Spirit of Wonder: Miss China's Ring (1992)

Outside of a small coastal town in an England that seems to be stuck in an eternal, rather peaceful and un-classist version of late the late Victorian or early Edwardian era, a young Chinese woman everybody only calls Miss China is running an inn, being nice to the local children, and kicking asses with her superior kung fu when necessary, like a deviant Michael Ripper. China could be satisfied with this somewhat boring life, if not for her boarders, the mad scientist Professor Breckenridge and his assistant and junior inventor Jim.

Because science ain't cheap, and Breckenridge spends all his money on his inventions, the scientist is behind on his rent all the time, providing China with ample opportunity to kick his door in. Which seems financially counterproductive to me, but what do I know?

Jim's a slightly different case - China and he have one of those slowly developing romances going on that mostly consist of the possible lovers looking at each other longingly and not explicitly speaking up, a state of affairs that is somewhat ironic when one half of the potential couple is as decidedly lacking in shyness and reserve as China is when not concerned with her love life.

Breckenridge's newest invention is particularly spectacular. He has - or so he says - invented a way to travel to the moon. That's the sort of thing that should keep a man in rent money for a long time, one would think, but convincing people the professor has a direct line to the moon turns out to be surprisingly difficult even when he writes a happy birthday wish for a certain Chinese innkeeper on the moon's surface in large letters. At least, this particular invention enables Jim to show he's the kind of guy willing to give his beloved the moon. If she kicks it hard enough, that is.

Miss China's Ring is one of two OVAs based on the rather obscure - as far as my sources tell me, both in the mythical West and in Japan - manga series Spirit of Wonder by Kenji Tsuruta. It's one of those OVAs whose existence is a bit of a mystery: its source is after all not particularly successful, and its tone and style don't fit particularly well into any clichés about what real otaku like. The anime also doesn't fit very well into the bodies of work of its director Mitsuru Hongo (whose Outlaw Star is a perfectly fine time) or its screenwriter Michiru Shimada, both men who have spent most of their working lives producing mildly to quite successful anime of the "popular yet not exactly conceptually riveting" variety that just scream work for hire. It's not that Miss China's Ring is an incredible artistic statement, but it's something a bit different in filmographies that generally tend to the blandly commercial.

Visually, Miss China's Ring is nothing spectacular. It's dominated by muted pastel colours and character design that's not too generic - I suspect we have the manga source to thank for that - without anything in its designs that would be stunning, or spectacular. Which, come to think of it, seems to be the right way to go about this particular anime. This is, after all, not a story of high drama and ultra-violence (even Miss China's fights are on the quotidian side), but rather a soft steampunk tale that charms its viewers by treating the utterly fantastical and whimsical with the same smiling interest it shows for its characters emotional lives. That is, of course, a time-honoured way to treat the fantastical, yet not one that's used in the movies all that often, not even in anime. When I look at how well Miss China's Ring succeeds with this technique, I'm bound to say unfortunately.

How well exactly does Miss China's Ring succeed? I had a bright, dopey smile on my face for its whole final act, and if that's not recommendation enough for you, I can't by of any further help.

 

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In short: Outlaw Star (1998)

The future! Smart-ass ray-gunslinger Gene Starwind and his kid side-kick Jim are operating a combined bounty-hunting/mechanic company on a planet on the backend of the universe. One day, a simple bodyguard-job for the outlaw "Hot Ice" Hilda turns into a of life-changing event that leaves our two buddies with a dead Hilda, a stolen experimental spacecraft navigated by amnesiac bio-android girl Melfina, rumours of a treasure hidden at something called the Galactic Leyline, and quite a lot of enemies. Among the latter are the man who murdered Gene's father (and his bishounen brother) and a large group of Taoist magic using space pirates.

In theory, Gene and Jim are planning to use their new ship to find the Galactic Leyline and the treasure, as well as helping Melfina get her memory back, but in practice, they spent most of the show with various insane and dangerous projects to earn enough money to pay for the ship's upkeep. At least, our heroes are the sort of guys who can turn enemies into friends, so their crew eventually also features an intensely annoying cat-girl and the female wooden-sword-swinging assassin Suzuka, both initially out to kill our heroes. They will probably come in handy once the show remembers it has a main plot.

Yes, Outlaw Star is most certainly one of those anime shows that randomly sticks every idea one of the scriptwriters once had while visiting the toilet as well as every fashionable anime cliché of 1998 into one of its episodes, without a care of any of it fitting together in any way or form.

Fortunately, this scatter-shot approach works out quite nicely for the show for most of the time. There's a sense of glee and delight running through most of the episodes, as if the team producing it just had a lot of fun throwing Taoist magic, spaceships that fight each other with grapple hands, Old West mythology and chambara action - to only take a few of the show's more awesome bits and pieces - into one large, episodic semi-comedic space opera. The same sense of fun runs through the character and object design, a love for the colourful, the larger-than-life and the just plain weird that excuses a certain lack of originality.

This lack of originality and ambition is the show's biggest weakness on the writing side - if you know the character types and the show's basic plotline, you can guess what will happen throughout the series with frightening precision; the writing is keeping on the safe side so much that the show might be infuriating to anyone obsessed with the idea of "The New" in SF. The show's other weakness is the slavish way in which it fulfils certain otaku expectations, and basically writes its own fan-fiction - see the sleazy and pubescent hot springs episode, annoying cat girl, the highly uncomfortable way the show's gay character is treated, or little things like the fact that Melfina needs to step naked into a tank of blue liquid to navigate the space ship. It's by far not as bad as it could be - this is no Neon Genesis Evangelion undermining its own virtues every five minutes - but if you're allergic against this specific part of anime culture, you might find your fun suddenly interrupted by writers with the emotional development of twelve-year-olds.

For my tastes, the show's speed and enthusiasm, its tendency to nearly shout "awesome!" at every new bit of space opera weirdness it can come up with and the small fact that these bits often are as awesome as the show thinks they are, more than make up for these flaws.

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