I agree that this sounds somewhat disturbing. After all, it’s clear this movie will have some sort of message about the nature of what it is to be human and to have our deepest dreams and desires be fulfilled and the unexpected prices we have to pay for that. I don’t know about you, but I just signed on to see a bunch of cyborgs bump sprockets!

The movie drops us into this post-apocalyptic world without any explanation, but really, what explanation is going to serve to explain why computer generated sexbots are the only things left on Earth?

Sure, there are some other machines as well such as Joe Admin, the thing in charge, as well as another machine that acts as some sort of guard, though I was never too sure what it would be guarding anything from or why it would be bothering to guard these robot hoochies.

One of the dolls is named Malice and she is among a handful of these dolls that have continued to function after the end of the world. Her days are spent walking the streets trying to hump fire hydrants and mailboxes or whatever else is still out there.

Malice is in need of some repairs so she heads up to the part of the building or city or whatever she was inhabiting to get to the Repairer. Everything goes according to plan with the small exception that she ends up in a strange room and gets assaulted by a strange creature with lots of slimy appendages. Next thing we know, Malice Doll has transformed into Malice, the human woman!

Malice is as surprised as anyone to find that she has actual flesh and bone and this immediately marks her as an outcast among her former friends, but Malice hasn’t just been given human form by this sexual assault. She also got a really cool super power in the bargain – her kiss can now turn other machines into humans as well!

Some of her pals are a tad reticent about this, but eventually most everyone gets in on the act, though a lot of them don’t turn out as well as Malice did.

You see, whereas Malice ended up looking like a regular broad (well, regular in the sense that she looks like what a sexually repressed Japanese guy thinks a regular broad ought to look like), some of her friends look really monstrous, having extra body parts and strange faces and all sorts of icky deformities!

Malice begins to think all this human transformation stuff isn’t maybe all that it’s cracked up to be. Malice ends up ditching her human form for a spirit form.

Say what you want about Malice, but she’s no dummy. She’s astute enough to realize at once that being a human being quite simply sucks and she somehow has the ability to transform again, this time to a little glowing white pixie who flies around and gives Joe Admin a final dramatic kiss.

See, this movie is just like Pinocchio if that little blockhead would have ended up turning into Tinkerbell!

The best thing you can say about this movie (actually three episodes of a video feature cobbled together) is that the computer generated animation is interesting to look at.

Even though the movie itself clocks in at a barely-feature-length 73 minutes or so, that’s still way too long to just be staring at a bunch of pretty pictures.

The story only made the vaguest sense in that I guess I could at least make out the themes they were attempting to push across (you know, all that wishing to be human and what is reality crap), but none of the details made any sense whatsoever.

What was this stupid world we were dumped into? What was that stupid creature that raped Malice. Why was she transformed? And why was she transformed again? Into a fairy? Aside from all that though, why should I even care about a robot without any feelings anyway?

I don’t even think she longed to be human at the beginning like a lot of these types of characters do. How is the audience supposed to be drawn into any of the events that transpired? Not coherent enough for regular audiences and not dirty enough for cartoon pervs. A total turnoff.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Once they join forces, the greatest super team of all team is back in action! Yes true believer, your suspicions are well-founded! The dream is alive and well! Finally after twenty-five years, the Galaxy Legion has reunited to combat evil, to cast light upon the dark, and to find out how 006′s career as a matador is working out!

When I heard that the Galaxy Legion had come out of retirement, I was crazed by giddy anticipation! Then, like some sort of super galaxy, it hit me! I had never heard of the Galaxy Legion and had no idea who the hell they were!

Once this dopey Galaxy Legion is reformed, everyone stands around talking until some little alien kid shows up and crybabies about how his daddy got his ass whupped by this intergalactic baddie named Zoa.

The Galaxy Legion decides that now that they have all the plot information they need, they can hop in the Galaxy Legionmobile and fly off for some long, drawn-out space hi-jinks.

The alien kid clues them in on some crazy contraption named a stargate that can act as a short cut across the vast distances of deep space. I was searching for my own stargate about this time, one that would transport me across the vast distances of this movie.

After they hit the stargate, the Galaxy Legionmobile starts having mechanical problems and all of us are rolling our eyes at Cyborg 005 since he was the guy that was supposed to get the Galaxy Legionmobile to the shop and have the hydrocrystals replaced every 75,000 parsecs.

Luckily, there’s a planet nearby that looks like it’s got breathable air (though I could have sworn I saw some of these cyborgs floating around in space without any helmets on, so what does it matter?) and some hydrocrystals.

Saving the universe gets put on hold, so that they can pit the Legionmobile and get some new crystals, but they run into a little drama on this planet. Everyone has fallen into barbarism because their precious little princess is being held captive inside a hydrocrystal (they’re for more than turbo charging your rig!) and they don’t have any jobs, so what is there to do but run around and menace outer space visitors?

You don’t think something as sissy as a Galaxy Legion is going to be passing up the opportunity to rescue a princess that’s imprisoned in a crystal do you?

She sends them a Princess Leia hologram message letting the Galaxy Legion know that if they happen to try and rescue her, they can find her in a necklace worn by a gigantic robot! Next thing you know, one of the cyborgs is dumping a bomb inside this thing’s mouth and we’re putting together the destroyed giant’s earrings to free the princess from her crystal prison. Uh, why was this giant robot wearing earrings? Was he trying out for the Galaxy Legion or something?

Since everyone helped save her, she immediately starts putting the moves on Joe which is probably Cyborg 009′s code name. For some reason Joe sports that hideously priss hairdo where one of his eyes is hidden by his hair. How am I supposed to be rooting for these guys when they insist on having women’s hairstyles?

She asks Joe to stay behind and help rebuild her world and that he should start with her bedroom! Uh, you’ve known this guy for like five minutes and this is your first real conversation with him and you’re already trying to get him to commit? Doesn’t she know that a member of the Galaxy Legion’s first love is to sail the starways in search of adventure? Well, first love after being a race car driver, ballerina, and rodeo clown, that is, but you know what I’m saying.

Girl Cyborg (I think she was 002), who also loves Joe, shows up around this time and is upset, but Joe turns the Princess down and then Zoa attacks and kills the princess. You can tell that Girl Cyborg is kind of like “awww, shoot. What a bad break. Guess we should get back to the ship and start forgetting her.” No one else really cares either and they go off in pursuit of Zoa.

Joe actually has a chance to bring her back to life at the end of the movie and doesn’t, proving once again that a cyborg’s logic circuits are infallible!

The whole affair was marked by jerky animation, ugly simple drawings, and an unimaginative use of light effects to show such things as going through the stargate and various space encounters. It’s just really off-putting in its cheapness.

Combined with the assembly line save-the-galaxy-from-some-evil-turd story and this is one Japanese cartoon that would confirm a non-anime fans’ suspicions that these things are just dumb kiddie crap starring big-eyed, big-haired freaks that spew one big gooey tear whenever they want to show us pathos. After viewing this, my bowels and stomach starting acting up and my head started to ache. Can you say “Galaxy Legionnaires’ Disease”?

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Usually, those sort of bovine antics would be enough to unhesitatingly recommend the title (even if there was never any of the expected giant cow pie scenes that such a creature promised), but while the story even has a midget killing the giant cow with a bazooka, things grind to a halt for the scene between the hunter and the guy he is hunting that he secretly respects.

You know the scene I’m talking about. It’s the one where both of our main characters meet face to face and engage in manly drivel about honor and promise one another that the next time they meet it will be on the battlefield and as enemies and that all this sissy stuff will be over because we’ll finally be to the last episode by then and something other than filler will actually have to happen.

In case you’re fuzzy on how we got to this point, Cosmo Warrior Zero Volume 1: Cold Steel Immortals was all about a guy named Warrius Zero who was the captain of a spaceship. His mission is to go out and hunt down the meanest star-cuss this side of Khan, one Captain Harlock!

Warrius Zero, is as we would expect, haunted by his past since his wife and kid were killed in the war with the machine men. He believes though that man and machine have to learn to co-exist peacefully and that’s why he has become their tool in the search for Harlock, who is causing trouble for his robot masters!

The first two episodes on this disc detail Zero and his crew investigating Harlock’s whereabouts on a planet where the town of Gun Frontier is located.

Gun Frontier is a town patterned after the wild west towns of old where there’s only two laws: don’t mess with anyone’s personal freedom and don’t mess with their drink.

Zero has information that there is a bounty hunter down on the planet named Sylvia who has been hunting Harlock for years. He sends down a bickering combination of crew members (humans and a machine man) to look around and see if Sylvia can put them on the right track.

I wasn’t sure what the point of this plan was other than to introduce a sexy bounty hunter and a really big cow to the story (and everyone knows that all good anime has at least one sexy bounty hunter and one really big cow) because if Sylvia had any info on Harlock and was trying to collect a bounty on him, why would she give someone else a lead?

Down in Gun Frontier, Sylvia runs into one of Harlock’s best friends, Tochiro. Tochiro is a midget who doesn’t look like much, but turns out to be a really deadly samurai. He also has a penchant for drinking milk and eating really big steaks.

Tochiro is eventually seduced by Sylvia and this leads to him almost getting strung up. The townspeople are mad at him for killing the big cow because the cow’s corpse landed on and destroyed all their whiskey and we all remember the two rules of Gun Frontier don’t we?

Harlock finally rolls in on his super cool space ship, the Death Shadow, to save his buddy.

Harlock is ready to wipe out the townspeople for trying to put the wood to Tochiro until he learns that Tochiro ruined their booze.

Well, why didn’t you say so? Harlock lives by the code of the space pirate and immediately does what he can to resupply their liquor.

Somehow this leads to Zero finally coming down to the surface to see what the devil his bumbling crew have gotten themselves into and thus we have the scene where Zero and Harlock drink for hours together at the local pub talking the politics of human-machine man conflict. There isn’t enough booze in three star systems to make that conversation tolerable.

They also meet up in the next episode when Harlock accidentally bombs a bunch of civilian machine men during one of his raids, prompting much hand wringing from Zero about how he thought Harlock was a space pirate with a heart of gold, but now he’s not so sure and prompting Harlock to re-read his maps.

If that wasn’t causing Zero enough problems, his first mate decides to go bonkers and starts following an intruder on the ship that no one can see but her.

This resorts in the expected engine room explosion you’re obligated to have in these space operas once every six or seven episodes and everyone except Zero thinks the first mate is the saboteur.

Zero abandons his ship and follows this chick to her home planet and we discover her secret origin and they end up rolling around in the snow!

This set of episodes has a rather jarring tone, shifting uncomfortably from the comedy of really big farm animals to the heavy drama of war crimes. The story line jumped around from character to character and new plots were being introduced as late the eighth episode in this thirteen episode series, relegating the ideological and actual battle between Harlock and Zero to secondary status.

The animation looks fine and is what you would expect from a Harlock project, but Zero is such a zero of a character in this set of episodes you just don’t care what happens to him. He’s a traitor to his race, he’s a crappy captain, and he abandons his own ship right after the big engine room explosion to rush after a sexy robot.

For the Harlock fans in the crowd, you do get more Harlock action in this set of episodes, but the choice of Zero as main character has to be classified so far as faulty. Since this is Volume 2 in a four volume set, your decision to pick it up probably will be influenced by whether you liked the first volume.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Being way too lazy to try and track down the Harlock movie, The Arcadia Of My Youth, I settled on Cosmo Warrior Zero since it was a brand new tale about some loser who is going to try and bring Harlock to justice.

The selling point of this series is that I can watch Harlock stand around, assuming pirate poses on the bridge of his fearsome ship, the Death Shadow.

I didn’t get this thing to watch some dingus named Warrius Zero, decked out in a loud yellow coat, whine endlessly about how the Machine Men killed his family, but now that the war is over they all have to work together.

So, just what has Harlock gone and done now to bring the heat back on his tail? Remember the war between the Machine Men and humans? Sure you do, it’s pretty much detailed in some form in virtually all space-oriented anime.

After the war was over and an uneasy peace reigns, there’s still many humans who don’t like these Machine Men and the pirates that roam around in space cause trouble by hunting these robot bastards down.

Harlock has been doing that and the higher ups in the government don’t appreciate it. Zero has a brief encounter with Harlock at the beginning of Episode 1 and gets smacked down like the space bitch he is.

Back at HQ, he gets assigned to go and bring Harlock in. If it seems a bit counterintuitive to have the guy that didn’t last five minutes against Harlock be put in charge of arresting him, then you’ll understand that there’s probably something dastardly afoot with this whole business.

Zero agrees to go after Harlock on the condition that he get his old ship back. Since we’ve just met Zero, this has little impact on us and doesn’t seem to matter much in the grand scheme of things. It’s not like he’s getting the Death Shadow or anything.

Still, maybe some back story on this guy beyond the “I lost my family in the war” bit would have been useful so that we actually cared what flying boat he hauled his crybaby butt onto.

He gets his old crew back, but has a new first mate who is a woman named Marina Oki. Oki encounters some sexism on the boat, but probably doesn’t do herself any favors by working the crew too hard.

Oki has a deep dark secret that may have something to do with the fact that during a shootout, following a food fight on the ship (Is this a starship or a frat?) she didn’t really bleed. Could’ve been that she just didn’t have time to bleed, but I’m guessing that she’s some kind of no-good stinking machine!

And what about Harlock? Bests me. After his cameo at the beginning, he never makes another appearance, which leads you to ask, “what exactly was Zero doing all this time, if he wasn’t getting shown up by Harlock?” Jeez, didn’t you notice the mention of the food fight?

Actually, it was related to a labor dispute between the lazy machines and the people on board who just happened to delegate all the really hard and crappy jobs to the robots.

After the cafeteria gets mopped up, Zero spends the rest of the time doing everything but going after Harlock including battling a space pirate named Shogun (who had a dastardly secret of his own!) and landing on a planet where one man was still fighting the war between man and machine all by himself, apparently missing the memo about the war ending and stuff.

I understand that Harlock’s name was no where to be found in the title, but that’s his really big picture on the front of the DVD and the back of the box babbled quite a bit about him, so his non-appearance in this was a big disappointment.

If you are a fan of Harlock or Matsumoto’s work, you’ll probably be obligated to pick it up, especially since this is just volume one. Cosmo Warrior Zero was a television series with 13 episodes and the first three DVDs contains four episodes each and the last one contains the wrap up so it may be understandable if the first volume is a bit slow in getting us to Harlock.

The problem though is that the first volume should be intriguing enough to make us want to keep getting future volumes. I can’t say that other than hardcore fans, anyone else would care enough about anything that went on here to even make it through the end of the disc.

The animation is sporadically impressive, but often times you’re just getting close ups of people doing nothing but yakking. Don’t they remember the old saying, “in space, no one wants to hear you yak”?

Also, through the first four episodes, you barely meet any of the crew and no one exhibits much of anything that could be called a personality.

The adventures in these early episodes are obviously a forgettable lot, and you have to think that all the on-board tension shown in episode two could have been dished out over the course of the series instead of taking up one fourth of this disc.

Another big problem is that the DVD presents each episode complete with opening and closing credits and previews of what’s going to happen in the next episode. Nothing like spoiling things for us moments before we actually watch it. It really interrupts the flow of things and you’ll be riding the fast forward button every twenty minutes or so just to get to the next episode.

It’s probably a bit unfair to write this one off yet, since it really is just the opening act of a larger story, so I’ll reserve judgment until I check out the other episodes in this series, but it is an inauspicious start for something that promised much more. I am looking forward to the giant cow that goes on a rampage at the beginning of Volume 2 though. (I guess those previews are worth something after all!)

© 2011 MonsterHunter

This is an animated version of the live action film of the same name. When I first heard that I was going to be watching a cartoon version of an already made regular movie, I have to admit there was some fair degree of cringing involved.

You should be rest assured though that this movie left its sandal-print on my doubting behind. Fast-paced, touching, an inventive use of both traditional and computer animation, and with copious amounts of pee, A Chinese Ghost Story, delivers the goods!

Ning is a young man in olden China who tells us that he used to work hard to impress this girl and now he works hard in order to forget her.

Since it seems that he never made enough money for her, we immediately know Ning is better off without this shallow cherry blossom, but admire how he maintains a goofily optimistic outlook nonetheless.

Ning also has a sidekick, a little green and white dog named Solid Gold and he sees Ning through all the trials and tribulations that are to follow. (I have always secretly believed that it is easier to keep your good humor if you are accompanied in your journeys by a faithful canine companion since dogs are usually doing something wacky like licking their balls.)

In an effort to forget his lost love, Ning has some kind of job collecting debts. This requires him to go the city, though he isn’t sure where that is. Along the way he encounters some ghostly activity.

Just when things seem to be dire for Ning, two professional exorcists named White Cloud and Ten Miles appear. They’re pretty cocky and they do manage to take care of the ghosts. but are shortly off because of the competition from fellow exorcist Redbeard.

Ning and Solid Gold survive their encounter with the spirits and the exorcists and resume their search for the city.

Ning wanders around and suddenly notices a big bright, shiny city that has mysteriously appeared behind him. He says, “wow, how did I almost miss that big bright, shiny city that has mysteriously appeared behind me?” Umm, because it was a ghost city?

Ning is pretty impressed with all the action in the city and with the fact that the guy he collects a debt from gives him a lot of gold. Since he’s a ghost, I guess this guy has lots of gold lying around, yet really doesn’t value it.

After collecting that debt, Ning and Solid Gold are simply famished and hit the ghost city equivalent of the Ponderosa. It doesn’t take them long to realize that it is a restaurant that serves ectoplasmic cuisine.

He and Solid Gold quickly go into disguise as dead people. This consists of them putting red stuff on their face and bugging their eyes out in order to look like recently deceased bloody people with bugged out eyes.

They order noodles, but are eventually found out. A female ghost called something like Siu San (the subtitles call her “Shine”) saves them.

Ning falls for her and while she is very nice to him, what she really wants to do is suck his soul out of him and feed it to her mistress to keep her young. She’s like most women in that respect.

Of course Ning loves her anyway. He’s like most men in that respect.

In fact, she continues to tell him that he should never trust a ghost and he continues to be all about being with her. He tells her that they can make it work even though she’s dead and intent on stealing his soul.

Redbeard appears and tries to destroy her, but Ning risks his life and is willing to perish in order to save her. Redbeard doesn’t understand why he would do that for a ghost, but he does give Ning some cool points for it and Redbeard sort of becomes an ally throughout the picture.

Solid Gold comes through around this time, interrupting a Redbeard rant by pissing on his leg!

Much of the rest of the movie is spent with Ning and Siu San as they cross the countryside. The problem with their relationship is that she is allergic to the sun and will burn up if exposed to it. This means Ning has to carry her all bunched up in a parasol.

Lest you get the wrong idea, this movie is pretty much nonstop action. You get battles with Redbeard and the other two exorcists, you get flying trains, a staircepede (don’t even ask), a battle with a mega ghost who looks like the Incredible Hulk with Fabio’s hair, and a tense situation at the point of reincarnation where our two lovers have to avoid a sky full of “void hammers” that stamp out memories of ghosts being reincarnated.

Plus, you never know when Solid Gold is going to get the urge to switch to his Solid Golden Shower secret identity!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

I’m also going to go out on a limb and hazard a guess that there might be a circumstance where having the fourteen year-old heroine of your movie dubbed by a male on the English language track who somehow manages to sound like a slowwitted toddler with a criminally cloying voice actually serves the plot and/or character development of the piece.

But is there really any excuse beyond thinking it would look “cool” for the maniac brain to somehow transform into a maniac caterpillar during the movie’s climax?  Wasn’t the chief asset of the bad guy that he was a floating brain?  And turning himself into a big worm was the only way he could come up with to defeat the good guys?

Artsmagic again gamely attempts to bring us some quality computer animation from Japan, but comes up short in this effort as it did in previous ones (Malice@Doll and A.LI.CE).

It’s pretty much the same old complaint with Blue Remains as with the other two: while a great deal of time and skill clearly went into creating the look and animating the projects, everything else got chucked out the window like so many evil floating brains turned into giant worms that ended up dead because of some life-giving ray from a bunch of bean seeds.

While not as patently ridiculous as the “post-apocalyptic Earth inhabited solely by robot hookers” idea of Malice@Doll or as conceptually clunky as the time-travel-in-Lapland plot that propelled A.LI.CE and its questionable punctuation along, Blue Remains takes an appealing idea and drowns it in a bunch of confusing and half-realized elements that had me wondering who all these people were and why were they doing whatever it was they were doing.

Things begin with your basic terraforming plot (I like the fact that we’ve gotten to a point where terraforming is right up there with boy-meets-girl as far as stories go – it feels like progress) where mom, dad, daughter, and soothingly voiced shipboard computer are all flying through space back to Earth on a mission to regenerate human life on Earth.  I think I speak for a good deal of us hunky astronauts out there when I say that if this dad was a real NASA man, he’d be lobbying to repopulate this here mudball the old fashioned way.

Sadly though, he never even gets the chance to reconsider his wimpy ways because before you know it there’s a big radiation storm!  Or something happens that forces them to put their kid in suspended animation on the ship under one of the oceans on Earth.  I never knew what was going on.  Part of it was the fact that even as I was listening to the English dub, I found it necessary to turn on the subtitles to understand what these fools were yattering on about!

If you’re going to hire someone to dub your movie, why can’t you get someone that speaks like a normal person?  Why do we have the bad accents, the poor enunciation, and terrible attempts at pretending to be an innocent child?  The voice acting was just horrible.  You may as well listen to the Japanese soundtrack and read the English subtitles.

Once Glyptofane Sex discovers the girl has woken from her suspended animation, he schemes to capture her before she can restore life on Earth.  I think good old G.S. attempted some feeble explanation for his antipathy toward more humans (probably some whiny crap about how all we do is wreck everything), but since I had no idea what this thing was, how he came to be, or what he was doing before the girl (Amamiku) showed up, it was kind of hard to understand what his real problem with everything was.

If he was so smart and just floated around in his little base, what does he care what happens with the rest of the planet?  But Glyptofane apparently doesn’t live by himself, because in a stroke of genius that screams “if one evil floating brain is good, then three more floating brains that aren’t evil are great” there’s some other brains hanging around, questioning G.S. and his schemes. Trust me, it’s much stupider than I make it sound.

Now even though the planet needs to be repopulated, it turns out that there’s still people hanging around in the ocean ready to help Amamiku out in her mission.  Demonstrating that the lessons of Seaquest DSV continue to go unappreciated, they even have a robot dolphin that saves Amamiku from Glyptofane’s clutches!

The expected chase scenes between Amamiku, her friends, and Glyptofane provide some entertainment as the animation is very good at portraying a sense of speed under the water, but beyond the quality of the animation in general, there isn’t much to hold the viewer’s interest here.

The sketchy plot and sketchier characters leave you scratching your head more often than not and the fact that the credits roll before we even hit the seventy minute mark is only further evidence of how wafer thin everything here is.

This was one of those movies that looked really good in the trailer and promised an epic kind of story about the future of Earth and its rebirth, but there’s no chance of succeeding when you saddle this thing with a villain that doesn’t make any sense and a lead character who would be terribly annoying if she actually played more than a marginal role in things.  You know you’re in trouble when the animation of your characters has more depth than they themselves do.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

I say all this to show that I don’t have a problem if a movie wants to look like a high-grade cutscene from a video game, which is what A.LI.CE will remind you of. I do have a problem though when a movie’s story and characters have all the depth of a video game cutscene however. And unfortunately, A.LI.CE will remind you of that as well.

While the movie impresses visually right from the start with its chase scene through a wintry Lapland, you keep waiting for the story to be more than it appears to be and for the characters to exhibit some personality beyond the generic parts they inhabit (the heroine, the crabby guy who helps the heroine, the robot waitress who helps the crabby guy and the heroine).

Sadly though, nothing happens in the movie that lifts it up out of that typical “future world ruled by evil computer” slop that anime serves up on a regular basis. In fact, the film takes this standard story and dumbs it down to an even smaller scale than we’re used to seeing in such things. Our three characters confront the bad guy at the end of things while another poorly realized bad guy shows up to try to be an even bigger bad guy and some stuff blows up and that’s about it.

The sudden appearance of Nicoli, the leader of the rebel group, the Liberators, at the end of things where he announces his plans for world domination (yawn – get in line, we’re still trying to deal with the evil Nero who currently dominates the world) is only the culmination of a half-thought out story line that can’t be bothered to flesh out its own concepts.

At its most basic, you sort of have a Terminator story in reverse. You may recall that in that movie, an robot was sent from the future to the past to kill off the mother of the guy who would grow up and lead the fight against the evil robots that run that future world. Makes sense to me. In this movie, the Liberators have snatched Alice from the past to fight her son in the future who grows up to be the man/computer thing that rules the world.

You might ask yourself why they just didn’t pull a Terminator on her and just send someone back into the past to kill her, but a character explains that messing with the past like that could have unforeseen consequences.

Two things about that. One, you’re already messing with the past by taking her thirty years into the future and two, your world is already ruled by some big evil thing that’s caused the disappearance of seven-eighths of the world’s population – what could you do to the past to make your current world worse?

Okay, so the set up isn’t the greatest, but maybe it gets really interesting once we’re fully caught up in the fate of this future world, right? Wrong.

Alice is helped by a Lapland boy and the robot he fixed up. After fending off attacks by the bad guys, they get caught by the rebel group and shipped back to their base. The Liberators want Alice because she’s the only one that can hack into Nero’s brain and through his security systems.

Nero is a computer guru who grew up in an orphanage because his dad was killed in some war and his mom (the future Alice, not our Alice) went into a coma when he was born and never woke up. He currently has her hooked up to him through some computer gizmo so that he can talk to her or listen in on her thoughts or something. The reason he took over the world is because of what he believes his mother wanted based on what he saw of her thoughts. It really makes less sense than all that, but you get the point.

I don’t how it was that Nero was able to take over the world by plugging himself into his mom’s USB port, but then again if he could take over the world and make all but 12.5% of the people on Earth disappear, why couldn’t he make those rebels disappear as well?

When we finally discover just what Nero is up to and why and the fact that it all relates to a gal pal of Alice’s that committed suicide, you’re left to wonder whether the filmmakers ever let a normal person read their script. The fact that they try and tack on an environmental message into all of this doesn’t add much to things other than to the general disorganization of the story.

The DVD from Artsmagic is presented with the option of using an English language track or a Japanese language track and English subtitles. Without a doubt, use the subtitles because the voice acting on this movie is about the worst you’ll find (the robot waitress is particularly putrid) outside of a video game.

Extras include the presentation on CGI in movies previously available on the Malice@Doll DVD, trailers, artwork, film bios, and an extensive interview with A.LI.CE‘s director. He isn’t the most interesting interview and needs to wash his hair, but he does give you some behind the scenes stuff about the challenges that went into making a fully CGI movie. Unfortunately, A.LI.CE is that classic case of a movie where its eye-candy element outshines every other aspect of it.

© 2008 MonsterHunter

The movie starts out with Tetsuro getting a message to once again board the Galaxy Express 999. (I’m taking a wild guess that he rode the rails in the original Galaxy Express 999.) Earth has become a warzone with invading something or others causing trouble for our high-pitched hero. Aided by a group of aging rebels who sacrifice themselves so that he can catch his train, Tetsuro boards the 999. The destination? Space adventure!

Met by the faithful bumbling conductor, Tetsuro wonders where he is going, but even the 999 itself has no idea. I must note at this point that watching the 999 take off into space is something else. It basically drives straight off a track that points up into the sky. It did this a few times during the course of this flick and each time I wanted to yell “hop on the Soul Train!”

His journey to parts unknown is sprinkled with incidents where he comes into contact with a number of characters and places. He is joined again by the beautiful and mysterious Maetel who was also with him in the first movie. Maetel has her own agenda and despite her affection for Tetsuro, she causes a little ruckus later on. There is also some type of robot woman on board the train and she has evil intentions. (Like you weren’t tipped off by the fact that she was a robot.)

Tetsuro stops off on some other worlds, meets up with some folks, helps them out in several action and explosion filled sequences and basically eats up about 45 minutes of time doing this. All the while that robot steals evil glances at him and generally skulks about the train, her ominous evil-robot music playing in the background.

The animation seems to be kind of standard for these affairs and was by no means as good as some of the more recent stuff coming out of Japan, but that can probably be chalked up to the fact that this movie was made way back in 1981. The man behind this film was Leiji Matsumoto, who was the driving force behind the Star Blazers films and TV series. These projects share a distinct look within the world of anime and you’ll hear talk of a “Leijiverse” which encompasses many of Matsumoto’s projects.

Among his creations are the space pirates Emeraldas and Captain Harlock. Naturally these two superstars make welcome appearances in this movie. Emeraldas has her own two part series available on DVD and Harlock is a veteran of several TV series and films. The only problem was that I ended up wishing I was watching Harlock’s The Arcadia of My Youth but that’s more a testament to that classic than a knock on the 999.

In any event, Tetsuro also encounters an evil train that takes control of the 999 for awhile. This ghost train warped the 999 off track, but they eventually got where they were supposed to go. They end up on some planet run by Maetel’s mother, a world of metal where the “awful” secret is revealed. I don’t like to spoil a 2 hour and 15 minute movie for you so the only thing I’ll say about the awful secret is that if the secret was a color it would be Soylent Green.

But what about the evil robot and Tetsuro’s destiny? She tries to double cross her human companions, but Tetsuro cries when the robot is fatally wounded and that turns the robot back to our side ! She later gets sucked out of a gaping hole in the 999 into a black hole, but at least she died all redeemed and stuff.

As for Tetsuro, he must battle an evil guy in black armor who is somehow connected to Maetel’s mother and he is also trying to destroy the universe or something and it turns out that this bad guy is Tetsuro’s dad. (And I thought my parents were trying to ruin my life when they made me join the marching band in high school!)

This was a solid effort, though marred by the abundant cliches you surely spotted in the above paragraphs. The idea of a space train is kind of nuts, but the rest of the film remains mired in space opera hi-jinks and never achieves the level of lunacy that mark many of these anime projects. There were moments of passion and emotion from these characters (getting your metal butt sucked into a black hole will really make you think about life) but I think they were undermined somewhat by the overly familiar finale.

© 2008 MonsterHunter