Nostalgic Anime Retrospective No.8] It's not fair to call it a "rip-off"!　Bubblegum Crisis" was born in the midst of the SFX film boom overseas!

Veteran writer Keisuke Hirota talks about the golden age and decline of Japanese animation in this "Nostalgic Anime Retrospective" at his leisure. Both the generation that knows those days and the generation that was not yet born at that time, let's enjoy the present and future brightly and happily by talking about the past. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the release of the first "Terminator," and the latest "Terminator: New Start/Genisys" is now in theaters. In 1985, when the first Terminator movie was released, the visual of a metallic skeleton called an "endoskeleton" appearing from under Schwarzenegger's face took everyone by surprise. The OVA "Bubblegum Crisis" (1987) was a Japanese adaptation of the Endoskeleton and made it the antagonist of the film.

Bubblegum Crisis" is an original animation by Artmic, a now defunct project company. It depicts the activities of four beautiful women, the "Night Sabers," who wear power suits and fight the crimes of "Buma," an android that mimics a human.... ... and when I write it all down at once, it has an indescribable B-grade flavor that is very enjoyable. The previous film, "Garforce: Eternal Story" (1986), was also a typical "mecha + bishojo" film, in which seven beautiful girl soldiers fight through a large-scale space war (......). The girl is cute and the mechas are cute. The charm of Artmik's work was its lightness: "The girl is cute, the mecha is cool, but the details are taken down. It is not tactful to point out the original source material, since it is so obvious and vivid. However, the fans know each other well enough to know that it is a crack-up. I don't think such a work with such a sense of distance was seen at all in the early 80s, when people were more original-minded.

Now, "Bubblegum Crisis," the name of one of the four beauties is Pris, a beautiful rock star who wears a wig with wolf hair and throngs the live houses. The AD Police detective who is a fan of hers and pursues Buma and his friends (who look just like the Terminator) is Leon. Both are names of replicants in "Blade Runner". ......, but there is no deeper meaning. Director Yoshiyuki Tomino writes down a lot of naming ideas, combines them in many patterns, and after much painstaking work, he has completed the names of the characters in all of his films. Neither "Brelan" (I don't like this abbreviation, but I dare to say it) nor "The Terminator" are named in the same way as "You like it, so why not make it that way? Let's make it fun anyway." The skyscraper of the giant conglomerate "Genome" in the opening scene resembles the Tyrell Corporation in "Brelland," and Buma, who wears human skin over a metallic skeleton, catches bullets with his skin and when he takes heavy damage, his metallic skeleton is exposed. The depiction of the metallic skeleton being exposed is straight out of "Terminator". However, pointing this out does not diminish the value of the work. The staff members are not offended, saying, "We all love foreign SFX movies. ...... It is certain that the somewhat thin, sweet, and comfortable common understanding between fans and senders, such as "I know this" or "I have seen this somewhere before," gave Artmik's works a familiarity. There was a unique sense of floating, unrelated to the long and heavy "history of animation.

The other original animation project solely produced by Artomic was "Wonavies" (1986), for which Kenichi Sonoda was in charge of character design. Or rather, Mr. Sonoda's professional debut was the original "Garforce" project (serialized in Model Graphics magazine). Before that, Sonoda was drawing advertising cuts for a retail store called Musashiya in Hobby Japan magazine, which included "Rumroid," an android version of a character from "Urusei Yatsura," "U-GAIM," a girl-shaped mecha combining "Creamy Mami, the Magic Angel" and "Heavy Metal El-Gaim," and other parodies. The works were all parodies. The "carelessness" of a local doujinshi artist (Sonoda is from Osaka) suddenly debuting in a commercial anime is similar to today's situation where a popular pixiv artist suddenly becomes the original designer of a character. Mr. Sonoda, who finally entered the animation world from a completely different field from the one in which he had worked for years in the field of animation production and finally found his way to ......, showed a stance similar to that of a fan: "I love animation, but I don't want to have a hard time with it. (I think he actually had a hard time, but this is just an image). This lightness and lack of fervor was refreshing to me. I guess the (somewhat irresponsible) atmosphere of the 1980s, where one never knows who will succeed and where opportunities and setbacks await, pushed Mr. Sonoda's back.

Both "Bubblegum Crisis" and "Garforce" were remade in the 1990s as "Bubblegum Crisis TOKYO 2040" and "Garforce the Revolution," respectively. However, both works continued to be steadily produced as sequels and extra editions for TV and OVA before the staffs were renewed. In the meantime, the production company and release maker changed, the series was cancelled, and finally Artmic went bankrupt, and the series entered a maze with no clear future. The confusion is just like the "Terminator" series, which wanders around aimlessly, saying, "This time we will finish it," "Let's continue with the TV series," "Next, a new trilogy," or "No, no, we must remake the first film. The first "Terminator" was a low-budget action film, and Schwarzenegger was a relative unknown. If we are to compete on the basis of one-shot ideas and one-time impact, we may not be able to rely on the success of a single film forever.

(Text by Keisuke Hirota)