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From Russia With Love deserves special recognition for being quite possibly the most bizarre and ridiculous Lupin III TV special ever animated.

It's difficult to explain in just a few words how much weird stuff happens in this movie that feels like it belongs in some offbeat comedy anime like Excel Saga or Pani Poni Dash instead of the Lupin adventure they're actually showing up in. Lupin yanks off a woman's top in the opening scene for no reason. Mobsters play with dolls and paint their toenails for no reason. Fujiko tells a bunch of big rig truck drivers that the loves smelly unwashed men for ... no reason. The Rasputin character sticks his fingers into other characters' mouths, noses, and ear-holes constantly throughout the movie for no reason. All of this in a middle of a story about tracking down the lost gold of the Romanovs? The awkward strangeness of the comedy is so far out there and over the top, even for Lupin, that it takes something away from the action and adventure aspects of the show and really comes up short at the climax compared to almost every other Lupin TV special.

The art and animation are on the low end of average for a Lupin special. FRWL was made in 1992 when ink & paint animation was still in fashion, so it has that much going for it at least. Some of the special effects sequences and character faces in certain scenes were not as well animated as other Lupin anime from about the same time period, however. The director also seems to have a thing for panning over an image in the middle of an action sequence three or four times to emphasize an explosion or other special effect, which this day and age just looks cheap.

The sound in the movie is positively average. Same voice cast in all the major roles since the 70's, same old theme music, appropriate but forgettable closing credit music. If there was an upside to the movie's bizarrely inappropriate antagonists, at least their voice actors gave respectable performances for the characters, however little time they may have spent on screen.

The other disappointing aspect of this special is the fact that it has such a huge cast of credited characters. The whole regular cast is there, of course: Lupin, Jigen, Goemon, Fujiko and Zenigata. Fujiko also has an additional partner in this movie by the name of Judy who assists the gang with the heist. There is also a pair of mercenaries trying to steal Lupin's book, the Rasputin character, two Italian mob bosses, an effeminate black market banker, a trigger-happy Texas sheriff, 20 truck drivers, and caricatures of George HW Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev. Most of the secondary characters are completely flat and uninteresting, but there are so many of them and they get so many speaking lines that the main cast ends up playing an unusually small role in the story. Zenigata and Goemon particularly don't do very much in the movie and don't have very many speaking lines.

Overall, From Russia With Love was okay to see one time, if for no other reason than to find out how the Lupin formula can be handled badly and not reach its full potential. There are so many other fantastic Lupin specials out there though, this one probably wouldn't be my first pick to watch with friends, and a single viewing is probably more than enough for anyone.

Having just seen Bobby's In Deep for the first time, and having read the reviews that have been posted for the film to date, I feel compelled to post a review of my own in praise of the film for several strong positive qualities which others seem to have missed.

To my understanding, Bobby's In Deep is a 45 minute short film from 1985 adapting a 1980 novel by the same name. The main character Bobby (real name Akihiko Nomura) is a 17/18 year old motorcycle enthusiast who has toured around Japan taking photos and submitting them to amateur motorcycle magazines. The movie opens with Bobby ... receiving a fan letter from a girl who has seen some of his photos and has been moved by the power of the imagery. The girl's voice narrates the letter, and Bobby narrates his reply as he sends her his answer back to her, setting up a romantic back and forth exchange of love letters which plays out as events in Bobby's young life start to rapidly unfold, starting with his decision to drop out of high school two weeks before summer vacation. The school notifies his parents of his absence, he has a confrontation with his father, and he winds up thrown out of the house to fend for himself and live with the consequences of his decision with nothing but his motorcycle and the clothes on his back.

I feel compelled to note that there isn't any indication in the movie that Bobby is a juvenile delinquent. He doesn't hang out with a bad crowd, or do drugs, or even talk back to his parents when they yell at him. He just seems to be a free spirit that doesn't value the kind of lifestyle that higher education and the traditional Japanese value system have to offer him, so he accepts his parents' disapproval and goes out into the world to find his own path to adulthood.

Bobby's In Deep has a rather thin story for an anime film. It is barely 45 minutes in length, after all. To deal with this, the film dispenses with the backstory and focuses on present events. We don't know how Bobby picked up the Western nickname, where he got the motorcycle, why he's such a bad student, or his other potential aspects as a character. What we do know is that it is the early 1980's, the peak of Japan's post-war miracle economy, and Bobby is a very nontraditional young person traveling the country on his motorcycle, coming of age, and maybe even falling in love in the unique environment of that time and place, and everything the movie does with that in 45 minutes is rather impressive.

What Bobby's In Deep lacks in story, it more than makes up for in creative direction and visuals. The film is no Angel's Egg (released the same year, interestingly) but deserves some recognition as experimental filmmaking for its skillful inclusion of still photography, brush-like watercolors, and imaginatively rendered representation of light and shadow into every exquisitely hand-drawn frame of the animation. It is a brief experience, but remarkable if you are looking for it.

In 1985 Bobby's In Deep may have been an unexceptional short film with some shiny animation, meant to promote a book and the careers of some aspiring J-drama personalities. Thirty years later, it is a time capsule of 1985 Japan with the power to transport you back and give you an idea what it felt like to be young, rebellious and in love in the sunset years of Showa era Japan, even if you are too young to have ever experienced anything of the kind yourself. For devoted Japanophiles it is a real gem. If you let the film's unique perspective slip by you, worrying too much about why Bobby's grades are poor, then you have really missed out on something special.

It took me almost ten years to get around to seeing Avenger. I was a really big fan of Noir, which was Bee Train's first independent series, back when it first came out, and the promos I started seeing for Avenger not long after made it look pretty stylish and unique, what with the Martian setting, hand-to-hand combat, and killer child androids.

I kept putting the series off though, because there always seemed to be something better to watch first, a feeling I'm pretty sure any long-time anime fan has experienced. In hindsight, my decision to put it off so long might have been my subconscious ... mind warning me not to judge the DVD by its cover, in a manner of speaking.

Avenger just does so many things wrong, it's hard to decide where to begin. The series felt like a chore to get through, even at 13 episodes, and it took me fully four days to complete because after an hour or two boredom just kept creeping in on me, making me want to watch something else.

As other reviews have already covered, the story basically involves the colonization of Mars, and competition for food and natural resources through martial arts competitions pitting one city's best fighter against another. The main protagonist Layla Ashley is one of the gladiators participating in the competition. In her care is a strangely well-crafted android girl called Nei, whom it is unclear whether Layla has just met for the first time in episode 1, or whether they have been together for some time. Rounding out the trio of main characters is a robot mechanic named Speedy, who does the vast majority of the talking in the group throughout the entirety of the series.

One of the things that makes Avenger so disappointing is the fact that Layla and Nei, the two most important characters, have incredibly few speaking lines and are some of the least emotionally expressive characters in any work of fiction I've ever been exposed to. Layla's motivations for participating in the competitions is hinted at frequently, but never clearly laid out for the viewers right up to the end of the series, and it's really hard to feel concerned about her success or failure when any meaning to the fights other than simple survival is unclear. Speedy does his best to make up for the unhelpful silence of the other two, but since he is only a supporting character, idle chatter about the importance of trust and cooperation are the best he can provide, when what we're really interested in are Layla and Nei's past and future.

As far as the story goes, there are at least three major conflicts in play that the series continuously switches back and forth between: The first is Layla's participation in the gladiator tournaments and her quest for revenge. The second is Nei's past and the Martian rulers' constant attempts to take her away from Layla. The third is the impending destruction of the Martian world due to some unexplained natural disaster caused by the encroaching red moon. Each episode fills its time by alternating between events related to each conflict, punctuated by the occasional security android ambush, or gladiator fight, to keep the audience's attention. The conclusion of the show is infuriatingly anti-climactic, and doesn't give definite closure to any of the three conflicts I've just described, leaving the protagonists and their planet in an unspecifically heightened state of emergency at the conclusion of the series compared to the first episode.

The fights themselves, which at times feel like the payload the show was really designed to deliver, aren't all that exciting either. There's a lot of leaping around in Mars' diminished gravity, and a lot of generic kickboxing without much uniqueness from one opponent to the next. It doesn't help that Layla's own fighting style, which has just a little specialist flavor, is very judo and/or gymnastic oriented, dodging a lot more punches than she throws. The animation of them isn't bad, but they aren't interesting enough to watch twice.

The art and animation of the series are crisp and clean as any of Bee Train's shows, and the music isn't terrible, although I think it would have been nice to have at least one more performer on the soundtrack instead of complete wall-to-wall Ali Project.

Overall, as I already mentioned, Avenger was a slog through a deep muddy swamp, with very little of the entertainment value that the basic concept seemed to promise, which proved pretty difficult to see through all the way to the end for the reasons I've just described. If you're on the fence about this one, you'll probably be happier turning Avenger down and choosing something else in the same genre(s).

Anyone who has ever so much as scanned my anime list here on MAL knows that I have a peculiar fondness for the OVA format of anime, particularly of that era in the late 80's and early 90's when the format was at its height. In a decade of being an anime fan, I've completed well over 200 series of this type, and to this day I still kind of prefer it just because of the superior quality you tend to have when animators can concentrate their time and energy on a small episode count.

That being said, Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ohki 3 easily wins my nomination ... for Most Disappointing OVA Ever.

Maybe my hopes were too high. I did go into the series with certain expectations. It's hard not to have expectations when the first episode of the series is littered with unedited footage borrowed from its parent series. (See my MAL blog for a sample screen capture. Both images are mere minutes apart within a single episode!)

Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ohki 1 was classic, must-watch anime, and TMRO3 ep. 1 reminds us why: The animation in the original series was juicy and detailed, the story had a natural flow from one event to the next, the characters defined one another through their interactions, and there was plenty of action and motion that held onto our attention on the screen from the beginning to the end.

It wasn't Gone With the Wind, but it was decent entertainment. It knew what we wanted and it did the best damn job it could of staying focused and delivering the goods.

Ryo-Ohki 2 was not as focused. It was more episodic like the Tenchi Muyo! TV series, with lighthearted episodes centered around babysitting and Ryo-Ohki having a crush on Tenchi too. But it was still pretty good. Some episodes were pretty funny, and there were still fight scenes and energetic activity on-screen most of the time. Well… except for that last episode. Remember that episode at the end, where Ayeka and Sasami's parents came to Earth, and there were a bunch of boring introductions and talking that never really lead to anything consequential? Yeah... That episode...

Unbelievably, the events of TMRO3 march proudly forward in the footsteps of that boring final episode of series two. There are a lot of introductions. There is a lot of eating and tea drinking. We meet Tenchi's really dumb school friends, his long-lost sister, his dad's new (Earthling) fiancé, Tenchi's own Juraian fiancé, Grandpa's Juraian wife, Ayeka & Sasami's grandmother, Mihoshi's brother, Mihoshi's brother's fiancé. (I wish I was joking.)

From episodes 2-5, while all of these characters are being introduced, nothing really happens. A lot of cooking. A lot of eating. A lot of small talk and dry chatter about relatives. No sealed demons being unleashed from ancient shrines, no crazy invaders from space to chase them, nothing reminiscent of the best parts of the original series. There are a couple of token space battles in TMRO3, but they're small in scale and only last a few minutes before changing direction to something less interesting.

And what's worse, with nothing interesting going on and no real source of conflict to make them butt heads, the established cast become lifeless paper dolls forced into predictable, monotonous roles while the writers focus on the dry backstories of all the new characters. Ayeka and Ryoko only have a few mild, token arguments. Gone are the days of "You go that way, I'll go this way." "..." "...That way was a dead end you idiot!" Sasami does nothing but cook, play with Ryo-Ohki, and talk about loving Tenchi. Washu walks around and makes small talk with the Juraian folk. Mihoshi shows her tits a lot and is still stupid, but not in the funny way she used to be. It's literally like their souls have been sucked out and they don't care about living anymore. And actually, that's a lot like how I felt when I realized I'd just watched two hours of people eating and drinking and chatting up their in-laws.

Watching this series was a truly horrifying experience, and if I had known this series was this boring and ridiculous going in, I never would have bothered. The final episode is more mind-boggling and Evangelion-wannabe than exciting. (Giant white human monster hurr!) There's not a single episode I can really honestly point to and say "This was okay" or "This made it worth it". Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ohki 3 is a long, grinding parade of military grade boring, and it's only because the series invoked my admiration for the original that I feel bad about burying this sequel at the bottom of the ratings barrel. If you're looking for something to reignite your love of things Tenchi-related, this fan would recommend looking up some old manga scanalations or something instead of wasting your time on this snorefest.

Out of all the anime I've seen over the years that fall in and around the mecha genre, Gasaraki definitely has one thing going for it: Style.

The show is a fusion of unlikely elements: Gritty mechanized warfare that's so real it's almost boring with its endless chatter about maintenance and data collection. Elaborately costumed and choreographed traditional performing arts. Classical Japanese history. War in the Middle East. Trans-Pacific diplomacy.

Somehow Sunrise manages to fit all these individual pieces together into a nice-looking whole with a muted but satisfying color palette, consistent but not-too-formulaic episode pacing, and well selected musical choices that compliment the military and spiritual ... aspects of the show equally well, creating this harmonious whole that mecha fanatics can't help but lose themselves in if they're not trying to follow the story too closely.

Unfortunately, if a person does try to follow along with the nebulous twists and turns of Gasaraki's storyline, major flaws become apparent that seriously detract from the brownie points the series collects on style: While Gasaraki does manage to stitch all the genres and tropes I mentioned above into one cloth that's largely believable, fitting that many elements into 25 episodes forces the plot to weave all over the road as far as the characters' motivations are concerned, and leave you a little dazed at the end wondering what the purpose of all the warfare was supposed to be from the beginning.

SPOILERS THIS PARAGRAPH: Yushiro started out the series as some kind of spiritual medium who could perform the dance of Gasaraki for Gowa. Then he also turned out to be the lead test pilot for Gowa's state-of-the-art mobile weapons program. Then these other mobile weapons appear in Belgistan (making Gowa no longer state-of-the-art?), and Yushiro goes there and meets Miharu, which in a roundabout way reveals that he is both a 1000-year-old reincarnated soul AND not the real Yushiro Gowa. Then, while Yushiro and Miharu are AWOL from their respective militias to "find themselves" in Kyoto, and hear the story of the kai and kugai from a man who's just conveniently waiting there for them, the JSSDF randomly decides that the Japanese population needs to be purged of modern materialistic greed (and taking the United States down with it?) provoking Miharu's former comrades to attack Gowa/JSSDF headquarters so Yushiro can return from Kyoto right in the nick of time and save the day?

It reminds of a Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle in a way, with reincarnated clones coming back from the dead to have incest babies that will eventually challenge their own incest parents to a duel to the death in another dimension in the future. (Just teasing Tsubasa fans.) It's hard to care anymore who lives or dies when the story has become so complicated that you lose sight of why winning the war is important?

MORE SPOILERS THIS PARAGRAPH: The height of the illogical insanity for me, was in the last episode when the American President calls Mr. Nishida on the phone at Gowa headquarters to concede defeat, telling Mr. Nishida that he regretted being the first American President in history to surrender, and that he wished he could have met Mr. Nishida. That didn't make any sense at all, because Mr. Nishida was not the Prime Minister or any sort of official Japanese government official at all? He's just some crazy old military advisor obsessed with Japanese swords who knew the Gasaraki legend and managed to convince Kazukiyo Gowa and the JSSDF guy that the kugai's revival was some kind of divine message. How did the US President even have Mr. Nishida's direct phone number? Is it possible that even Gasaraki's own writers had lost track of what was going on by the last episode?

After finishing the first four episodes of Gasaraki, I had really high hopes for where the end of the series was going to go. I really thought it was going to turn out like Evangelion, or Lain, or xxxHolic, and have some kind of deep-but-vague conclusion that I could kick back and think about for a while. I kept suspending judgment as I watched one episode after the next, holding out hope, waiting for the end when something unexpected would happen that would tie everything together and make it all make sense... But that validating moment never came, and there was just massive disappointment waiting for me as the power of the Gasaraki faded away leaving Yushiro and Miharu smilingly gazing into the sunrise with all their friends, like the end of some fluffy Pixar movie, so easily seeming to forget everything that happened to them in the last 24 episodes.

Fushigi Yuugi Eikoden seems to catch a lot of flak because of its origins as fanfiction.

I don't know much about that really, and to be honest I don't care. More power to the fan who managed to get her story noticed, published and animated.

What I do know is that most people who review Eikoden seem to focus their criticisms on what a pathetic character Mayo Sakaki is. In this viewer's estimation, that's not actually a fair judgment to make. And here's why: They don't give her enough screen time to get fleshed out and actually give us a chance to decide if she has any ... potential or not.

Looking at things from a casting perspective, Eikoden's real problems stem from the fact that there aren't really any characters available to tell any kind of decent story with. From the first episode, four of the seven Suzaku warriors are still dead following the events of the TV series. Miaka falls into a coma early on, and the new character Mayo is even less involved in unfolding events than Yui was in the early parts of the television series.

What this leaves us with in terms of story is exactly what we've seen in the previous FY OVA's: Tamahome, Chichiri and Tasuki wandering the countryside in search of their reincarnated fellow warriors, finding them one by one and listening to the stories of their new reincarnated lives, while weak random monsters that vaguely resemble the four beast gods attack them and Mayo observes their progress through a crystal ball and curses the fact they they aren't dead.

The whole OVA is just structured wrong. For a four episode series there is way too much backstory and recycled footage from the TV series, and not enough participation in current events from the new characters Eikoden introduces. There are plot holes everywhere, the advancement of the story feels forced, and the fight-monsters-and-collect-things motif that runs under everything in Eikoden seems a far cry from what the Fushigi Yuugi TV series was all about.

If you only watch the Fushigi Yuugi TV series, you're probably not missing anything. The OVA episodes only seem to get worse and worse the more of them you watch.

The recent review of this series by hauptg lacks all specifics but is not a bad overall judgment of El Hazard series 3. The music and art in The Alternative World are a disappointment across the board compared to The Magnificent World.

The new opening theme is a completely forgettable Jpop ballad completely out of line with the exotic Mideastern feel of El Hazard as a whole, and the closing credits are downright scary, with hideously painted images of women's faces in flowers and linked hands circled by glowing halos, having nothing to do with the plot or story of the anime and looking like spooky ... illustrations out of some evangelical Sunday School picture book.

The Alternative World introduces several new major characters, but with such a huge cast and so few episodes to work with, the only one that comes off seeming like they might be a real person is Qawoor. Qawoor seems to have some mysterious past connection to Makoto, but like so many other things in this series, that revelation ends up being brushed aside and forgotten.

As if all that isn't enough bad news, most of the events in The Alternative World do not actually take place in El Hazard, but in a new world whose history, geography, and politics are never explained in any detail. The climax of the series is one of those infamous "dream endings", and the final episode is the most boring onsen episode I've ever seen. (Oh god, all the nipple-less breasts! Make it stop!)

In short, El Hazard: The Alternative World is a disappointment from the word go. Only recommended for completionists. At least it's short.