#animeeigo

[recentanimenews]

FEATURE: The Fantastic True Story of How Project A-ko Was Lost and Found

Disclosure: The author of this article personally contributed to the MADOX-01 Kickstarter project described later in the piece.

Thirty-five years ago, when Project A-ko debuted in Japanese movie theaters, no one thought they were witnessing the birth of an anime classic. Director Katsuhiko Nishijima jokingly claimed in the behind-the-scenes documentary Project A-ko Secret File that he helped create the film because he needed some cash to buy new teeth.

  The film, which is named after an unrelated Jackie Chan movie and which began production as an adults-only entry in the Cream Lemon series before transforming into a general audience science fiction action-comedy film we know now, would prove popular enough to spawn three sequels and a spin-off series.

    If you've seen the film, it's no mystery why Project A-ko earned its reputation as a milestone of modern anime with adoring fans both in Japan and overseas. And yet, the film itself was shrouded in mystery, because sometime after its video masters were struck from the original 35mm film elements, the reels containing Project A-ko vanished without a trace.

  This is the story of that discovery.  

  School Girls Head West

  In the United States, Project A-ko was originally licensed by the now-defunct Central Park Media, a New York-based film company run by John O'Donnell. CPM first published the film on VHS in 1991, and Project A-ko proved to be an evergreen title all the way up until its final CPM release on DVD in 2002. After CPM went out of business in 2009, Discotek Media announced the rescue of the license of Project A-ko in 2010, releasing the film and its sequels on DVD later in 2011.

  Project A-ko still has a huge fan following overseas, but for all its success as an anime classic, it has never received a high-definition Blu-ray release in the United States. Even Central Park Media’s final “Special Edition” DVD release was recorded off the laserdisc because the original film elements were presumed to be lost. When it came time to create an HD remastered release, the original 35mm prints of Project A-ko were nowhere to be found.

    As a result, when Discotek Media announced that they were bringing Project A-ko to Blu-ray in September 2020, they also revealed that they were using technologies called the Domesday Duplicator and AstroRes to try to capture the best video possible from the available sources. 

  According to Justin Sevakis, CEO of MediaOCD, Discotek’s Production Contractor, the Domesday Duplicator captures and digitizes RF signals from multiple laserdisc sources, which results in a cleaner image overall.

  “[Domesday] is a cool concept and very intriguing, but I think people got the wrong idea that this was some sort of game-changer in terms of restoring A-ko,” said Sevakis. “It definitely would’ve helped, but it only got us part of the way back to the condition of the original master tape it came from. Even if we had THAT tape, it was a video master from 1986, and still would’ve required a lot more restoration work from that point onward.”

    The initial plan was to take the Domesday Duplicator transfer to an engineer who then used AstroRes, a process that uses machine learning to estimate the original linework to create an HD signal of the original. “When it comes off the disc, it’s still a video transfer,” said Sevakis. “Even for an SD master, it’s blurry because it was made in 1986. If anything was the miracle process, it was AstroRes.” 

  When it comes to older anime, Sevakis says that missing film elements are the biggest challenges when it comes to preserving and archiving. “If we’re stuck with decades-old video masters, often they’re made in such a way that makes restoring them very difficult or impossible ... Sometimes there are also old analog video problems that make the image completely unacceptable on a modern 4K display. At that point, the best you can really do is release it in standard definition.”

  The Domesday Duplicator and AstroRes processes certainly made the most sense for the Project A-ko restoration Discotek was producing at the time. But soon enough, a simple investigation into an unrelated Shinji Aramaki title would prove otherwise. 

    The MADOX-01 Connection

  While Discotek Media began the Herculean task of reconstructing Project A-ko, a plucky little North Carolina-based distributor known as AnimEigo was breaking ground on their next Kickstarter-financed release: a Blu-ray version of Metal Skin Panic MADOX-01, an original animation video from 1987 directed by Shinji Aramaki.

  A one-shot story about a young man who dons a highly advanced prototype suit of mechanical powered armor in a quest to say goodbye to his girlfriend, MADOX-01 is a goofy story with a lot of humor and some exquisite technical animation.

  In fact, Metal Skin Panic MADOX-01 was the first anime title licensed and distributed by AnimEigo. In an interview included as a special feature on the DVD release, Robert Woodhead, the founder and CEO of the AnimEigo, recalled that originally he was given the option to license Project A-ko or MADOX-01, but he decided to go with MADOX-01 because he felt it had more “mainstream appeal,” a choice which he jokingly referred to as “the first of many terrible business decisions.”

    Flash forward to December of 2020, when Robert Woodhead of AnimEigo and Ollie Barder of Sola Digital Arts discussed securing the materials for a high definition Blu-ray release of Metal Skin Panic MADOX-01. This plan hit a snag: Woodhead had previously inquired about obtaining the film elements needed to make a MADOX-01 Blu-ray but was informed at the time that the original materials were not available.

  It seems the black hole of “lost films” Project A-ko fell into claimed another victim, but Woodhead was undaunted. In January of 2021, Woodhead made new inquiries with AMG, the company that acquired the rights to MADOX-01 from Pony Canyon. An AMG representative acquired a list of films being stored at the Tokyo Genzōsho film archives — “information that the previous contact person at Pony Canyon apparently didn’t have,” according to Woodhead — and the missing MADOX-01 materials were located.

  Tokyo Genzōsho, also known as Tokyo Laboratory and usually shortened to Togen, hosts a wide range of original materials from Japanese film producers in climate-controlled environments.  As one of Japan’s major labs, they offer a wide range of professional media services to the film industry.

    Found Footage

  During a meeting with the AMG licensors, Woodhead was shown the list of films stored at Togen. Much to his surprise, not only was Metal Skin Panic MADOX-01 listed but right next to it on the list was another title: Project A-ko.

  The long-missing film 35mm print of Project A-ko wasn't actually lost. The film had simply been misfiled and couldn't be located for decades as a result of a clerical error. “It wasn’t hard to find,” said Woodhead. “The problem was that there was a break in the chain of knowledge about the film’s location.”

    “We’ve been looking for Project A-ko for 20 years,” Sevakis explained. “Most professional film, anime included, is locked away in a giant climate-controlled warehouse, in this case, run by the film lab that developed it. According to their records, it wasn’t there."

  Due to Woodhead’s discovery, Discotek Media was able to request the archivists to make a physical search of the vault. When they did, they learned that Project A-ko “was there the whole time,” in Woodhead’s words.

    Happy Endings

  After Woodhead got permission to inform Discotek of his discovery and the missing film reels were found, Discotek announced on a Twitch stream in March 2021 that they were canceling their initial plans for the AstroRes remastered Project A-ko release and instead were producing a remastered Blu-ray using the newly rediscovered original 35mm print.

  And that's the story of how Project A-ko was lost and found: lost by accident due to a simple filing error, found through happenstance and serendipity, an anime classic rescued from obscurity for future generations of fans to enjoy.

    At the time of this writing, the restoration process for the Blu-ray release is well underway, with Discotek eliminating anomalies “ranging from dust and small scratches to flickering and jitter caused by the photography of the era,” according to Sevakis. While there is no release date currently set, if the sample footage above is anything to go by, Project A-ko is going to look and sound better than ever.

  As for AnimeEigo's efforts on MADOX-01, the company's Kickstarter for the OVA reached its $50,000 goal in 42 minutes after it launched on April 30, now sitting at over $130,000 as of May 4, 2021.

  “The film lab vaults are out-of-sight, out-of-mind for most of the companies in Japan, especially because at this point not many people deal with film on a regular basis,” said Sevakis. “The people dealing with the rights often don’t even have a clear idea of what’s in there, even if the records are correct! Who knows what else might be found?” 

      Paul Chapman is the host of The Greatest Movie EVER! Podcast and GME! Anime Fun Time.

Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: Paul Chapman

[watching-pictures-move]

Viddying the Nasties #24 | Shogun Assassin and the Lone Wolf and Cub series

I’d first seen Shogun Assassin years ago in bits and pieces, when I first became aware of what exploitation movies were. At the time its mixture of splatter and swordplay seemed too awesome for words, but I had no real concept of its source material and cultural standing other than the fact that this was a movie that had been a hit on the grindhouse circuit. Fast forward a couple of years and I would revisit the movie again, this time having gotten somewhat into hip hop and having listened to GZA’s Liquid Swords. This time what struck me was not just the action but the atmosphere of sadism - this is a movie packed with some truly ice cold shit - and how that lent itself to the aesthetic of that record. But this was also when I learned that there was more to the story, and that Shogun Assassin was not just something that materialized out of the ultraviolent ether but was indeed recut from preexisting movies in the Lone Wolf and Cub series from the early ‘70s, based on the manga by Kazuo Koike. Sadly at the time Shogun Assassin was much more available in North America (in a sharp looking DVD and Blu-ray release from AnimeEigo) than the originals (the box sets were long out of print) so I was unable to dig further at the time. Fast forward a few more years and the good people at Janus Films decide to give the entire Lone Wolf and Cub film series plus Shogun Assassin some handsome restorations and release them as part of the Criterion Collection. Coming off of the Stray Cat Rock series and still in the mood for some Japanese action movies, I decided to finally get through this series and, at the very least, see how they compared with the version I’d been familiar with all these years. Thankfully, they happened to be pretty damn good.

The overarching plot is as follows: our hero Ogami Itto, the shogun’s executioner, has his wife murdered and is falsely accused of wanting the shogun dead by a rival clan, and so is forced to flee with his infant son Daigoro and take up life as an assassin while seeking revenge, living on “the demon way in hell.” Now, if I’m being perfectly honest, having rushed through the six movies in a few days, I have to admit they blend together a bit, so I’m not necessarily going to delve into plot details of the individual movies in depth. This isn’t necessarily a criticism, as I suspect it’s a bit by design. That overarching plot I described is introduced in the first film and returned to periodically over the course of the subsequent movies, but a large portion of the series is spent on the assassinations our hero is hired to perform, side quests to the main revenge quest. The films were all scripted by Koike, the author of the original manga, and I assume they are faithful to the source material, so perhaps those who have read the manga might find the plots easier to distinguish. The sixth and final film was made before the manga was completed, which leaves the series feeling a touch inconclusive as it doesn’t tie up the overall plot.

The first film, Sword of Vengeance, sets up not just the plot but also the pitiless world the films reside in. This is a movie that opens with Itto executing a baby(!) on the orders of a paranoid shogun, making it clear that traditional ideas of justice don’t apply in this universe and that Itto’s “heroism” will definitely be of the anti-heroic stripe. But the movie also eased me into the rhythms of the overall series, which are a lot more meditative and a lot less frantic than I’d expected, while still dishing out generous helpings of blood and steel. The action here is not distinguished purely through choreography but also the structure, the blood sprays serving as gory exclamation marks. There’s also a fair bit of handheld work reminiscent of early Chang Cheh - I understand filmmakers in Hong Kong at the time were influenced by Japanese samurai pictures, and perhaps the influence was going ways.

The second film, Baby Cart at the River Styx, pushes even further in this regard, conceiving its action as a series of gory non-sequiturs, images of blood pouring through walls or through desert sands and characters being chopped into stumps or having their heads split open having been etched into my memory when I first saw them edited into Shogun Assassin all those years ago. This is probably the best of the movies, packing in the most incident but also finding some unexpected tenderness in their harsh worldview. Itto encounters a female ninja sent to kill him, but she ends up reassessing her own capacity for violence after being moved by his relationship with Daigoro, and in the end elicits a rare moment of mercy from Itto. It’s a character arc that could have been corny but feels well earned in the otherwise unrelenting cruelty of the series. However, the scene were Itto forcefully has them warm each other up to survive is still hilariously uncomfortable no matter which cut you see. There’s also the underrated delight of seeing Daigoro react to different animals.

The next few movies continue this dynamic, with Baby Cart to Hades and Baby Cart in Peril pitting Itto and Daigoro, respectively, against a disgraced samurai and a tattooed female assassin with a tragic backstory, both of whom reassert a sense of honour in their confrontations with our heroes. They also have Daigoro becoming a more active participant in their survival, with his carriage being revealed to have additional deadly capabilities, best demonstrated when they machine gun hordes of men while taking on an entire army in the climax of the third movie. The moral complexity of the series peaks with the fifth movie, Baby Cart in the Land of the Demons, which has Itto being hired to assassinate an infant princess and hesitating before killing another target. That movie also has Daigoro falsely accused of being in cahoots with a pickpocket and the baffling sight of the police trying to beat a confession out of a toddler. This specific strain of ridiculousness is absent in the final film, White Heaven in Hell, but otherwise that movie goes out with a bang, trading the jazzy sounds of the earlier movies with a score that suggests James Bond meets Shaft, sending reanimated assassins after our heroes, and pitting them against an entire army in a climax whose virtuosity is matched by its body count. The wintry setting of that action sequence and the soundtrack suggest that the filmmakers wanted to outdo On Her Majesty’s Secret Service of all movies, and the carnage concludes with the bodies of Itto’s foes scattered over a snowy hillside, like black pepper on white rice. Yet at the end, even with the story not really being over, the movie reasserts Itto’s bond with Daigoro, ending on a tender note that brings nuance to the butchery that preceded it.

Which brings us back to Shogun Assassin, which combines sections of the first movie with the bulk of the second, trades the original score for a cheapo synth one and a well done English dub, and greatly simplifies the story, excising the specific clan conflicts and adopting a more generic story of our heroes facing off against the shogun. What’s lost in the translation are the complexities in the series’ worldview, with this new version less eager to challenge us to contemplate the violence and the characters’ relationships and preferring to serve it up for our giddy enjoyment. But what does come through or is perhaps even enhanced is the outrageousness of the violence and the non-sequitur-style delivery, coming across as even more frenetic in this faster-paced version. On the level of pure enjoyment, this ranks with the best of the series even if it lacks the richness of the originals, and there’s a reason its blend of ultraviolent samurai imagery has proven so iconic. Whatever entry or version you happen to watch, there’s no denying the mix of artistry and entertainment value that defines the series.

[officerdingo]

Riding Bean (1989)

Original Story by Sonoda Kenichi / Directed by Hasegawa Yasuo

1993 (English / Dub) AnimeEigo

[harlandproductions]

The way a #VHS #Collection of a #Anime should be displayed. #KimagureOrangeRoad #AnimeEigo #classic #darthvadorlamp

[ljaesch]

AnimEigo to Launch Kickstarter for Riding Bean Special Edition

AnimEigo announced on its Kickstarter page for Otaku no Video that the company will launch a Kickstarter in Summer 2015 for a “High Octane Edition” of Riding Bean. The 1989 OVA is based on a manga by Kenichi Sonoda. AnimEigo released Riding Bean in 2002 on a dual-audio DVD—its first anime release along with MADOX-01. In the story, Bean Bandit and his partner Rally Vincent are couriers for hire –…