Mar 4, 2024
Shoujo stuff tends to get the short end of the stick when it comes to getting ported to the US, but in some circles that seems to be changing quite a bit. Discotek Media has started making an effort to put out more shoujo and magical girl stuff as of late, something many fans are very happy about, especially since a lot of those titles either never came to the US officially or were neglected in previous years. One such title that Discotek put on Blu-Ray recently is Lady Georgie, based on the manga by Mann Izawa and Yumiko Igarashi that ran from 1982 to
...
1984. The anime was made concurrently with the manga in 1983, but it wouldn't get brought to the US until 2023, a whole forty years after its first premiere in Japan. It never even received good fansubs. Since it's so rare for eighties shoujo anime to get brought to the US in any capacity, I figured I'd buy Lady Georgie to give Discotek incentive to license more in the future. Hell, for all I know, they probably will in the future thanks to all the money Berserk is netting them right now. But now that I've actually watched the series...yeah, there are reasons why Lady Georgie never came to the US. I think its an okay show, and the changes the anime made to it might have actually helped it in a lot of ways, but Lady Georgie is not only very much a product of its time, it has a lot of elements that really would not fly today.
But what's the story, you might ask? Georgie Buttman (Yes, that is how her name is officially spelled. The people at Discotek confirmed it with the mangakas themselves) is a cheerful, energetic young girl living with her family on a farm in late 19th century Australia. However, even though her father and two brothers Abel and Arthur adore her very much, her mother Mary seems to resent her. What she doesn't know is that her family actually found her in the middle of a storm, with the only clue to her true lineage being a golden bracelet. But early in her life, Georgie grows up happily alongside her brothers, and at one point meeting and falling in love with the dashing Lowell J. Gray, the grandson of the then governor of Sydney. When Georgie finally learns the truth about her true heritage, she decides to journey to London to learn more about her birth parents and find Lowell again, with her brothers following in hot pursuit for reasons of their own.
Alright, there's no point in hiding it, so let's get the elephant out of the room: The bulk of Lady Georgie consists of a love triangle between Georgie and her two adopted brothers, so basically non-blood-related incest. For what little it's worth, compared to the manga, which has one of the brothers actually consummate their relationship with Georgie (Ugh!), the anime changes things drastically in that while Abel and Arthur do fight over her quite a bit and try to pursue her, it's completely one-sided on their parts and it never manages to go beyond simply confessing how they feel and eventually accepting the fact that Georgie rejected them. Thank God, because if Lady Georgie's anime had been a faithful adaptation of the manga, I wouldn't have touched it with a ten foot pole as I abhor sibling incest romance in anything. That's pretty much the only reason I even bothered to watch the anime, because it either removed or toned down a lot of the manga's grosser aspects, though that's not to say the anime is perfect. I have no interest in reading the manga for the fact that it actually makes the incest subtext actual text, so for anybody who's turned off by that, Lady Georgie's anime provides a better alternative.
Speaking of the anime, it's a serviceable production all things considered, even if it's held back by the limitations of the technology of the period and due to Japan's bubble economy not having happened yet, so it wouldn't have had the higher budget of later eighties anime. I do think Yumiko Igarashi's trademark shoujo character designs made transition to the screen pretty well, and what the anime lacks in fluidity and kinetic motion, it manages to make up for with well-drawn backgrounds and setpieces and really capturing the look of 19th century Australia. I will admit, as an American, my knowledge of Australia and its history is pretty limited, so I don't know how the anime producers went about researching Australia and whether their depiction of it is accurate or not. But even with my limited knowledge of Australia, I can say that no koala I've seen behaves the way Rapp does, and it's very easy to tell he's an original creation of the anime made solely to be a cute comic relief animal character, even though he flat-out disappears when the setting moves from Australia to London in the latter half. The music is pretty nice for its time period, and both the opening and ending, sung by Georgie's seiyuu Yuriko Yamamoto, are pleasant to listen to.
Remember in my review of Dear Brother, I mentioned that the anime for that added a lot of new scenes and expanded on some characters' backstories, which actually benefitted them quite a lot? Lady Georgie does the same thing. Since the manga is only 5 volumes long and the anime has 45 episodes, the anime opted to really expand on Georgie's early life in Australia, detailing her childhood starting from age 6-7 and ending when she turns 15. The manga actually starts just before the boomerang contest, but in the anime, the boomerang contest doesn't take place until episode 24, more than halfway into the anime's run, so most everything before then is anime original. I actually like that the anime took its time to flesh out Georgie, Abel, Arthur, and the rest of the characters early on, because it allows the audience to get invested in them before getting to the harder drama so you'll actually care what happens to them. If the anime had started at the same point as the manga, it probably wouldn't have made the same impact and would have resulted in a lot of pacing issues. Lady Georgie's slow and steady approach not only helps the characters, but the pacing and story progression, and it never feels like the anime is rushing to get through all its major plot points.
Interestingly enough, the anime also makes changes to some characters' personalities that actually humanize them more and make them feel less like one-note cartoonish villains. For example, in the manga, Georgie's adoptive mother Mary is abusive and cruel through and through, whereas the anime, while still keeping her resentment of Georgie and worries about Abel and Arthur falling in love with her, goes out of its way to show her at least trying to connect with Georgie and showing her genuine affection on occasion, making her feel more human and sympathetic, and her crueler moments hit harder, especially when Georgie learns the truth behind her lineage. Another character, Jessica, is made much less cartoonishly villainous. In the manga, she has a crush on Abel but when she finds out that he loves Georgie, she tries to hire a hitman to kill her while she's heading to London and even wishing she'd die. In the anime, she still crushes on Abel and gets jealous of Georgie, but her murderous plotting is excised in favor of having her just try to get Georgie out of the way via suggesting she get on a boat manned by a sailor she knows. It also tones down other villains' more crueler actions, such as removing Irwin drugging and raping Arthur in favor of just simply holding him prisoner and foiling Abel's attempts at saving him. I think the anime's changes really helped Lady Georgie, both from expanding on some characters' personalities and backstories, humanizing some and making them more sympathetic, or just getting rid of the grosser aspects of the whole incesty love triangle plot.
However, Lady Georgie isn't a perfect anime, and its pseudo-incest plot, while the biggest problem the series has, is just one of its problems. I found Lowell as a character to be rather bland and annoying, mainly because his reasons for falling in love with Georgie don't really have anything to do with Georgie herself, and a lot of the time he came across as objectifying her and seeing her as an ideal and a solution to all his problems rather than as a person. Furthermore, I know Japan has more lax views on child nudity, but there were several points in the anime where Georgie's bare chest is shown completely uncensored, most of which happen when Georgie is still in her early teens. Hell, one scene in the anime shows Arthur stripping naked and cuddling with an also naked Georgie in an attempt to share his body heat with her and save her life, and the way the scene is animated makes it look like they're about to have sex. Do I even need to go into how creepy and gross this is? Yeah, I think I'm starting to understand why the anime never got brought to the US until now. And keep in mind, Lady Georgie is considered a children's series. This is as far as anything goes between Georgie and Arthur, and like I mentioned before, Georgie never gets romantically involved with either adopted brother as opposed to the manga, but...this is still skin-crawlingly unsettling. Finally, the narrator. Decades ago, I reviewed another historical anime called Ie Naki Ko, or Nobody's Boy Remi, and while I love that show to death, one of my biggest complaints is how the narrator is really overused. Not only does the narrator talk in literally every episode, he had this bad tendency to spoil really important plot twists when the show would have been better off revealing them on its own. I think the narrator for Lady Georgie is even more obnoxious in that she does this as well, but also has the bad habit of not only spelling out the characters' thoughts and feelings like she's talking to toddlers, but restating past events that were already established previously. The narrator as a whole feels unneeded because the show does a good enough job of showing the characters growing and revealing the narrative organically. You could cut the narrator out entirely and nothing would be lost.
Other than the whole pseudo-incest love triangle going on, Lady Georgie is still your typical eighties shoujo melodrama, complete with family issues, theatrical acting, cheesy eighties sound effects, and over-the-top plot twists straight out of a soap opera. I do think the anime improved on the manga's problems quite a bit with what it did do, so I'm willing to give it kudos for the things it did right both on that front and on its own merits. I actually think the anime's best episodes are near the finale, where certain characters have to make hard decisions and face genuinely compelling moral dilemmas for the sake of others' happiness, tackling them with a surprising amount of maturity and realism. But overall, Lady Georgie is very much a product of its time, and a lot of what it does absolutely would not fly in the modern era. But if you like this series, I'm not going to judge you for it. I should be happy that Discotek Media put Lady Georgie out on blu-ray in the US, because if enough people buy the series, it'll give them incentive to license more old school shoujo series like Lady Lady, the 70s Haikara-san ga Tooru series, and Hello Sandybelle. We already got stuff like Rose of Versailles, Aim For The Ace, Dear Brother, and a few others like them, so who knows what the future might hold?
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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