Format: Region Free Blu-ray, NTSC, Japanese Dialogue with optional English and Japanese Subtitles
Length: 93 minutes
Production Date: 2014
Currently in Print (as of writing): Yes
All is not well in the realm known as Sanctuary. Saint Sagittarius Aiolos has escaped the realm with a baby, the reincarnation of the Greek goddess Athena. Aiolos is being pursued by two other saints; Capricorn Shura and Gemini Saga. Both have been sent by the realm’s current pope as he has deemed Aiolos to be a traitor and sentenced him to death. The ensuing battle takes the trio across the galaxy. While Aiolos manages to kill one of his pursuers (Saga), he is struck down by Gemini and ends up crashing somewhere in the Himalayan mountain range. Sometime later a man named Mitsumasa Kido and his butler Tatsumi are exploring caves within the Himalayas and come across the golden cocoon which holds the baby Athena inside. Using the saint’s power named Cosmos, the dying Aiolos shows Mitsumasa what has happened and who the child is. Mitsumasa decides to adopt her and keep her safe.
16 years later and the baby has grown up to be Saori Kido, adopted granddaughter of the late Mitsumasa Kido. Saori has the ability to heal people, something which she finds a little worrying. She often wonders why she has these powers. While being driven to an appointment, Tatsumi explains to her that she is the reincarnation of the Greek goddess Athena and that her grandfather found and trained four Saints to protect her. The pleasant drive on the highway is interrupted by several explosions which Tatsumi attempts to avoid. Eventually he is forced into the guardrails where the car comes to halt. They are being attacked by two Saints sent by the Pope from the Sanctuary. Their aim is to assassinate Saori. Saori is captured by one of the Saints and is about to be killed when Saint Pegasus Seiya arrives and fends him off. Soon Saori’s other protector Saints, Cygnus Hyoga, Dragon Shiryu and Andromeda Shun, arrive to help protect her from the killers.
Later that night at the Kido mansion, the four Saints along with Tatsumi and Saori discuss what their next move should be. The Saints from Sanctuary haven’t made a move until now. The mansion comes under attack from Saint Leo Aiolia who proclaims he is there to retrieve the Sagittarius Cloth (the armour left by Aiolos 16 years ago) and kill Saori who he believes is the fake Athena, with the "real" one is currently ruling Sanctuary. To avoid further conflict, Tatsumi hands over the Sagittarius Cloth, but Saori’s powers (known as Cosmos, like the Saint’s powers) manifest themselves and become known to Aiolia. He begins to have doubts about the Athena currently ruling Sanctuary and asks Saori to journey to Sanctuary in order to prove she is the true Athena.
Afterwards Saori makes the decision to go to Sanctuary the defeat the Pope. Traveling through a dimensional portal to the realm of the Sanctuary, the group discover they must pass through twelve Zodiac Temples each with its own Saint guardian in order to arrive at palace where the current ruling Athena resides. This almost certainly means they well have to fight all twelve Saints in order to advance to the palace, unless they can convince each Saint otherwise. But tragedy strikes early with Saori being struck by a poisoned arrow. They have twelve hours in order to pass through all of the Zodiac Temples to reach the cure to save her from a certain death. Some of the Zodiac Saints become their allies, while others refuse to listen to reason. The group soon decide to split up and battle the remaining saints separately in order get though the Zodiac Temples faster.
This film came out a while back, but I left it on the backburner in my wish list of discs to buy. I eventually bought it a couple of weeks ago from a Book-Off after I accidentally came across in Ikebukuro when I managed to get lost trying to find Animate. This is another Toei Animation CG anime film based off another old anime/manga property. Now you may remember the last film to get this treatment was “Space Pirate Captain Harlock” in 2013 which, and let’s not mince words, sucked massive balls. It was a fucking awful film which was compounded by the fact there was no uncut English dub version and all uncut Japanese version had English subtitles which bafflingly changed some characters names, even though you could clearly hear the Japanese voice actors saying the correct name.
I’ll talk more about this film in a minute, but I should probably talk about the “Saint Seiya” franchise first. Based on the hugely successful manga (and anime) by Masami Kurumada, which ran from 1986 to 1990, it essentially created its own short-lived genre; boys in armour, which “Samurai Troopers (aka Ronin Warriors)” was the other major franchise of the genre. While still relatively unknown to western anime and manga fans, the anime version was a major hit in Spanish speaking countries as well as France. Unexplained in this film is that in the original anime and manga versions, all of the Saints took part in an organised competition to obtain their “Cloths”, i.e. battle amour, in order to defend Athena. Here it is explained that Saori’s grandfather somehow obtained the Saint’s Cloths and managed to recruit and train the Saints. The how and why of how this happened is of course glossed over. The Cloths in the original versions of the franchise are mostly kept in large metal boxes, which the characters often lug around on their backs when not in use. The movie sensibly transfers the Cloths and the boxes inside small dog tags (via interdimentional storage I guess) which hang around the character’s necks. The other big change from the anime and manga versions is moving Sanctuary from somewhere in Greece to somewhere on another planet or another dimension. It’s a little bit hard to figure out where it’s located.
Directed by Keiichi Sato, who’s most famous for directing the “Tiger & Bunny” TV series, the best thing you could say about the film is that it looks fantastic for the most part. The big action sequences look epic and very well rendered. The character animation is pretty handled fairly well. But it looks a bit too cartoonish I think, more so in the comic relief parts of the film. Seiya himself ends up being the clown of the Saints, and a lot of the time his humour doesn’t really work or falls flat. Actually you could probably say that about all the attempts at humour in the film. For example there’s a very bizarre sequence involving the saint Cancer Deathmask whose lair has singing masks embedded into the floor and pillars of his temple (trapped victims who dared to enter his temple). I was expecting a lot of fighting sequences in the film, but not a song and dance routine by one of the Saints. It’s truly one of the oddest scenes I’ve seen in an anime in quite a while. The biggest problem I had with the film is that by the half way mark it just becomes one giant slug fest. It’s all a bit tedious and in the end I sort of didn’t care what happened to any of them. If these action sequences where broken up a bit I probably wouldn’t have minded as much.
For all the action and spectacular sequences a number of times I felt the film was a bit flat and dull. It doesn’t help that a fair wack of the film looks like a cut scene from a game. However this is a problem that's shared in a lot of CG anime over the last decade or so. I will say the film is certainly a lot more fun and interesting than Toei’s god awful “Captain Harlock” film which for whatever reason has been widely distributed in the west over this film. Odd when you consider both franchises are virtually unknown outside anime fandom. I still haven’t been sold on CG anime yet. Everything I’ve seen so far, maybe the exception being “Knights of Sidonia”, just isn’t all that good. I think a lot of this has to do with story or script issues though, not the medium itself. At any rate, this film was decent. The story was a little clichéd, but stays true to the “Saint Seiya” story. The main draw here is the spectacular action sequences which really make the film. 6 out of 10.
Remaining Backlog: Five series, 12 movies, two OVAs also waiting for second parts for two shows to be released before viewing them.
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