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Column by Scott Green

Anime Preview Guyver: The Bioboosted Armor Volume 1: Days of Future Past To be released by ADV Films November 14th, 2006 Based on episodes 1-3

Heralded with the tag line "Meet The New Face of Ultra-Violence". the ideal Guyver is as follows: the situations starts with a straight set-up.  Teen hero Sho Fukamachi, his buddy Tetsuro Segawa and his crush Mizuki Segawa are menaced by the operatives  of Chronos, a shadowy corporation / conspiracy.  Nothing that deviates too far from a minimal plot needed.  Confronted by squads of field troopers and 80's G.I. Joe style uniforms, the point man will take of his helmet, his body will enlarge, then twist, eyes melt, skin rips and features distort into a thick man-beast: a furry bear with stacked muscles and enlarged bat-ears, humanoid dino-slug-eels, or some other muscle pack humanoid chimera.  Sho responds by calling upon the Guyver suit, standard issue super-hero armor, except a bit too biological, with knobs and sockets that move a bit too much on their own.  What happens next is what makes a proper Guyver work.  With the beauty of a yanked spider-limb's detached twitch, Guyver's foes and/or Guyver himself get brutally mangled in  a quick, clearly resolved death match.  Guyver is all about the bad death of the horrible beastie challenging the humanoid-alien-anthrod-ish hero.  While not quite a Go Nagai style active challenge to widely held sensibilities, it does relish is position at the hind end of the artistic totem pole.   A clear cut, unambiguous, smash-mouth power fantasy, good Guyver features plenty of this.  Bad Guyver is stingy or slow to build.  In the language of an alien race that bioengineered specimens of Earth's life to create organic weapons, "Guyver" means "out of control."  And that of sort half-clever assertion of an unapologetic violence over seriousness stance encapsulates the tone for the franchise pretty well.  Laughability be damned, there are interesting aspects of mythos, but more to the point, it's a teen in a blue exoskeleton-like armor who is indestructible and levels huge amounts of damage.   The gimmick is that, generally, Guyver kills rather than fights.  He does a lot of ripping.  Ripping limbs of man-rhino-lizard people.  Ripping open the chest of stocky wolf-men.  Ripping his own chest open to fire his trump card energy blast. A Guyver work is meant to capitalize on "Did you just see that?!" moments.   More violent than a -Man comic (except Devilman), it's the kind of bloody "mature" fare that will appeal to male teens and adults with retrograde taste. Yoshiki Takaya's manga, inspired by the impulse to put more blood into Shotaro Ishinomori-style hero tokusatsu (Kamen Rider or Kikaider), was previously adapted into a direct to video OVA in the early 90's (and two live action movies, the first of which featured Mark Hamill and Jimmie Walker).  The 12 episode work was put out on two now out o print DVDs by Manga.  Opening credits tend to be poor points of comparison for the precise nature of a work of anime, but in this case, for the most part, it captures this and the quality fairly well. It's starts with a sequence in Earth's primordial age that gets a bit longer every couple of episodes. In Chariots of the Gods fashion, "god" like beings arrive on the boiling planet and begin tweaking things. Cut to a human heart beating under the pectoral of a chitinous breast plate. Fleshy orbs move in sockets along the cranium's temples. Exhaust spews from mandible-like openings. Then the creature lets loose. An elbow blade slices through the chests of advancing floes. Finally, Guyver opens his own chest to unleash incinerating streams of energy. The 26 episode TV series, that first appeared on Japanese TV in 2005 features an opening with more of Sho running, then Guyver running, with cuts to a worried looking Mizuki. Finally Guyver dodges some enemy fired laser beams (Guyver comes from an age where invoking "laser" was still a bit cool). To the credit of this new adaptation of Guyver from Katsuhito Akiyama, veteran director of Thunder Cats and Gall force, the first episode does feature plenty of skinned monsters. A rhino-lizard squares off against a gorilla man whose muscle are emphasized, due to the fact that the thing lacks skin (unlike the OVA, skinned thing's degenerating condition is not emphasized). Skinned thing pulls the pin off a grenade, killing itself and taking chunks of the outside off lizard thing. These exposed muscles are more graphic than most of the elements of these episodes. Flashes of blood spurts tend to be the extend to which this work goes. If these episodes are evidence of where the series' sensibilities rest, this TV series isn't going to cast a concerted gaze on the graphic results of violence. Guyver does not attempt to be shocking like Gantz of Elfin Lied.  It's blood doesn't flow with the volume of something like New Getter Robo.  It doesn't try to invoke real mortality like Blue Gender. Contrary to the mode of a work spotlighting brutality, acts are left off screen only to be referred to.  The work opens with a fugitive.  In the OVA this creature happens upon a truck driver.  After the man returns to his vehicle, the monster pile drives it, leaving an aftermath of explosive wreckage.  In the new TV work, two police officers find the man/beast.  A bit of one's blood flies at the lower quarter of the screen. The scene cuts away and nothing of two's death is depicted except through second hand rumors suggesting it looked like a gorilla the victims them apart. It could make sense to downplay these particular deaths. Guyvers is not supposed to be violence that is comparable to real world tragedies. It's supposed to be harmless, almost pornographic killings of men that have given themselves over to becoming homicidal beasts. But thats not the case here. For one thing, cop killing beastie is humanized with its own family (pictures of a pretty wife and cute young daughter). For another, the results aren't more spectacular later on. Ultimately, Guyver is comparable to a violent phase of an action oriented wide-audience work like Ruruoni Kenshin or Inu-Yasha. Maybe slightly more grizzly. Because Guyver's fights are quick, it needs to hit hard as it hits fast. Leaving images to the imagination isn't the point of Guyver. The trouble is that Akiyama is not sharp in his direction of the series.  He lets the mundane scenes that dominate these episode remain mundane rather than build tension.  Consequently, a high-school students entangled with a corporate conspiracy concept neither transcends its familiarity or establishes an effectively menacing footing.  The series' hero isn't actively annoying, but he is flat; a student council member who worries about doing the right thing even before the stakes had been established.  His friend/sidekick is slightly more interesting given that the character is a large geek who is also proactive, almost to an impulsive degree.  In concept and implementation, the circumstances amount to a teen who finds a powerful armor.  Without starting in the middle of the events or offering an origin with the capacity to connect to a viewer, along the lines of a a Stan Lee/Jack Kirby origin story, Guyver relies on presentation to differentiate itself. The generic nature of the characters seems actively enforced.  Yoshihiko Umakoshi, a character designer whose works have been both varied and distinctive, including works on Berserk, Airmaster, Marmalade Boy, Mushishi, Ojamajo Doremi, and Zipang, turns out a cast that does little to stick out.  Here, Umakoshi updates the look of Guyver's characters, but sets them with simple, smooth lines minimally capturing features. As mentioned in the description of the Guyver ideal, the thickly muscled Guyver monster design and the suit itself are iconally 'Guyver', but the people who populate, and to some degree, drive the work are unexceptional, almost o the point of anonymity. Every-people could be suited for a super hero work, but they don't make it interesting.  There are cases where the action is fast and smart.  Guyver sees a bullet about to fly into the brain of his friend and  with instinctual speed he fires a vaporizing beam at the projectile. These brief, original effect-laden innovations give the anime the rapid dynamism a new Guyver needs.  Unfortunately, more often than not, the movement is a bit lethargic.  While not quite static, much of the construction is limited.  This can be seen in cases as simple as monsters whose mouths do not move as they speak.  Action scenes often feature gestures rather than motion as a set up for effects shots. In the new series, Guyver with grab arm monster's a move it. Often, there is a straight forward, evenly framed vision of the combatants, oft setting stillness with leisurely plans. When movement does happen, it is assisted with motion blur backgrounds. The results don't make for sizzling exchange. The OVA would set up situations where Guyver and a monster would lock hands in a contest of strength.  In pro-wrestling, that would be called a rest-hold.  In the OVA, the monster's hand would shatter under the pressure of Guyver's grip, then, after the creature's arms were inevitably broken, the scene would linger on the splintered bones. In the new version, the outcome is merely a bit bloody.   The expectations that the anime sets puts a premium on attacks that offer motion and novelty.  A fight in which Guyver Muay Thai kicks a squid-thing in the head becomes a stand out in the field of the series action sequences.   For an action fan, whether it is worth while to wait the majority of an episode for these results is open to question.  Beneath that question is the trouble that the series has not built a contract with its viewers.  That if they wait through a given amount of time, something spectacular will be displayed.  An example would be Fist of the North Star.  A certain amount of build will result in Kenshiro spraying the innards of his opponents across the screen.  This could mean predictability and stagnation, but it is also enticing. Three episodes in, Guyvers action is average and its quantity of blood is coming at a volume slightly larger than the sub-genre average.