confesses to her friend Wakana that she has seen the secret rituals, only to discover that Wakana is already an initiate. Later episodes collapse from the silly into the disturbing as the tortures get increasingly sadistic. For some reason, the sequel Rhythmic Gymnastics Makoto (2005) appears to have been released by a different company, as part of the Discovery Series. LNV

Princess Tutu *

2002. jpn: Princess Tutu/Chuchu. TV series. dir: Junichi Sato, Shogo Kawamoto, Ikuko Ito, Kiyoko Sayama, Osamu Sekita, Yu Ko. scr: Chiaki Ko-naka, Mamiko Ikeda, Michiko Yokote, Rika Nanase, Takuya Sato. des: Ikuko Ito. ani: Akemi Kobayashi, Takashi Shiokawa, Yuji Ushijima, Nobuto Akada, Shinichi Yoshikawa. mus: Kaoru Wada. prd: Hal Film Maker, Kid’s Station, Imagica. 30 mins. x 13 eps. (TV1) 15 mins. x 26 eps. (TV2).

Gangly, clumsy but determined, Ahiru (whose name is Japanese for duck) studies ballet at Kinkan Academy—a duckling training to become a swan, just in case that wasn’t obvious. She adores Mythos, the school’s star male dancer, from afar, but he’s so remote and passive that he hardly seems to notice anything. His sinister friend Fakir protects and bullies him in equal measure, and elegant and self-centerd Rue, the school’s star ballerina, wants him for herself.

This fairy tale redolent of Tales of Hans Christian Andersen is also a magical-girl story, a high school romance in which the clumsiest but most determined and kind-hearted girl in the class struggles to win the school hunk; a drama fable along the lines of Mask of Glass (featuring much music from famous ballets), and the tale of a hero’s fight against the forces of darkness seen through the eyes of the princess. The characters inhabit a reality not dissimilar to that of Ranma ½, in which an ordinary town can be populated with animal-human hybrids subject to strange enchantments.

The reason is supposedly rooted in an ancient fairy tale, in which a handsome, noble prince fought an evil raven. The story teller died before the story could be finished, and, determined to fulfill their destinies despite the death of their creator, the prince and the bird escaped from the story. In our own world, the prince sacrificed his heart to seal the raven’s powers away and protect the world from her malice. But since a story demands an ending a duck is magically transformed into a human girl—with help and advice from mechanical doll musician Edel, Ahiru can use a magic pendant to transform herself into Princess Tutu. When she has retrieved every piece of the prince’s lost heart, he will be free. But the raven princess is also free, and determined to fight the swan princess, and Ahiru has a hitherto unsuspected handicap. She transforms back into her duck self whenever she quacks, and she quacks when she’s startled. It takes a splash of water to get her back to normal.

The charm of PT is its attempt to subvert the formulae of its genres, such as allowing the princess to save the hero. The sensual yearning at the heart of all school romances mixes with the fear of the adult world, in which everything is unfamiliar and safety nets are few; but stronger than the powerful mix of fear and sex is a passion for stories and storytelling, for the magic of making a new world. Borrowing from European folklore already familiar to many Japanese through earlier anime, it deftly creates an internal reality where perception is just a medium for filtering dreams to find the one your heart holds dearest. Writer Konaka brings in a mechanical being wiser and more reliable than most organic ones, just as he did in Armitage III and Malice Doll, and keeps the story closer to the terrifying undercurrents of Swan Lake than the sugarplum fairy tale of The Nutcracker. There’s a wonderful echo of Little Mermaid each time Tutu gives the Prince back a piece of his heart; with each piece he gains the power to express new emotions and ideas, but not always pleasant ones. The things she unleashes in him often tear at her own heart like knives. The series is divided into two parts, the first 13 half-hour episodes known as the Egg Chapter, and the following 26 15-minute episodes, shown two at a time, known as the Chick Chapter. V

Prism Season

1989. jpn: Nagata Megumi Prism Season. aka: Megumi Nagata’s Prism Season. Video. dir: Yuichi Ito. scr: Yuichi Ito. des: Megumi Nagata. ani: Yuichi Ito. mus: Ami Osaki. prd: Grouper Pro. 30 mins.

In a gentle adaptation of Megumi Nagata’s book Flowers Wait for the Moon, a girl grows up, falls in love, and becomes a mother, realizing that her childhood is now forever behind her. The same illustrator’s distinctive pastels, Victorian-style fairies, and falling flowers could also be seen in later follow-ups, 1994 Japanese-style adaptations of Thumbelina, Mimei Ogawa’s children’s book The Coloring Magician, and Mermaid and the Red Candle; though, as a combination of still pictures and narration, none of them is technically anime.

Private Psycho Lesson *

1996. jpn: Kojin Jugyo. aka: U-Jin’s Personal Tuition. Video. dir: Tetsuro Amino. scr: Ryusei. des: Makoto Takahata. ani: N/C. mus: N/C. prd: JC Staff, Blue Mantis. 35 mins. x 2 eps.

Sara Iijima of Stunford [sic] University is a psychotherapist working in the field of higher education—which means most of her patients are high school or college students, coincidentally the target audience for this video. The traditional watch-on-a-chain method is not for her; to hypnotize patients she whips her top off, gets into a state of sexual excitement, and rotates her breasts in opposite directions. Once the patients are under her hypnotic influence, she regresses them to the point of trauma and sorts it out with a bit of fan service. This sex-solves-everything school of analysis has made her very successful—she travels to assignments in her own helicopter gunship and disciplines inadequate teachers with a few hundred well-aimed bullets. A variant on the elder erotic initiatress also seen in Rei Rei, but the script’s treatment of rape—a punishment for bad Japanese girls dealt out by foreign men—is particularly offensive. U-Jin, who wrote the original manga, knows what his audience wants, but he’s capable of delivering it more cleverly; see the Tales of . . . series. LNV

Private Sessions *

2001. aka: Tokubetsu Jugyo Video. dir: Hiroyuki Yanase. scr: Rokurota Maka-be. des: Hiroyuki Yanase. ani: Hiroyuki Yanase. mus: Yoshi. prd: YOUC Digital Works (Vanilla Series). 30 mins. x 2 eps. (v1) 30 mins. x 2 eps. (v2).

Takumi Mikami is unable to find full-time work as a teacher because he has a record for sexually abusing his pupils. However, such foibles are no bar to employment in the world of anime pornography, and so he is soon taking a temporary teaching job at a high-class girls’ school famed for its discipline. By a remarkable coincidence, discipline is what Takumi is best at, and his sex slave Sahi Azuma is already working at the school in another teaching post. His first victim is Natsuki, the heroine of the basketball club, whom he rapes in his office after practice, while Sahi captures the incident on video. Meanwhile, the brother of one of Takumi’s other victims decides that it is more important for his sister’s honor for him to regain the tape of her rape than it is for him to report it to the police.

The seemingly unrelated Private Sessions 2 (2003) features Juichiro Aoki, a famous painter who lives in a mansion in the leafy suburbs of Kyoto. His wife Reika is 30 years younger than he, and only married him in order to pay off the debts of her father, the ikebana master. Although the marriage is technically loveless, Juichiro’s wife has come to enjoy their bondage games, as does Juichiro’s new apprentice Kaoru, who witnesses their activities in secret.

For the second part of PS2, the scene changes once more to a school, where Tomoya Ishiguro realizes that he is the spitting image of one of the real teachers, and so is able to smuggle himself into the daily life of the school. His schoolgirl victims include computer geek Yumi, librarian Seira and art student Asuka. Based on a computer game by Bishop. Another entry in the Vanilla Series. LNV

Production IG

Founded in 1987 by Mitsuhisa Ishikawa and Takayuki Goto as an offshoot of Tatsunoko Productions, the company was first known by a name that combined its founders’ initials—IG Tatsunoko. Its first major role was as a production house on the first Patlabor movie—the authors speculate that, had the movie been a failure, the existence of a separate company would have shielded the parent from liability. Renamed Production IG, it was subsequently merged with ING, another of Ishikawa’s companies, to form the entity as it is known today, with credits ranging from Ghost in the Shell to Blood: The Last Vampire and a prominent position as a subcontractor on Studio Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke. Notable staffers include Ishikawa himself, Hiroyuki Kitakubo, Toshihiro Kawamoto, and computer animator Norifumi Kiyozumi. Production IG has benefited greatly from its association with director Mamoru Oshii and also from its high profile in the Western fan community, bolstered by a U.S. office. The company is a major player in digital animation, and pioneered “screen architecture”—that is, the pre-visualizing of effects that will be applied to a scene, allowing animators to get a better idea of how their work will look when it is finally composited with multiple effects and filters. Production IG also created the “anime” sequence of Kill Bill: The Origin of O-Ren and “Last Orders” (1997), a superb one-minute pastiche of Madhouse Studios’ future dystopias as an animated commercial for Murphy’s Stout in the U.K. Production IG’s advertising work for other companies includes commercials for Kirin Lemon, T-Mobile, and Samsung. The animation studio Xebec is a subsidiary of the company.

Professor Pain *

1998. jpn: Gakuen Sodom. aka: Sodom Academy. Video. dir: Genkuro Shizuka. scr: Genkuro Shizuka. des: Saki Kuradama. ani: Saki Kuradama. mus: N/C. prd: Beam Entertainment. 25 mins. x 2 eps.

Frustrated teacher Mr. Ohse plants high explosives all over the school (a university in the U.S. dub), locks his students in the chemistry lab, and subjects them to sexual torments. A female teacher tries to negotiate and becomes Ohse’s next victim. Eventually, however, the secret behind Ohse’s madness is revealed. Distraught at his sister’s suicide after a gang rape and livid that the press assumed she led her assailants on, Ohse has been encouraged, in a pastiche of the previous year’s Perfect Blue, to wire up the school and kill his pupils by anonymous e-mails sent by someone posing as his sister. His aim is to create an over-the-top circus of depravity for the media he so despises. In other words, PP wants the best of both worlds—a snide pop at media perversity as an excuse for an hour of orgiastic bondage.

Whereas the original computer game had one of the hapless boys (“forced” by Ohse to copulate with the girl he secretly adores) as a point-of-view character, Genkuro Shizuka’s script concentrates on Ohse himself, though the result is still one of anime’s most filthily degenerate videos. Merely summarizing the plot is pushing the boundaries of decency—lowlights include grateful rape victims, sexual assault with a mop, a girl forced to evacuate her bowels at the front of the class, needles stuck into breasts, and a lactating teacher providing nourishment for her pupils. LNV

Professor Poppen and the Swamp of No Return

1982. jpn: Poppen Sensei to Kaerazu no Numa. TV special. dir: Shiro Ii, Yoshimitsu Morita. scr: Akiteru Yokomi-tsu. des: Shinya Takahashi. ani: Kazuyoshi Yoshida. mus: Kuni Kawauchi. prd: Heruhen, Mainichi, TBS. 90 mins.

The assistant professor of biology at Udo University is dispatched to the local marshes to write a paper on the food chain. However, he is unable to formulate a thesis and angrily decides to stop time. Transforming himself into an insect, he then changes shape into a fish, a kingfisher, and a weasel in order to experience the struggle for life firsthand. Based on the Professor Poppen series of stories by Katsuhiko Funahashi.

Progolfer Saru

1982. aka: Progolfer Monkey. TV special, TV series, movie. dir: Hiroshi Fukutomi, Junji Nishimura, Minoru Arai, Yasuhiro Imagawa, Tameo Ogawa, Tsukasa Sunaga. scr: Noboru Shiroyama, Seiji Matsuoka. des: Shinichi Suzuki. ani: Toshiyuki Honda, Hideyuki Motohashi. mus: Hiroshi Tsutsui. prd: Shinei Doga, TV Asahi. 111 mins. (TVm1), 25 mins. x 147 (TV), 96 mins. (TVm2), 44 mins. (m1), 75 mins. (m2).

Sarumaru Sarutani is a professional golfer, determined to defeat the shadowy Mr. X and his syndicate of evil golfers, including Dragon the kung-fu golf master. This TV special was based on the 1974 manga by Motoo Abiko, one half of the Fujiko-Fujio duo who created Doraemon. Splitting from his working partner Hiroshi Fujimoto in the 1980s, he produced several titles under the name Fujiko-Fujio “A,” including Parasol Henbe, Laughing Salesman, and Billy Dog—PGS is his longest and most successful creation. Serialized in publications for the very young, such as Mommy, Baby Book, and Corocoro Comic, the story was never intended for the adult audience, except perhaps as a way of making Dad’s weekend hobby look more interesting to his children. The hero’s much more akin to the Man with No Name than to the irrepressible Stone Monkey of Journey to the West, but these games are played strictly for laughs.

Bringing new meaning to the term “crazy golf,” PGS returned as a TV series in 1985, with a series of fantastical tournaments in which players used absurd special powers, and the simian Saru remained determined to triumph. Amid kung-fu masters, dragon warriors, and fairway fairies, his opponents include Death himself. In the midst of these adventures, he went to America in another TV movie PGS: Saru in USA (1985) for a duel against the Native American golf-shaman Hawkwild. The movies beckoned with PGS: Challenge of Super Golf World (1986), set in the eponymous theme park where our hero faced the world greats at a tournament run by the ever-present Mr. X. A second movie, PGS: Koga’s Secret Zone—the Shadow Ninja Golfer (1987), took Saru to a hidden valley in the Japanese Alps, where Saru and his family must battle a trio of golf-assassins. More adult golfing activities would be the focus of Beat Shot.

Project A-Ko *

1986. jpn: Project A-Ko. Movie, video. dir: Katsuhiko Nishijima; Yuji Moriyama. scr: Yuji Moriyama, Katsu­hiko Nishijima, Tomoko Kawasaki; Takao Koyama. des: Yuji Moriyama. ani: Yuji Moriyama, Tomohiro Hirata. mus: Richie Zito, Joey Carbone. prd: APPP, Studio Fantasia. 80 mins. (m), 70 mins., 50 mins., 60 mins., 55 mins. x 2 eps. (all video).

An alien spaceship crashes on Graviton City. Nobody clears it away, people get used to it being there, and gradually the district is rebuilt on an island around the hulk. Years later, two new girls arrive in class—late, as they always will be—at the Graviton Institute for Girls. Eiko (“A-Ko”) Magami is a normal Japanese schoolgirl hero, apart from superstrength and superspeed inherited from superparents who are only revealed at the end of the film—one of its many in-jokes. She’s cheerful, loyal, and always tries her best. Her best friend, C-Ko Kotobuki, is very, very stupid but so unbelievably cute that she reawakens an intense crush in rich, clever, and beautiful B-Ko Daitokuji. B-Ko decides that she’ll break up the friendship between A-Ko and C-Ko, and then C-Ko will be her best friend.

Starting out looking like just another girls’ school story in the tradition of Twins at St. Clare’s, PA was actually named after Jackie Chan’s Project A (1984), and the inspiration of the master of slapstick martial-arts mayhem is obvious. The film pokes fun at such anime staples as the heroic Captain Harlock, here transformed into a cross-dressing dipsomaniac, and the alien-princess-school-love-triangle so successful in Urusei Yatsura, as well as throwing in foreign jokes like the rotund American fast-food icon Colonel Sanders, in a parody of a scene from Harmagedon depicting a terrifying warrior emerging from a dark alley toward the hero. (Kentucky Fried Chicken had just opened its franchise in Japan and the lifesize statue of the colonel outside every restaurant became a target for comedians for years—see Junk Boy.) C-Ko isn’t what she seems—she is really the princess of a lost alien civilization, and the captain was coming to find her when he accidentally crashed his ship.

In the video sequel PA2: The Plot of the Daitokuji Corporation (1987), directed by Moriyama from Koyama’s script, B-Ko’s millionaire industrialist father, from whom she inherited all her least charming characteristics, is plotting to acquire the alien technology for his own ends, but he reckons without his daughter’s determination to win C-Ko’s affection or A-Ko’s loyalty to her annoying little friend. The pair unite to stop the aliens taking C-Ko home. Moriyama also directed the Kawasaki-scripted video PA3: Cinderella Rhapsody (1988), about an unusual love quadrangle forming when A-Ko and B-Ko fall for Kei, who loves C-Ko, who can’t stand him because he’s taking A-Ko’s attention away from her. The whole thing culminates in a huge party on the crashed battlecruiser, which the captain and his crew have converted into the best disco in town. Opening and closing sequences have stunning artwork by Yasuomi Umezu, and the ending reassures us that men come and go, but friends are always friends. Moriyama and Kawasaki teamed up again for Project A-Ko: Final (1989, aka PA4), in which Kei’s matrimonial negotiations with the girls’ teacher, C-Ko’s origins as an alien princess, and the captain’s continuing failure to complete his mission culminate in the arrival of C-Ko’s mother in a spaceship modeled on a George Lucas Star Destroyer. But the world’s cutest bubble-brain doesn’t go home after all, and the video ends, as the first movie began, with our heroines late for school again.

Final wasn’t so final after all. A video two-parter, A-Ko the Versus (1990, aka PA5), took our heroines into an alternate universe to reprise their story with a new twist and new oppo-nents but still the same theme—
rivalries, friendships, love, and massive rumbles with bigger collateral damage than most medium-sized wars.

Nishijima and Moriyama (also known as Cream Lemon’s Yuji Motoyama) wrote the story for PA with Kasumi Shirasaka reputedly as a pitch for the soft-core franchise, mercifully dropped. Allowed to flourish as comedy instead of erotica, PA throws in parodies of and references to just about every area of popular Japanese and American youth culture. Just like its pornographic precursor, PA is cunningly telling the same story with the same ingredients, spinning it just enough to hold the audience’s attention. The team added two saving graces: good comic timing and a complete failure to comprehend the meaning of the word “excess.” The whole canon—especially the first film and Cinderella Rhapsody—is still watchable, whether you have seen enough anime to get the in-jokes or just enjoy comedy that goes completely over the top. Nishijima would reprise the character relationships for the 1990s in the less successful Agent Aika.

Project Arms

2001. TV series. dir: Hirotoshi Takaya. scr: Aya Yoshinaga, Shuichi Miyashita. des: Masaki Sato. ani: Masako Shimizu and Hideyuki Motohashi. mus: N/C. prd: TMS, TV Tokyo. 25 mins. x 26 eps.

Teenager Ryo Takatsuki almost loses his left arm in an accident, only to discover his wounds taking on a life of their own—he hasn’t lost an arm, so much as gained a symbiotic bioweapon. Sub-Guyver action based on the Shonen Sunday manga by Spriggan-cocreator Ryoji Minagawa. V

Protecting from the Shadows

2006. jpn: Kage Kara Mamoru. aka: Mamoru from the Shadows. TV series. dir: Yoshitaka: Fujimoto. scr: Ryunosuke Kingetsu, Toshimitsu Takeuchi. des: Sai Madara, Natsuki Watanabe. ani: Ichiro Hattori. mus: Tsuyoshi Watanabe. prd: Group Tac, Studio Tulip, TV Tokyo, TV Osaka. 25 mins. x 12 eps.

Shy, unkempt, bespectacled teenager Mamoru is really the latest in a long line of ninja, who, for the last 400 years, have been sworn to protect the nearby Konyaku family from harm. The pretty Yuna Konyaku is thus safe from danger for as long as her benevolently geeky stalker is nearby. Based on an idea by Taro Achi, the creator of Dokkoida. Note that the last two episodes were broadcast in a single time block, and so may be filed in some sources as a single double-length “eleventh” episode.

Psammead, The

1985. jpn: Onegai, Samiadon! aka: Samiadon, I Wish . . . ; Psammead the Sand Imp. TV series. dir: Osamu Kobayashi, Hideharu Iuchi, Fumiko Ishii, Tomomi Mochizuki, Mitsuru Hongo, Kazuhiko Kobayashi. scr: Toshiyuki Yamazaki, Eiichi Tachi, Haruya Yamazaki. des: Tsutomu Shibayama. ani: Hideo Kawauchi. mus: Kentaro Haneda. prd: Tokyo Movie Shinsha, NHK. 25 mins. x 39 eps. (2 stories per ep.).

In a deserted English chalk quarry, the older siblings of the five Turner children—Jill, Robert, and Jean—find a strange creature buried in the sand and decide to “take care” of it. It looks like Pikachu in a pointy hat and is allergic to water, but the children have found the powerful and capricious Psammead in this adaptation of E. Nesbit’s novel Five Children and It (1902). The sand-imp can grant one wish every day, but the wish only lasts until sundown, and like many such magical “advantages” (see Doraemon), it doesn’t always work as the wishers intend. The children ask for all sorts of toys and adventures, including becoming a mermaid, going into space, and having a robot of their own. Despite the mishaps some of their wishes bring, they learn valuable lessons from their strange friend.

TMS relocated the story to the present-day “English countryside,” a half-timbered neverland of green fields and friendly policemen. The sand-imp character was renamed Samiadon (a Japanese wind spirit) in order to bring an oriental association not present in the original. Several TV episodes were also cut into a feature-length edition for video.

Psychic Academy *

2002. jpn: Psychic Academy Ora Bansho. aka: Aura Bansho. TV series. dir: Shigeru Yamazaki. scr: Mitsuhiro Yamada. des: Miho Shimogasa. ani:
N/C. mus: Michihiko Ota. prd: E. G. Films, Gansis, Starchild Records. 9 mins. x 24 eps.

Ai Shiomi is an insecure teenager following his gifted older brother to a school for students with psychic abilities. All the female pupils seem to manifest their biggest talents at chest level, providing a clue that this is just another formulaic wish-fulfillment show. The love triangle between Ai, his sweet-and-pneumatic childhood friend Orina, and his tomboyish-but-pneumatic classmate Myu is interrupted by random psychic battles and rough-and-ready wisdom from his crusty psychic coach. Much eye candy, plus boys’ uniforms shamelessly stolen from Harry Potter, may please the undiscerning. Based on a manga by Katsu Aki, who produced the boys’ manga version of Escaflowne, this show’s sole attempt at innovation was being released straight to the Internet, although in its American incarnation it was released on DVD. N

Psychic Force

1998. Video. dir: Fujio Yamauchi. scr: Hiroyuki Kawasaki, Kenichi Onuki, Katsu­hiko Takayama. des: Kenichi Onuki. ani: Hideki Araki. mus: N/C. prd: Triangle Staff, Broccoli. 40 mins. x 2 eps.

In 2007, the world is under martial law. As telepathic powers manifest in the young, the army begins conducting its own experiments, hoping to create its own elite Psycorps, known as the Psychickers. One day, Keith Evans escapes from the American compound. Evans is taken in by the kindly Griffiths family, but he goes on the run with the Griffiths boy Verne when the family is attacked by soldiers. Griffiths and Evans then fall in with the international Noah cartel, led by the eccentric Richard Wong, and the fight for freedom begins. This anime was based on an arcade fighting game but bizarrely uses Welsh names for the lead characters.

Psychic Wars *

1991. jpn: Soju Senshi Psychic Wars. aka: Bestial Warrior Psychic Wars. Video. dir: Tetsuo Imazawa. scr: Yasushi Ishiguro. des: Masami Suda. ani: Masami Suda. mus: Tetsuro Kashibuchi. prd: Toei. 50 mins.

In this disappointingly trite adaptation of Yasuaki Kadota’s SF novel, a recently qualified Kyoto doctor discovers that prehistoric Japan was the site of an ancient war between demons and ninja. Injecting Julian May’s Saga of the Exiles with a Japanese attitude toward honor, obligation, and love, the PW novel was clearly optioned for its time-traveling messiah and prehistoric demon wars, as with Dark Myth, hinging on a threat that Japan’s ancient enemies are returning to continue a vendetta older than time. But its fascinating take on Japanese history is dumped in a mix of breakneck exposition and supposedly arty pauses. Director Imazawa tries to jolly things along by playing up the rich historicity of the Kansai region and the (literally) many-colored land of the past, but he doesn’t have the time or budget to do it properly. He is not helped in this by a particularly poor U.K. dub that has academics discussing the mysteries of Japan’s lost Jomon culture (see Princess Mononoke) without being able to pronounce its name. V

Psycho Armor Gobarian

1983. TV series. dir: Seiji Okuda, Satoru Kumazaki, Kazuya Miyazaki, Hiroshi Yoshida, Tatsuya Sasahara, Yasuo Ishigawa, Hiroshi Negishi, Kazuhiro Okaseko. scr: Yoshihisa Araki, Hideki Sonoda, Katsuhiko Taguchi, Jiyu Watanabe, Tsukasa Takahashi. des: Kiyoshi Fukuda, Yuki Kinoshita. ani: Kiyoshi Fukuda, Yuki Kinoshita. mus: Tatsumi Yano. prd: Knack, Dynamic, TV Tokyo. 25 mins. x 26 eps.

Sometime in the 21st century, Earth is threatened by the Galadine, evil psychics from another dimension. The world’s last line of defense is the giant robot Gobarian and its teenage pilot, Isamu Napoto, who moves the huge weapon using his immense powers of ESP. He’s aided in his fight by his companions Kult Buster and Hans in their robots Reido and Garom. If you think that the robot Gobarian and, indeed, the whole setup are strongly reminiscent of Mazinger Z, it won’t surprise you to learn that this is another of Go Nagai’s many robot tales—though not one of his best.

Psycho Diver: Soul Siren *

1997. jpn: Psycho Diver Masei Rakuryu. Video. dir: Mamoru Kobe. scr: Toshiaki Kawamura, Tatsuhiko Urahata. des: Makoto Koga, Masafumi Yamamoto. ani: Makoto Koga. mus: Akihiko Hirama, SORMA, TA-1. prd: Toei, AIC, APPP, Madhouse. 47 mins.

Yuki Kano has it all—fame, wealth, the world at her feet—but she’s occasionally unable to sing (and for a pop star, this is probably bad). Enter Bosujima, a “psycho diver” with the capability to enter people’s heads and straighten out what’s wrong with them. Well, most of the time, anyway. Based on a novel by Amon Saga–creator Baku Yumemakura, this production has a list of distinguished animation houses in its credits as long as your arm. The look is urban-hard, cool, and savvy with just enough retro and pop-culture references; check out the psychodiving machine for echoes of the brain-swap apparatus from cult 1960s series The Prisoner. The voice cast is full of fan favorites headed by Junko Iwao as Yuki. NV

Pugyuru

2004. TV series. dir: Hajime Kurihara. scr: Hiroyuki Nakaki. des: Tohiro Konno. ani: N/C. mus: Yasunori Koda. prd: 2000 Creators.com, Dex, Kids’ Station, Kodansha, Media Factory, MOVIX. 3 mins. x 13 eps.

Not so much a series as a televised gag strip, Tohiro Konno’s surreal manga was animated as part of the Anime Paradise! TV segment. High school girl Maa... (the rest of her name is inaudible) meets Cheko when her mother hires a maid so that Maa… won’t be alone when she has to go away on a long trip. Cheko has allegedly come from the Maid Village, where real maids live and train, but she’s not an ordinary maid; she can dissolve, grow roots, fly, and separate her head from her body. She’s been sent to change Maa…’s life, and Maa… and her friends have wacky moments with their new little friend, water-gun toting gangsters, an overbearing American, and other strange creatures. Director Kurihara plays a character called Kurihara in episode 5, and the kind of food gag commonly found in juvenile shows like Anpanman is a staple of the story, with Cheko’s head replaced with dumplings in one episode while in another she eats another appropriately named character’s head with syrup. Self-consciously strange, and made using limited animation techniques liable to make it easier to port into mobile phone delivery systems in future.

Pumpkin Wine

1982. jpn: The Kabocha Wine. TV series, movie. dir: Kimio Yabuki. scr: Shunichi Yukimuro, Mitsuru Majima, Shinji Shimizu. des: Megumu Ishiguro, Fumihiro Uchikawa. ani: Megumu Ishi­guro, Akira Shimizu. mus: Osamu Shoji. prd: Toei, TV Asahi. 25 mins. x 95 eps. (TV), 60 mins. (TVm), 24 mins.

Shy teenager Shunsuke is terrified of girls. He’s grown up surrounded by his sisters, and his mother owns a lingerie shop. When he moves to a new high school thinking it’s for boys only but finds it’s actually a coed establishment, he’s in danger of letting his phobia ruin his schooldays. His fellow pupil, the lovely Natsumi “Call Me L” Asaoka, is a lot bigger than he is in every way. But despite being kindhearted, taller, and stronger, she falls in love with short, neurotic Shunsuke. And even though he feels he’s being run over by a well-meaning bulldozer, he comes to appreciate her finer qualities.

Based on Mitsuru Miura’s Shonen Magazine manga, the series jars modern audiences because of the dated design and Rubensesque physique of the heroine, but the story has charm, and the French dub was very successful. The TV movie PW: Is She Really on a Honeymoon with Him!? (1982) features predictable misunderstandings in a remote ski lodge, following a winter wonderland formula also found in Kimagure Orange Road and Urusei Yatsura. A short movie, PW: Nita’s Love Story (1984), ran on the Toei Manga Matsuri summer double bill alongside Kinnikuman: Ultimate Muscle. In it, the titular dog, who lives in the school dormitory at the Sunshine academy, has a puppy sired by the pet of the wealthy Takizawa family. Nita steals milk for her offspring but disappears. While searching for the dog, Natsumi is lured onto the Takizawas’ yacht by their wayward son, who claims to have the dog on board but really has designs on Natsumi herself.

Puni Puni Poemi *

2001. Video. dir: Shinichi Watanabe. scr: Yosuke Kuroda. des: Satoshi Ishino. ani: Satoshi Ishino. mus: Toshiro Soda. prd: JC Staff. 30 mins. x 2 eps.

Poemi Watanabe is a cheerful student at Inunabe elementary school who lives happily with her parents until they are attacked and killed by mysterious aliens. Adopted by the parents of her classmate Futaba Memesu, she finds that the seven Memesu sisters have secret lives as the Earth Protect Unit, defending humankind against the aliens who killed her family and are now popping up in war machines all over the place. The snag is that, like Thunderbirds’ International Rescue, they are sworn to save life, not threaten it—they can defend but not attack. But Poemi has no such scruples, and, with a bit of magical help, she transforms into Puni Puni Poemi, magical girl and enemy of Earth’s attackers. A spin-off of Excel Saga, with Poemi resembling Excel, and Futaba her associate Hyatt. LNV

Puppet Master Sakon

1999. jpn: Karakuri Soji Sakon. aka: Sakon the Ventriloquist. TV series. dir: Hitoyuki Matsui, Hideki Tonokatsu, Kazuo Nogami. scr: Chiho Katsura, Daisuke Hanebara. des: Toshimitsu Kobayashi, Tetsu Koga. ani: Toshimitsu Kobayashi. mus: Norihiro Tsuru, Yuriko Nakamura. prd: Kyoiku, Tokyo Movie Shinsha, WOWOW. 25 mins. x 26 eps.

Scooby-Doo meets Child’s Play? Sakon is following in the footsteps of a master puppeteer who took the art of ventriloquism to undreamed-of levels centuries ago, but not even his studies in these ancient arts and his great talent can explain why his doll Ukon seems to have a life of its own. Realizing that his skills and Ukon’s unexpected independence could be very useful in solving mysteries and crimes, Sakon starts to develop a new sideline as an investigator of unusual problems. Based on the 1995 Shonen Jump manga by Ken Obata and Maro Sharaku, with attractive designs and an evocative score, PMS nonetheless boasts one of the most unlikely premises in detective history. About as believable as Sherlock Holmes talking to a sock puppet, though sleuthing tales such as Conan the Boy Detective and Young Kindaichi Files are hardly less strange. V

Puppet Princess *

2000. jpn: Karakuri no Kimi. Video. dir: N/C. scr: N/C. des: N/C. ani: N/C. mus: N/C. prd: N/C. N/D mins.

Lord Ayawatari is not interested in governing his territory or in conflicts between the other warlords but instead only lives to create puppets. Knowing Ayawatari’s nature, the evil warlord Sadayoshi Karimata invades Ayawatari’s castle and kills almost all his family. Princess Rangiku, the daughter of Ayawatari, is forced to seek out the legendary ninja Danzo Kato to oppose the evil Karimata, but Danzo’s assistance comes at a cost. Together these unlikely heroes must find a way to infiltrate Karimata’s castle and restore the mysterious stolen puppet. Based on a Shonen Sunday manga by Ushio and Tora–creator Kazuhiro Fujita.

PUPPETRY AND STOP-MOTION

The first stop-motion animation in Japan was Princess Tsumeko and the Devil (Tsumeko-hime to Amanojaku, 1955) produced by Tadahito Mochinaga, who had left cel-based anime behind after Momotaro’s Divine Sea Warriors. Mochinaga learned the techniques of stop-motion animation in China during his sojourn at the Shanghai Animation Studio and took them back to Japan in 1953. He oversaw several other stop-motion shorts in the 1950s, his collaborators including Yoshikazu Inamura and Kiichi Tanaka. Their highest profile work was the German sequence in Beer Through the Ages (Beer Mukashimukashi, 1956), a 12-minute commercial commissioned by the Asahi brewing company to celebrate its 50th anniversary—compare to Penguins Memory. The authors presume that it was commissioned as several separate TV commercials, and only later edited together into its full running time as listed in Japanese sources. Beginning with dancing, drunken Babylonians, it traces the story of intoxicants through to ancient Egypt and medieval Germany, before a brief Italian interlude that comprises cut-cellophane animation from Noburo Ofuji. The trail, of course, finally reaches Japan, a nation so taken with the commercial’s achievement that Kinema Junpo magazine voted it the ninth best cultural work of the year.

Other works included Little Black Sambo (Chibikuro Sambo no Torataiji, 1956), exhibited at the Vancouver International Film Festival, and Five Little Monkeys (Gohiki no Kozarutachi, 1956), which won an education award in the year of its release. Often funded by Dentsu Eigasha, early stop-motion appeared to reach the limit of its development with Penguin Boys Lulu and Kiki (Penguin Boya Lulu to Kiki, 1958) and Removing the Lump (Kobutori, 1958), the latter of which reached the heady heights of a 21-minute running time. Stop-motion, however, has all the labor intensive difficulties of cel animation, but few of its advantages. Sets must still be constructed, gravity still limits special effects, and the chances of mistakes that ruin an entire scene are greatly increased. Furthermore, the success of the feature-length cel animation of Panda and the Magic Serpent in 1958 was a damaging blow to future investment in stop-motion.

The potential for production-line techniques allowed the output of cel animators to swiftly outstrip stop-motion animators, and cels soon took over. Stop-motion enjoyed limited success on Japanese television, with Tadahito Mochinaga’s series Prince Ciscon (Ciscon Oji, 1963), based on a manga by Doraemon-creators Fujiko-Fujio. However, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (Akabana no Tonakai Rudolph Monogatari, 1964), based on a script by Romeo Muller, was undertaken by Mochinaga’s team as work-for-hire for Videocraft (later known as Rankin/Bass). Not broadcast in Japan until three years after its American premiere, this TV special remains a Yuletide regular in the English-speaking world, but was the last significant use of stop-motion on Japanese TV for some years. However, the efforts of Japan’s stop-motion animators were utilized to a great extent on international coproductions, often unseen by the Japanese. Mochinaga’s MOM Films company turned out a number of stop-motion works for Rankin/Bass, including The New Adventures of Pinocchio (1961), Willy McBean and His Magic Machine (1963), Andersen’s Fairy Tales (1966), Ballad of Smokey the Bear (1967, broadcast in Japan as Smokey Bear no Uta, 1970), and Mad Monster Party (1967), all animated to match prerecorded soundtracks and scripts supplied from America.

It is notable that MOM Films limited itself to short TV specials, as serial stop-motion animation at 24 minutes a week was simply unworkable. A long-running stop-motion series was Ichiro Komuro’s Little Battles of the Salaryman (Salaryman Minimini Sakusen, 1970), but even that only managed a 27-episode run by keeping the episodes at a manageable four minutes each. As Japanese children’s television succumbed to the onslaught of live-action rubber monster shows, there was some experimentation with the use of animation for effects work (for the cel variant of this, see Born Free). Devil Hunter Mitsurugi (Majin Hunter Mitsurugi, 1971), featured three live-action children, wielding ceremonial swords themed on Wisdom, Humanity, and Love, which allow them to combine into the stop-motion giant Mitsurugi, who can fight giant monster invaders from Scorpio. Made by animator Takeo Nakamura and his wife Ayako Magiri, the show was innovative, but suffered from production processes that made it inevitably more time-consuming than cels. The TBS network tried something similar with Transform! Pompoko Jewels (Henshin! Pompoko Tama, 1973) a live-action series about two feuding Japanese families whose children were able to switch identities and genders—shades here of the gender-swapping comedy of Ranma 1⁄2. As with Marvelous Melmo, the engines of transformation were red and blue magic items (jewels here); as with Pompoko, tanuki were involved, although here they were regarded as interfering creatures from another world who happened to resemble Japanese raccoon dogs. As with Mitsurugi, the stop-motion elements were only employed very briefly, since the transformative powers of the magical jewels would only last for a maximum of ten minutes. Such an artificial time limit was common in special effects shows, whatever the medium, since it allowed the filmmakers to limit their effects budgets—similar excuses were tried in the live-action Ultraman and later pastiched in the perilously short battery life of Evangelion.

Stop-motion seemed fated to slip into the world of film festival awards for worthy effort, the prerogative of hobbyists and artists but unlikely to attract much interest from the money-minded producers of the rest of commercial animation. Kazuhiko Watanabe’s The Crane Returns a Favor (Tsuru no Ongaeshi, 1966) won an educational prize at that year’s Mainichi Film Concours, and Katsuo Takahashi’s Issun Boshi (1967) was voted one of the top ten movies of the year by Kinema Junpo. However, many of the early pioneers in stop-motion found alternative employment in puppetry, a creative medium that never escaped from children’s television but remained a lucrative field, largely on the license-funded channel NHK—NHK derives its funding from a monthly fee charged to each household which possesses a television. The animator Tadanari Okamoto made TV’s first marionette series, Tamamonomae (1953), a short-lived tale about a fox who is able to transform herself into a beautiful human girl.

The original puppet version of Chirorin Village (1956, see also *DE) lasted for over a thousand episodes on television, its stars becoming familiar voices to an entire generation, including Tetsuko Kuroyanagi (see Chocchan’s Story). Other TV experiments in puppetry included the space-voyaging vessel Silica (*DE), created by science fiction author Shinichi Hoshi, and Osamu Tezuka’s Space Patrol (*DE), which was chiefly a puppet show, but also used cel animation for certain special effects and its opening sequence. Madcap Island (see also *DE) ran for more than a thousand episodes and received that ultimate of TV accolades—complaints about violence and bad language! As a mark of its fame to Japanese viewers of a certain age, it even appeared in a cameo role playing on a TV screen in Only Yesterday.

Further discussion of the development of puppetry is beyond the scope of this book, except to note Aerial City 008 (1969, see also *DE), 11 People of Nekojara City (Nekojara-shi no Juichinin, 1970), and the samurai epic Hakkenden (*DE), widely acknowledged by the makers of the anime Hakkenden to have been a greater influence on them than the 19th-century original. Other puppet shows of the 1970s include the original of Sanada’s Ten Brave Warriors, (see also *DE, as Ten Brave Warriors of Sanada), an adaptation of the radio drama The Flutist (*DE), and 1978’s Kujaku-o (a Japanese retelling of the same myth that later became Peacock King). The early 1980s saw the flourishing of both Prin Prin (*DE) and a puppet version of Great Conquest (see also *DE as Romance of the Three Kingdoms), for which the accomplished Kihachiro Kawamoto made over 400 puppets.

Regarded as a highly disposable medium, with many thousands of episodes lost or wiped soon after their original broadcast, TV puppetry foundered in the 1980s, particularly after the ill-fated attempt of the commercial channel Fuji TV to make its own puppet show, the sci-fi spectacular X-Bomber (1980). Despite creative input from Devilman-creator Go Nagai and a truly gripping plot, X-Bomber was canceled partway through its run amid whispers of low ratings and enjoyed better success abroad under the title Star Fleet (*DE). Fuji TV’s attitude also seemed to influence NHK, the home of TV puppetry, whose Farewell Higeyo (Higeyo Saraba, 1984) was the last puppet series to be shown on the channel for some years. The channel revived puppetry with Tale of the Heike (Heike Monogatari, 1993), which also featured puppets designed by Kihachiro Kawamoto, and Drum Canna (*DE), a significantly shorter puppet series broadcast in seven-minute segments as part of another program.

The traditions of puppetry found new relevance in the late 1990s in digital animation, as an example to the manipulators of virtual 3D models in 3D environments. Early digital anime often borrowed from puppetry, particularly in attempts to depict realistic human movement. As with puppets in the physical world, virtual models often have difficulty interacting with the environment around them—figures are best filmed from the waist up to avoid notably unrealistic leg movements and foot placements, and characters in early digital animation such as A.Li.Ce and Blue Remains spend prolonged periods sitting in vehicles or floating in space, water, or cyberspace. Malice Doll took the links between puppetry and stop-motion to extremes, with a cast of puppets that comes to life.

Stop-motion continues to flourish outside the commercial world of cel or digital animation, particularly at film festivals. In particular, Kihachiro Kawamoto (see Kihachiro Kawamoto Film Works) has continued to keep Japanese stop-motion in the eyes of festival crowds. While the majority of the Japanese animation in this book reflects Western preconceptions of what “anime” should be, it is worth noting that it is Kawamoto who is the president of the Japan Animation Association, and that Koji Yamamura’s Mount Head was nominated for a Best Short Animation Academy Award in the same year as Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. For the average Western viewer, however, the most likely encounter with stop-motion animation is probably the special effects in Shinya Tsukamoto’s surreal live-action movie Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1991) or the claymation credit sequences of Ninja Nonsense and many Crayon Shin-chan movies.

Pure Love *

1998. jpn: Rhythm. Video. dir: Miyo Morita. scr: N/C. des: N/C. ani: Chuji Nakajima. mus: N/C. prd: Daiei. 30 mins. x 2 eps.

In a fantasy world modeled loosely on medieval Europe, knight Hiro sneaks into the king’s secret chambers one evening to meet with the queen. Then, the two of them go at it like rabbits, because this is a porn anime, and she is a nymphomaniac. N

Pure Mail *

2001. Video. dir: Shinichi Masaki, Yuji Yoshimoto. scr: Yoshio Takaoka. des:
Eta Nishi. ani: Yuji Yoshimoto. mus: N/C. prd: Green Bunny. 30 mins. x 2 eps.

Highschooler Kei Ogata is a loner who has constructed a different persona and life on the Internet, where he chats with girls as “A.W.” He begins to suspect that his online friend Eve is also his classmate Midori Nagawa, someone he would love to get to know in real life. However, he fears he’ll never be as attractive as A.W.; the other problem is that he once had a disastrous relationship with her friend Miki, behaved like a monster, and fears he can’t control himself outside the safety of the Net. Meanwhile, Kei is caught using the school’s servers to log into the chatroom, and is blackmailed into becoming the slave of the cruel tech support lady. LN

Purple Eyes in the Dark

1988. jpn: Yami no Purple Eye. aka: Purple Eye of Darkness. Video. dir: Mizuho Nishikubo. scr: Asami Wata­nabe. des: Chie Shinohara. ani: N/C. mus: Derek Jackson, Purple Gar, Mayumi Seki. prd: Youmex, Toei. 30 mins.

Rinko has always had a strange birthmark on her arm but discovers that it indicates she is not like other girls. The teenager’s young body hides a murderous beast that threatens to transform her at any moment, manifesting itself as glowing, savage purple eyes. An “image video” consisting of images from Chie Shinohara’s 1984 Comic Margaret manga set to seven musical interludes in the style of Cipher the Video. A full-blown anime, however, was not forthcoming, as instead the franchise was adapted for live-action television in 1996 (*DE). The same author also created Sea’s Darkness: Moon Shadow and Red River (aka Anatolia Story).

Puss in Boots *

1969. jpn: Nagagutsu o Haita Neko. aka: Wonderful World of Puss ’n Boots. Movie. dir: Kimio Yabuki. scr: Hisashi Inoue, Morihisa Yamamoto. des: Yasuo Otsuka. ani: Yasuji Mori, Reiko Okuyama, Takao Sakano, Hayao Miyazaki, Akio Fukube. mus: Seiichiro Uno. prd: Toei. 80 mins. (m1), 53 mins. (m2), 58 mins. (m3), 25 mins. x 26 eps. (TV).

Pierre, youngest of three brothers, befriends Perrault, a cat-musketeer in boots on the run from the henchmen of the evil, rat-loving Nekoboss. Perrault helps Pierre pose as the Marquis of Carabas in order to woo the beautiful Princess Rosa. She, however, is betrothed to the Demon King Lucifer, who kidnaps her on the night of the full moon. Perrault and Pierre set off to rescue Rosa from Lucifer’s castle.

This delightful if free version of Charles Perrault’s 18th-century fairy tale was given a limited U.S. release to the Saturday morning kids’ market, along with several other Toei anime including Jack and the Witch and Treasure Island. Featuring nods to Swan Lake and Beauty and the Beast, it was such a success in Japan that the feline hero became Toei Animation’s mascot. The comic elements of the movie owe much to the characterization of the extremely stupid transforming ogre who gets all the best bits of slapstick business. Note the presence of a young Hayao Miyazaki in the lower ranks of the animators.

Tomoharu Katsumata’s movie sequel Three Musketeers in Boots (1972) dispatched Perrault to the Wild West, where he accompanies the young Annie and Jimmy to Gogo Town, a frontier staging post. Annie’s father is killed, and the characters’ lives are all endangered when the town boss discovers they know about his counterfeiting operation that he runs out of the basement of the town saloon. Annie is kidnapped, and it is time for a replay of the rescue scenario from the first film, as Perrault and Sheriff Jimmy save her from the bad guys.

A third movie, PiB: Around the World in 80 Days (1976), was directed by Hiroshi Shidara for the same film studio—its feline version of Jules Verne a distant precursor of Around the World with Willy Fogg. Perrault bets Grumon the pig industrialist that he can travel around the world in 80
days but is pursued by cat assassins, Carter the obstructive hippo, and Grumon’s sneaky lupine agent Professor Garigari.

The unrelated TV series The Adventures of Puss in Boots (1992) was directed by Susumu Ishizaki and broadcast on TV Tokyo, featuring young boy Hans and his cat Kusuto. Their adventures include cameos by characters from many other fairy tales and stories, including Snow White, Don Quixote, Hansel and Gretel, Dracula, The Little Match Girl, and The Three Musketeers. This series is currently being repromoted in the U.S. as Puss ’n’ Boots along with a 75-minute feature, The Journey of Puss ’n’ Boots, which is probably three episodes edited together. The original 1969 film was restored in 1998 and shown with Galaxy Express 999 as part of the regular Toei Anime Fair theater run. An adaptation of Puss in Boots was also included in the anime series Grimms’ Fairy Tales.

Put it All in the Ring

2004. jpn: Ring ni Kakero 1. TV series. dir: Toshiaki Komura, Shigeyasu Yamauchi et al. scr: Yosuke Kuroda. des: Michi Himeno, Shingo Araki. ani: Eisaku Inoue, Keiichi Ichikawa, Shingo Araki, Hideji Ishimoto. mus: Susumu Ueda. prd: Toei Animation, Marvelous Entertainment, TV Asahi. 25 mins. x 12 eps.

The Takane siblings are determined to fulfill their late father’s wish that a Takane should become a champion boxer. Ryuji sets out to develop special techniques that will make him unstoppable in the ring, trained by his sister Kiku and aiming for the national squad. But first he has to take the junior high school championship against his archrival Jun Kenzaki. Based on the manga by Masami Kurumada, this old-fashioned saga of a boy’s growth into manhood by way of extreme physical pain (see Tomorrow’s Joe) has a mix of old and new names on the crew. V

Putsun Make Love

1987. Video. dir: Minoru Okazaki. scr: Wataru Amano. des: Masaki Kajishima. ani: Masaki Kajishima. mus: N/C. prd: Agent 21, Toei. 25 mins. x 6 eps.

The fall and rise of a loving couple’s fortunes, in which cute high school girl Saori begins barely speaking to Yuji, putting him through a series of trials as she slowly realizes that he’s the boy for her. As her parents try to fix her up with a husband in an omiai (“ar­ranged”) marriage meeting, Saori convinces Yuji to impersonate her at the meal, with predictably comedic results. Realizing there is fun to be had in impersonating a girl, Yuji disguises himself again and sneaks into the girls’ locker room with a camera, only to be waylaid by his teacher, Miss Akimoto, who confiscates his film. A traditional anime love triangle enters the plot, as Yuji schemes and matchmakes to ensure that Saori’s new suitor and the girl who is chasing him are maneuvered safely into each other’s arms. Yuji and Saori head off to the seaside in the final episode but are kept from consummating their budding relationship by the attentions of their teacher and Yuji’s unexpected heroism when he stops a suicidal girl from jumping in front of a train. Based on the manga by Jun Amemiya in Scholar magazine, this is an early work for Tenchi Muyo!’s Masaki Kajishima in the playful spirit of Slow Step and Kimagure Orange Road.

Pyunpyunmaru

1967. TV series. dir: Yugo Serikawa, Yasuo Yamaguchi, Kazuya Miyazaki. scr: Jiro Yoshino, Tsuneaki Nakane, Kenji Urakawa, Enrico Dolizoni, Tomohiro Ando, Masashi Hayashi, Shunichi Yukimuro. des: Jiro Tsunoda. ani: Keijiro Kimura, Hiroshi Wagatsuma, Tetsuhiro Wakabayashi. mus: Yoshioki Ogawa. prd: Toei, Shin Production, NET. 25 mins. x 26 eps.

Pyunpyun Maru is a ninja of the Iga clan, in charge of their Nandemo OK (Anything Goes) Office. Lumbered with the crybaby ninja Chibi Maru, downtrodden by his boss, and secretly enamored of the lady ninja Sayuri, Pyunpyun must also fend off the unwelcome advances of Kemeko, the office man-eater. This funny mix of office life and ninja japery was based on the manga Ninja Awatemaru by Karate for Idiots–creator Jiro Tsunoda serialized in Shonen King magazine.