#ARTMIC

[arcadebroke]

[laboitediabolique]

Promotional poster for the cancelled TV anime Omega Zone 23, September 1984. The main sponsor of the show pulled out at the last minute forcing a halt to production. It was then decided to reformat the completed scripts into an 80 minute direct to video film (known as Original Video Animation or OVA) and was released in March 1985. The format was still fairly new and seen as a risky investment at the time. However the OVA, retitled as Megazone 23, sold over 26,000 copies, mostly in the rental market, a feat which would not be matched for an OVA release for over a decade.

[studioalmain]

BUBBLEGUM CRISIS - Rare Promotional Cel Art (1987-1988)

These cel paintings were created to help promote the first three episodes of the 1987 OVA Bubblegum Crisis (Tinsel City Rhapsody, Born to Kill, and Blow Up). They were chiefly used for various posters and on the backs of albums, but also saw use in R. Talisorian Games’ RPG books during the mid-1990s.

While HD versions of the ep 1 art can be found easily, this version depicts the full coverage of the art including what would be cropped out ordinarily. The art for eps 2 and 3 are, however, much rarer and I could only normally find them as unscanned posters on Japanese auction sites. The “AD POLICE SUPER MECHANICS” one in particular was exceedingly difficult to find pictures of.

Hope you all enjoy this here slice of obscure, nearly lost Bubblegum Crisis art!

[thetremblingroofbeam]

[selketshaula]

Art by Matayoshi (Nopple 1000)

[drilanime]

[canmom]

Animation Night 168: when Anno was young...

Animation Night has been getting kind of short lately, huh? Gone are the days when we'd marathon three films in a night... for now. Next week is Animation Night 169, and @mogsk has been helping me cook up quite a program to act as a sequel to Animation Night 69. It's time to find out just how much Twitch will let me get away with.

But what about tonight? Well, tonight I figure since we've been talking about Anno this week, it might be fun to put a short program together to show some of his earlier works - as an animator. Truly long-time viewers might remember watching Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise and Gunbuster all the way back on Animation Night 29. But this isn't exactly a reprise of that. We'll revisit Gunbuster on another day. Tonight the subject will be Metal Skin Panic: Madox-01 and Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise.

So here's a brief timeline (largely leaning on SteveM's video here lol). Anno's work on the Daicon III film got him a foot in the door in the industry by impressing Studio Nue enough to invite the Daicon III team to work on Macross. Nue were also in large part fans turned animators, many of them Gundam doujinshi artists. Anno joined what became known as the 'mecha unit' at Artland, working alongside the legendary Ichirō Itano - where he was known for walking around barefoot and talking loudly to himself. A couple of years after Daicon III, the Daicon team reassembled to create a followup film, a lavish effort packed with a ludicrous density of pop-culture references.

Not long after this... Anno dropped out of university, and started bouncing between animation studios in Tokyo. The next big break came when he applied to work on Miyazaki's Nausicaa, a production which was rapidly transforming the outsourcing-oriented studio Topcraft into a gathering of some of the best animators in the business. At Topcraft, Anno's reputation was 'the primal man', sleeping under his desk with the cockroaches and not wearing shoes. But despite his inexperience, he made a good impression on Miyazaki, who assigned him the crucial finale cuts of the God Warrior.

Here we see what is sometimes called the 'Anno explosion', where the laser sweeps across and a massive explosion follows after a beat. Anno was able to handle the complex shading and multiple layers with aplomb...

...if not entirely on schedule. (One anecdote has that he tried to use his work on this sequence to pick up women. Which, to be fair...)

So in the mid 80s, Anno has established himself as a skilled mecha animator who can handle some ludicrously technical scenes. Besides Nausicaa and Macross, you will see him in Megazone 23 Part I, Giant Robo: The Animation, Baoh, Birth - and even Grave of the Fireflies. Any time you wanted mechanical animation or explosions, Anno was definitely a guy to get on the phone. And of course one of his most significant projects was on SDF Macross: Do You Remember Love? where he animated... you guessed it, lots of missiles and explosions.

With all this experience under his belt, Anno was almost ready to return to the newly founded Gainax - what had been Daicon Film. But first - lets check out Metal Skin Panic! MADOX-01. This OVA, made at AIC and Artmic - who made so many of the classic OVAs from this period, it's nuts - was the directorial debut of Shinji Aramaki, whose later CG films we covered back on Animation Night 152. Even back in 1987, Aramaki's love of intricate mechanical detail was on full display - and luckily Anno was on hand to make that vision work, along with the even younger 14-year-old prodigy Kōji Akimoto. (I'm not entirely sure what became of Akimoto. He only has one other anime credit, much later.)

Anno's scenes here prefigure the later similar hyper-detailed mechanical animation in works like Patlabor 2. But what's this OVA actually about? Well, it's a pretty simple story: a mechanic gets trapped inside a mecha suit, and accidentally ends up on a rampage as he's chased by the military (remind you of Roujin Z? or Stink Bomb in Memories?), hoping to unite with his girlfriend Shiori. Ultimately he ends up in a confrontation with an American soldier Lieutenant Kilgore. They fight! Really, we're here for the animation.

So, that brings us to Royal Space Force. The origin is kinda messy. To make a long story short, Daicon Film approached Bandai, hoping to make an OVA based on new Gundam kits. Bandai (and more specifically Shigeru Watanabe) said no to Gundam, but they were interested in this idea for a scifi OVA - and they'd drop them a cool three and a half million dollars to make a film to rival Nausicaa. (Apparently Mamoru Oshii's approval played a big part in that).

So Royal Space Force, what a film. There truly isn't anything quite like it, either in Gainax's oeuvre or anime at large. The closest thing I could compare it to might be the near-future anime series Planetes, which similarly focuses on realistic spaceflight in the context of war and geopolitics - but the tone of these two stories is markedly different. Of all things, it actually most makes me think of the works of Le Guin.

Honneamise is set on a fictional world vaguely resembling eartly 20th Century Earth, in which a country embroiled in war is putting together its world's first, threadbare space programme. It follows aspiring astronaut Shirotsugh Ladatt, who missed his chance to be a pilot and ended up in the sideshow space programme. But he meets a religious girl named Riquinni Nonderaiko who convinces him of the potential of spaceflight in bringing peace to the world.

But this idealism clashes with the reality of a world where the space programme is viewed cynically, a means to an end, with protestors questioning the cost of it and the higherups seeing the rocket launch merely as a means to set up an ambush against their enemies. Shirotsugh increasingly doubts whether the space programme is worthwhile at all. And he himself is definitely not a fully sympathetic protagonist; in one particularly uncomfortable scene he attempts to rape Riquinni (which in its framing reminds me of a similar moment with Shevek in The Dispossessed).

The film is as much as anything an insane work of worldbuilding, full of constructed cultures and small details that sit just a little askew of Earth while still feeling incredibly grounded. The animation in this film is fucking insane - not just Anno's incredible rocket launch and flight sequences, based on a research trip to the States where he watched the Shuttle go up for real - but throughout, in its character animation, it anticipates the 90s 'realist' approach to stylisation. It's just full of loving detail, wordlessly conveying so much about its setting.

Of course, such an ambitious film faced a troubled production. Between the inexperience of Daicon Film Gainax and the difference between what this film was going for and what everything else was going for, and production meddling... it was a mess. Big name composer Ryuichi Sakamoto was pulled in to score the film, won over by its storyboards, but ended up clashing over the timing of scenes, and in the end his score was chopped up and rearranged.

And for their part, Bandai started getting antsy and attempted to impose changes, like insisting on tacking on the subtitle 'The Wings of Honneamise'. They wanted to cut the runtime, cut elements that didn't have toy potential, and so on. They wanted something that would sell toys... and got a deliberately slow, moody art film that leans heavily on nonverbal storytelling.

So it's a weird one... and it didn't sell in its theatrical run. But you know, all those elements that made it a hard sell at first are a perfect recipe for 'cult classic', and for that reason, Honneamise is still remembered today.

In any case, back to Anno. He delivered the most impressive animation of his career. The rocket launch in meticulous detail of course, but equally scenes of planes to rival any in Miyazaki's films (or The Cockpit [AN146]). Of course, he didn't carry it alone! The great realist Toshiyuki Inoue, who'd later be famous for his work at Production I.G. such as Ghost in the Shell, was on it, working for example on astonishingly busy crowd scenes which apparently took a full month to animate. And animators like Fumio Iida, Nobuteru Yuki and Noriasu Yamauchi, brought some of the best work they'd ever done.

All in all, there's nothing quite like Royal Space Force, before or since. So I'm really looking forward to seeing it again.

Animation Night 168 will go live shortly; films will begin at 11pm UK time and continue to about 2am UK time. (Apologies it's so late once more, my sleep is proving troublesome to shift.) We will as usual be at twitch.tv/canmom. I hope to see you there, it's gonna be a real sakuga feast tonight!!

[nerdiertides]

Gatchaman is getting a super powered complete collection release next month

(Featured Image Source: Sentai Filmworks / Tatsunoko Production / Artmic) Get ready to add a true classic to your shelf next month when Sentai Filmworks releases the Gatchaman Complete Collection, a super-powered collection featuring the original series, its sequels, and OVAs! Sentai Filmworks / Tatsunoko Production / Artmic Gatchaman, originally titled Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, is an…

[pabsterthelobster]

The Deluxe Insecticons were a quadrio of Decepticons with insect alternate modes sold during the second year of the Transtormers toyline. Consisting of Venom the cicada, Chop Shop the stag beetle, Barrage the rhinoceros beetle, and Ransack the grasshopper, these four were different from the cheaper non-Deluxe trio of Insecticons that most people were familiar with, as their toys were originally designed by Artmic as part of the Armored Insect Corps Beetras toyline by Takatoku Toys, rather than by Takara for their own Diaclone toyline.

Each Insecticon was originally designed as an Insecter mecha to be piloted by one of Beetras' main cast members. Barrage was originally Beet-Gadol, Chop Shop was originally Beet-Gugal, Venom was Beet-Zeguna, and Ransack was Beet-Vadam (whose toy went unreleased by the time Takatoku collapsed). Alongside these four was a fifth, female mecha named Beet-Papil, themed after a ladybug. In addition, an attempt to refresh the brand as Beet Seven renamed the mecha Beet-Leide, giving her old name to a new mecha themed after a butterfly, as well as creating a new firefly-themed mecha dubbed Beet-Bigal. None of these three designs have been reused as inspiration for any new Transformers characters.

[khuantru]

version 2 of todays drawing.

Software: Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator CS3 Tools: wacom pen

manga: AD POLICE (1990)

wiki ref: AD Police Files is a 1990 three-part original video animation produced by Youmex and animated by Artmic and AIC. Set in 2027, it is a prequel to the Bubblegum Crisis OVA series, focusing mainly on AD Police officer Leon McNichol, the future rival and love interest of Knight Saber Priscilla Asagiri. Due to the legal conflict between Artmic and Youmex, the production of the series was stopped with only three complete episodes made.

[morkitten]

Detonator Orgun Masami Obari (AIC, Artmic), 1991

[arcadebroke]

[laboitediabolique]

Theatrical flyer for limited theatrical release of Megazone 23, 23 March 1985.

[studioalmain]

MODEL GRAPHIX SPECIAL - STAR FRONT GALL FORCE (1988)

Two rare sights online, I personally scanned and colored in some of Kenichi Sonoda’s lovely Gall Force art from the Model Graphix special for your delectation. :3c

First comes from the back cover sans dust cover and depicts Patty in an unused power armor not featured in the story proper.

Second is Rabby in her Struggle Suit with it’s iconic rabbit ears (hur hurrr get it it’s a punnnn) often featured in the model comic and in promo material, but alas a colorized version of the lineart is excruciatingly rare online, so I recreated it here.

Compare it to the vinyl model of Rabby they released around the same time!

[mechanicalinertia]

Bubblegum Black Chapter 4 is now live!

So this is a far shorter chapter than Chapter 3, and honestly that might be a good thing. As is the fic is 31K words and the plot's barely started. Well, next chapter is another big STMPD-branded fight scene - that's why I waited a month to release this chapter, so I had time to finish the next one in a satisfactory manner.

But that's not to discount that what's going on in this chapter isn't important. Far from it. If anything, this is the chapter where a very crucial decision is made that is the contours along which much of the plot goes. Let's dig into it.

Recovery Zone 23: As tempting as it is to be coy and refuse to explain the joke... look, it's a Megazone 23 reference, Megazone being the anime that made AIC and Artmic the kings of the 80's OVA boom before Bubblegum Crisis and Gall Force. I did watch the last part of Megazone 23 Part III recently, and it was profoundly okay-ish. Megazone never manages to be as concise and snappy as BGC, and often feels like it's trying too much and never enough at once. Apparently, though, Megazone and not BGC is the franchise AIC wanted to remake and slap a part 4 on during their period of trying to Kickstart anime back in the 2010's. So maybe it's more popular in Japan, even 40 years out? Who knows.

The Vampire Serial Killer Thing: Yeah, for those of you who don't know Crisis, Sylvie's original role was a lesbian sexbot vampire serial killer, gathering blood to save the life of a sister Sexaroid, who befriended Priss and then died miserably at the end of OVA 5. It's a genuinely sad moment, especially because Sylvie's circumstances are so interesting, and the question of 'should we have empathy for this Boomer-girl-thing' is a question that has been discussed in the fandom ever since the episode's release on Christmas Day, 1988. So part of the reason I switched over to a 2060's AU for my work is so I could just keep her alive, force Sylvie to come to grips with who she is and could become. Pure, uncut copium, as Edgerunners fans might say. But I think I'm onto something when I say that Priss wouldn't be pissed about the killings - she's an ex-bosozoku in a cyberpunk cityscape, she's killed innocents before - but more that Sylvie lied to her, didn't trust Priss to help her. Celia, now, Celia would be the one who would treat Sylvie as subhuman in nature and actions. That's why Sylvie wants to meet Sawyer. Being an only-human-enough monster herself, she's more willing to see things in someone like the Gore Gore Girl than Priss. Also we get an intimate moment between them, so... yeah.

Inspector Cara: Oblique reference to the AD Police Files detective girl Iris Cara, who uncovered an unhinged cyberpsychotic serial killer in the only good episode of that trio, The Ripper. I actually ranked The Ripper pretty low on my big ranking sheet awhile back, but then again I hadn't really watched the whole episode properly, and was judging the episode more on the concept. Which is unfair, because... eh. I won't spoil it, but suffice to say that I wrote a paper for my last quarter of undergrad where I argued that The Ripper's cyberpsychotic arc and David Martinez's descent into madness are one and the same. If I ever get permission from my prof to post it, I will.

Monster Revolver: I haven't had the chance to show it off, but instead of a Stechkin, Balalaika now wields an Rsh-12 revolver, which fires a 12.7*55mm round, normally used for short-range engagements in battle rifles like the ShAK-12, getting the stopping power of Lapua Magnum without the range. Why is Balalaika wielding this thing? Because it's big and intimidating-looking, and I can see her using it, maybe even modifying it for sniping somehow. It's a menacing gun for a menacing woman.

Rock Okajima and Celia Stingray: So here's the thing. I wrote Celia very well. I don't doubt that. I know how to write Celia's particular drives very well. It's Rock I'm not certain I did right. Now, negativemidas on Reddit, one of the guys who's been very helpful with hashing out various plot beats I want to happen, said once that Rock is fundamentally a blank slate, added to the story after test audiences for Lagoon's original draft needed someone to relate to. And indeed, Rock is sort of the moralizer of the story for most of it, even if he grows a spine pretty fast and carves out a niche as a negotiator and logistics guy that guarantees his survival. So I guess I have some license to write Rock as fundamentally depressed after, you know, manga-original character Le Majeur died in his arms. Was that the right thing to do? I'm not gonna lie, I basically fridged her, killed her to affect Rock's emotional landscape and set him to a state not unlike where he was at the end of Roberta's Blood Trail, just because I wanted to use a jumping point closer to something like Apotheosis (which is, to my mind, the greatest Lagoon fanfic ever written) than where Rock is in the manga. There's an alternate version of this fic where Majeur sticks around, but what would that even look like? Where would that go? I don't fucking know. More importantly, with the release of the latest chapter of Lagoon in August of this year, I realized I had diverted seriously from Hiroe's vision of Rock. Rock in that chapter has embraced his role as a mastermind, as a savior of Roanapur, as someone who loves the city and is willing to work with Chang to get shit done. And that was a choice that baffled me, because Rock tried to 'save' the city before, in Roberta's Blood Trail, and uh, we all know how that turned out, didn't we? Okay, so he's chosen to throw his lot in with the power brokers of the city like Chang, but is that making anything better? How is this meaningfully different? I think that somewhere during Hiroe's hiatus, he seemed to decide that Roanapur was a Good Place, a place that could save the forgotten and shunned and give them purpose if they didn't get shot in the first week of their existence. Hell, apparently Balalaika said in one of the Urobuchi light novels or someplace similar that she felt that Rock had a future where she didn't. This does not make sense to me. I have my own headcanons about what Roanapur really is, but they run counter to Hiroe's work, now, it seems. I don't like being one of those fanfic authors who doesn't just disregards canon, but actively scorns it. I told a different story for BGC because BGC is a different beast, one that's pliable and loose enough in its worldbuilding that anything can happen. But now the story I want to tell in Roanapur is one that is a 'fuck canon we ball' story. A story where Rock slips back into his old habits and, uh, spoiler alert, it doesn't end well for him. That is the story that makes sense to me.

So I guess if I have to tell a different story... well, so be fucking it.

That's what fanfiction is for.

[archonedd]

DETONATOR ORGUN (Mega CD) review

Exactly on March 31st, 2023, SEGA silently released (then announced on their Sonic social media) one of the best April Fool's jokes ever. They released a point-and-click adventure/visual novel game exclusively on PC, titled The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog with a mystery theme, starring an unnamed quokka (whom the player is prompted to name themselves) who must help figure out who "killed" Sonic the Hedgehog in a murder mystery game.

Admittedly, I have watched a whole longplay of the game, and I though the game had solid things going for it. That being said though, I thought to myself "Sega might have taken a thing or two from many video games I've played as a kid." The point-and-click elements seem heavily inspired by the likes of Dynamix's Rise of the Dragon, but there is a game I never really talked about completely. So, after a lot of brainstorming, including possible inspirations from the likes of Snatcher, Policenauts (which is actually a point-and-click), and the like, I thought of something. Could it be that they took inspiration from one game I loved playing as a kid - a Mega CD game based on an OVA called DETONATOR ORGUN?

On July 31, 1992, precisely 1 year and 5 days after the Japanese Mega Drive release of the very first Sonic the Hedgehog (July 26, 1991), a little-known developer called HOT-B Co. Ltd. (you may know them under their American alias "Sage's Creation") released DETONATOR ORGUN exclusively in Japan as a Sega Mega CD exclusive. Thanks to being attached to the license behind the Detonator Orgun OVA by Anime International Company [AIC] and Artmic, this Mega CD visual novel did sell quite a bit, though reviews were above average. I recall getting this game from a friend when I ordered the three Detonator Orgun OVA DVD's at Speedy DVD back in 2011. For some reason I accidentally got the Mega CD disc of DETONATOR ORGUN along with my order. It wasn't until Christmas of 2012 (I was 12 years old) where I finally scored myself a Japanese Model 1 Mega Drive and Mega CD as a gift from my mother after acing the national exams. So, is this game way past cool? Or is it no good? Let's do it to it!

STORY

Somewhere in space a battle is going on. Mechanized knights of unknown origin battle each other, ending up on the Moon, where a fight to the death takes place. Apparently Orgun has been marked for death by his own kind, the Evoluders, a bloodthirsty race of machine-cyborgs bent on conquering and destruction.

Meanwhile back on Earth in City No. 5, a college student named Tomoru Shindo is somehow contacted by Orgun as he is dying on the Moon. Orgun has also been sending instructions to Earth received by the Earth Defense Force, for building a new Orgun, one which Tomoru is now destined to meet.

This is the story to Mega CD DETONATOR ORGUN. Quite lacking in some obscure areas, but the story is cobbled together well. Narrative-wise, it seems to be a joined-up story of both Detonator Orgun OVA 1 & 2. The story concludes with this: "This story will be continued in 'Detonator Organ III'." I give the story an A.

GAMEPLAY

Gameplay-wise, DETONATOR ORGUN is quite simple. There will be four buttons on the top right, and most of the gameplay consists of clicking on decisions from a menu, such as Look, Think, Talk, Move, etc. This simplicity of controls makes it quite easy to learn, though obviously, being a visual novel, some critical thinking is required. Unlike many modern-day visual novels that have flooded the market these days, such as the aforementioned The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog, this game will not support any mouse or keyboard. Sega Mouse compatibility is not present, however it does support the Mega CD Backup Ram Cartridge which is very handy for saving the game. Internal battery backups don't last forever.

One of my main gripes with the game is that while the main four buttons are in English initially, the rest of the game is completely unplayable if you are one of those people that can't understand Kanji at a native level, or don't have some sort of understanding of the language. So many great underappreciated Mega CD games fall victim to this, while all the U.S. seemed to get were sub-par digitized FMV efforts, which had severely compromised gameplay. It's a crying shame that games like this never even got an English translation. Hence why the gameplay gets a B- from me.

GRAPHICS & SOUND

I really love the animation for this game. You can definitely tell that there are some AIC touches, especially in the animation department. The video moves so smoothly, and doesn't look too grainy. Also, I really like the soundtrack for this game. From the CD soundtrack and super-clear voice samples in the intro, opening, mid-game and ending cutscenes, to the YM2612-generated chip-tune in-game music, the songs in this game are great. I give it a solid A. 

CONCLUSION

To conclude, this game is fine. It had a good idea of what it was trying to accomplish but, like most great Mega CD games, it just wasn't destined to be released in the west. What saves this game is its amazing music. I give it a 7/10.

AT A GLANCE: DETONATOR ORGUN

SUMMARY: Mechanized knights of unknown origin end up on the Moon, where a fight to the death takes place. Tomoru Shindo is somehow contacted by Orgun as he is dying on the Moon.

Platform: Sega Mega CD

Developer / Publisher: HOT-B Co. Ltd.

Release Date: 31 July, 1992 (Japan)

Genre: Visual Novel / Digital Comic

Number of Players: 1

Catalogue Code: T-28014

Initial Retail Price: ¥7,800 (¥8,603 adjusted for inflation in 2023)

Rating: 7/10