Overview:
After reviewing the original Transformers Movie from 1986, I decided to look at the next movie animated and directed by the same man that gave Transformers its legendary animation. Transformers was the first movie animated by the now rather infamous Satoshi Urushihara. Never again would he work on ANYTHING kid friendly, and devoted the rest of his career to drawing complete smut. That descent into total perversion began with his directorial debut in 1987: Legend of Lemnear. Urushihara had just left high school and worked on the Transformers movie instead of going to college. Fortunately for him, it was a huge success and his artwork
...
won enough praise to land him the job of animating and co-directing this low budget OVA the next year. It was here that he found his life's passion: drawing tits.
Story and characters: 2/10
SPOILERS! Yeah right! As if you actually care!
The story is very minimalist, and the OVA's total run time even uncut is only 40 minutes! What little story Lemnear does have, was completely ripped off from other popular 80s movies! The protagonist is a female barbarian warrior who is attempting to use a magic sword to get revenge on a wizard for destroying her village and slaying her parents. Basically, the plot is copy/pasted from Conan the Barbarian from 1982. In addition, Lemnear flies around on a Pterodactyl like creature taken straight out of the movie Heavy Metal from 1981. In fact, Lemnear's character appearance was also stolen from the main character of Heavy Metal! Lemnear begins by having our title heroine walk into a saloon and order a drink, which soon leads to an absurdly cliche bar fight against some bounty hunter thugs that come in after her and start trouble. Unfortunately, this is Lemnear we're watching, so there isn't any cool dialogue like: Thug 1 "I didn't hear what the bet was" Lemnear (spits) "Your Life!" (shoots bad guys). That's what the bar fight would sound like if you were actually watching a GOOD movie! Instead, Lemnear just throws some kicks, threatens the bad guys with her sword, and they all leave. After talking to an old man, Lemnear leaves the saloon and 2 minutes later is knocked out by the evil wizard she was searching for and taken to the sex dungeon of some fat guy with hypnosis powers. I guess because the bad guy in Conan also had hypnosis powers. Lemnear gets hypnotized, stripped, and felt up by the fat guy, but then the evil wizard shows up and helps Lemnear! He frees her from her hypnosis, which allows her to stab the fat guy in his large belly and kill him. The wizard did this so he could lure Lemnear to his flying fortress and kill her himself. Even though he could have just killed her right there when she was under hypnosis and totally helpless. Lemnear uses her pterodactyl to fulfill its reason for being in this movie and fly to the floating skull fortress. There Lemnear discovers that the wizard is only a part of the main villain's body, which he detaches and uses to do his bidding at a distance. The main bad guy is called the "Gold Champion" and after literally 15 seconds of back story about how he hates humanity because he was thrown into a forest as a kid, he transforms into a dragon and impales Lemnear! Due to the power of complete bullshit, Lemnear regenerates her wounds and uses the pterodactyl to fly above the clouds and gather sunlight into her sword. This allows her to shoot a beam of sunlight at the Gold champion's forehead jewel...which kills him instantly. The End! Seriously, it just kind of ends right there!
Animation: 6/10
Although it doesn't look all that impressive today, you must take into account the extremely limited budget of this OVA, along with the fact that this was 1987. For an anime made in 1987 with an absolutely shoe string budget, this actually looks pretty good. There are plenty of anime from the 1990s with much larger budgets that look worse than Lemnear.
Music and audio: 2/10
Unlike some other terrible 80s OVAs like MD Geist, Lemnear does NOT even have the benefit of a rockin soundtrack. Instead we get rather bland and repetitive music that really doesn't add anything. The best song in Lemnear is actually a ripoff of the opening rift from the Transformer's theme "The Touch", but it never quite gets to the singing part and just cockteases you instead. The English dub is HORRIBLE as you would expect from Central Park Media, but the Japanese is available for free on Youtube if you are curious what the original sounds like. Normally, I would recommend watching the hilariously bad English dub, but for some reason the audio quality suffered horrendously for the English dub version and sounds REALLY fuzzy like it was recorded on VHS. Probably because they DID use VHS to transfer the audio. Some viewer's might find this SO annoying that the Japanese version would be better then having to listen to anything "shot on shitteo"!
Overall: 3/10
Legend of Lemnear is 40 minutes of pure 1980s cheese, but with almost all the fun sucked out. Nothing is creative or well written. The action scenes are short and poorly executed. The ONLY thing this anime has going for it is tits...lots and lots of tits. This may be the first anime I've reviewed that actually got spared a 1/10 rating simply for having lots of appealing mammary glands. I will also begrudgingly admit the animation was decent given its budget and time period. Unfortunately, Lemnear isn't even one of those old anime that is so bad it's funny like Mad Bull 34 or MD Geist. Lemnear is either really boring, or showing tits. Those are the only 2 modes it has. I would laugh at the English dub, but the fucking VHS audio recording for the English version just makes me cringe instead! I wouldn't really recommend watching Lemnear, unless you have a group of friends that simply love to watch REALLY bad movies!
Alternative Titles
Japanese: Legend of Lemnear 極黒の翼 バルキサス
More titlesInformation
Type:
OVA
Episodes:
1
Status:
Finished Airing
Aired:
Jul 25, 1989
Producers:
81 Produce
Licensors:
Central Park Media
Studios:
AIC
Source:
Original
Duration:
42 min.
Rating:
R+ - Mild Nudity
Statistics
Ranked:
#110432
2
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Popularity:
#6777
Members:
8,775
Favorites:
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Your Feelings Categories May 13, 2015
Overview:
After reviewing the original Transformers Movie from 1986, I decided to look at the next movie animated and directed by the same man that gave Transformers its legendary animation. Transformers was the first movie animated by the now rather infamous Satoshi Urushihara. Never again would he work on ANYTHING kid friendly, and devoted the rest of his career to drawing complete smut. That descent into total perversion began with his directorial debut in 1987: Legend of Lemnear. Urushihara had just left high school and worked on the Transformers movie instead of going to college. Fortunately for him, it was a huge success and his artwork ... Jul 27, 2018
This one's pretty dense for an 80s/90s OVA, a lot happens in it's short run-time. Completely worth your time if you're into high action fantasy with fan service, you won't be disappointed, this is one of the better ones and I've seen loads of those from the era in all levels of obscurity. The action is good, the fan service is excellent, the fantasy elements are compelling, and to top it off this has great animation.
Something that stood out to me other than the sheer amount of breasts in this OVA was the boss fight. I'd put the boss right near the top of the ... Oct 12, 2012
For most of us in the western world the Legend of Lemnear first appeared as yet another 1990s pulp produced OVA however it was actually from the mid-1980s with the delay simply being the product of waiting for a decent localisation to reach our shores in the days before fan-subbing and the internet made almost all releases available in a matter of days after they were released in their native language. The Legend of Lemnear certainly holds its own appeal despite the era it comes from being associated with large numbers of dubious quality OVAs arriving due to it having a rather dark tone and
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Aug 19, 2021
Legend of Lemnear is a show that you are forgiven for having no idea it ever existed. I myself only found out about it because I by happenstance dropped the Lemnear character in a discord karuta game. However something about her design piqued my interests and I sought out the 40 minute OVA (subbed of course because the dubbed is absolutely atrocious). After having seen the OVA, I can say with good confidence it's a hidden gem.
Story: 6/10 The basic premise is that an evil race of bad people™ sought to genocide a tribe of warriors and did just that, killing all but 2. These two ... Feb 1, 2019
This is a Satoshi Urushihara joint, which means you only have to know one thing about this: Le boobies.
I mean, they do try to wrap a story around the whole fan-service-y bits, but in the end its all just window dressing. In this case, Lemnear is a scantily-clad sword-wielding silver-haired beauty who is out for revenge, and ends up being at the heart of a prophecy. However, that's all just an excuse to get to what Urushihara does best: Drawing nubile young girls in various states of undress. No, it's not a porno ... Aug 31, 2020
Sword and sorcery fantasy OVA with a healthy dose of nudity and fan-service. Although not the comedy style fan-service that most associate the term with these days, this one's pretty serious. I actually liked it pretty well, even though it doesn't do much to stand out from the pack. Something about these older fantasy anime OVAs/series that I tend to really like. At least there's a heap of action--the entire last third of the film is a big ol' fight--but the animation is cheap and the visuals bland. Even the Japanese acting is bad. But I still loved it.
A low-minded, nudity-strewn, fantasy action fest. ... Jan 27, 2024
One’s liminal ears at the precipice of lemony tears, soured by the duress and distress of all that you hear could only match a crumb of the heartache from the mythopoetic soul that resides in Lemnear. Should sword and sorcery offer a companion piece from a land in the East, this would be most welcome a feast in the midst of past contemporaries deceased. And that it does in its dealings with life and death, truly its effervescence springs forward past its grave leaving none bereft.
In the bosom of Indo-European tradition, our heroine embarks a journey through perdition to rescue her sacred kin, and ... Jun 14, 2022
Hey there! Are you a bored dweeb that scrolls through retro anime OVAs that rank as well as b-movies as I do? Then chances are you've run across this title.
At first glance, it seems like your run-of-the-mill fantasy, so I thought I was about to watch some mediocre fantasy that you could mistake for any other. Though I suppose I was foolish in that with me being someone who likes Satoshi Urushihara's artstyle, but not his way of inserting fanservice so much. Like I'm fine with fanservice, his insertion of it so far just sucks. Though, big warning, don't go in blind like I did if ... Mar 6, 2022
“Legend of Lemnear: Kyokuguro no Tsubasa Valkisas” is a one-episode high fantasy OVA that has a typical beginning, an unnecessarily and egregiously explicit middle, a boring final fight, and a predictable ending.
The OVA starts out ordinarily enough — we have a flashback to where the bad guy kidnaps a guy called the “bronze hero,” who is the brother of the “silver hero,” who is the only one powerful enough to defeat the bad guy, the “gold hero.” Years (?) later, the “silver hero,” the titular Lemnear, is traveling from town to town with her trusty flying dragon-horse mount, in search of the bad guy. She ... |