Nostalgic Anime Retrospective No.13] Shigeru Matsuzaki's husky voice makes me swoon!　The cold and beautiful abstraction of "Space Adventure Cobra

The "Force Awakens," a completely new "Star Wars" movie, will be released on December 18, and around the time of the first "Star Wars" movie in 1978, parodies of the first "Star Wars" movie were shown in TV commercials, and domestic animation and special effects were also greatly influenced by the film.

The theatrical film "Space Adventure Cobra" ("Cobra") was released in 1982, two years after "Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. Takeichi Terasawa, the original author of the film, himself said that "Star Wars" was a sign of encouragement for him to begin work on this animated adaptation of the comic.

Why did Shigeru Matsuzaki play Han Solo?

Let me digress a bit. The film version of "Cobra" was produced by Tokyo Movie Productions (now TMS Entertainment), the same company that produced "Lupin the Third. Just as the voice actor for Lupin changed from Nachi Nozawa, Taichiro Hirokawa, and Yasuo Yamada before the start of the series, the voice actor for Cobra was Shigeru Matsuzaki for the movie version, Nachi Nozawa for the TV series, and Yasuo Yamada for the related product commercials (Naoya Uchida played the role in the TV series in 2010).

In the theatrical version of "Cobra," Shigeru Matsuzaki plays Cobra with a husky voice and a light-hearted air, but Matsuzaki won the role of Han Solo in the first TV broadcast of "Star Wars" the following year, in 1983. It was rumored at the time that Matsuzaki's fine performance in the theatrical version of "Cobra" may have influenced this casting .......

Putting the truth aside, it is easy to see the influence of "Star Wars" in the theatrical version of "Cobra. In the opening scene, when the heroine, Jane, kills the bounty hunter, a huge spaceship crosses overhead and an all-alien bar appears. The weapon used by the bounty hunter is a beamy lancer transformed into a cane, reminiscent of the lightsaber in "Star Wars.

But that's about as far as one can call it an influence. The director is Osamu Izaki, known for "Ashita no Joe. After the start of the ballad-like theme song sung by Shigeru Matsuzaki, an aesthetic world with an adult atmosphere develops.

An abstract world created by soft glass and metal

The story is a love story in which Cobra meets three sisters, Jane, Dominique, and Catherine, survivors of the planet Milos, and confronts their tragic fates. Cobra fights her nemesis, the Crystal Boy, only to travel across the planet at the behest of the three sisters.

It should be noted that the sci-fi gadgets in the film are not in the least bit physically realistic. The psycho gun hidden in Cobra's left arm is used with the prosthetic hand removed in the original manga. However, in the film version of "Cobra," the left arm glows, and before you know it, it is transformed into a psycho-gun. It is a mysterious mechanism, like a three-dimensional image.

Crystal Boy, the arch-enemy, is made of a metal skeleton and glass skin. But is his body rigid or not? When he laughs, he sticks his fingers into his face. At that moment, his glass epidermis becomes as soft as liquid. Boy also takes a metal rib from inside his glass-covered body with his hand and uses it as a weapon. Psycho-gun beams pass through it unaided, and when shot, the glass epidermis becomes gelatinous and catches the bullets. Although it shuts down external attacks, Boy can move matter in and out of his body as long as it is the same substance as his own body (a trait that is avenged in the final battle).

Also, of the three sisters, only Dominique is controlled at will by Crystal Boy. He has a ring on his head made of the same material as Boy's metal skeleton. When Boy is defeated by Cobra, the ring on Dominique's head melts away like liquid. At that moment, the molten metal collects in her eyes and flows down like golden tears. Adding to the aesthetic mood of the theatrical version of "Cobra" are a number of physically impossible science fiction gadgets, such as these liquid metals, cubic ice restraints, and vehicles that transform into light horses and disks. They could be pictured, but would be difficult to actually make, and there is no reason to make them in the first place. They are design for design's sake.

The film version of "Cobra" is not a warm, touchable world like "Star Wars. It is a cold and beautiful abstract world that is only possible within the "freely moving pictures" law of animation.

(Text by Keisuke Hirota)