In short: Arion (1986)

Original title: アリオン

A version of mythological Greece where the three sons of Cronos, Zeus, Poseidon and Hades, are involved in a bitter war. Young Arion (voiced by Shigeru Nakahara) is the son of Demeter and Poseidon. His mother, blind through circumstances she isn’t willing to disclose to her little kid yet, has left the wars and intrigues of the Titans behind her. These intrigues haven’t left her behind, however, thus Hades kidnaps Arion and tricks him into believing Zeus to be responsible for his mother’s blindness. Arion killing Zeus would not just be an act of vengeance but also the only cure for Demeter’s blindness. Trained into a pretty impressive yet also really stupid teenage killing machine by Hades, Arion sets out to kill his way through various of the Titans. He will eventually meet his father and side with him for a while; fall in love with his own sister Resphoina, as is tradition among his family, and eventually become instrumental in the fall of the Titans.

I’m usually all for Asian artists doing weird stuff to western mythology and religion; cultural appropriation is fun to watch/read/listen to for me. Alas, nothing Yoshikazu Yasuhiko (who adapted his own manga with this) does to Greek myth here is terribly interesting, even if you can cope with its titular character not being a horse. Most of the many, many changes to Greek myth here seem in service of making it less interesting and more generic in a very particular boring mid-80s anime way, and none of Yoshikazu’s ideas on display are an improvement on the actual myth cycle. The characterisation of most of the gods and half gods in the film is so different from their sources, it’s not even a story deconstructing the myths, but just one using their names.

Worse still, the film’s storytelling has all the hallmarks of the kind of adaptation that doesn’t know what to cut from its source material – which is no wonder given that the creator of said source material co-writes and directs – so Arion also never manages to focus on any theme or idea but instead throws out an astonishing number of them it then has no time to actually use well or think through. Characters are never actually developed, instead, we are told their character traits; relationships never quite make sense because there’s no space to develop them either.

In a quite impressive turn of events, the film still manages to feel like a slog.

The animation side is generic and very of its time but certainly very competent – I particularly like the use of cheap psychedelic effects whenever magic of any kind comes into play – but the script is so weak, there simply never seems to be much point to any of it.