Forgotten Anime: “Blue Sonnet”

Distributor: US Manga Corps (Central Park Media, USA)
Original Year of Release: 1989 - 1990
English Video Release: 1994 - 1995, NTSC VHS, Japanese Dialogue with English subtitles (also released as a NTSC Laserdisc, Japanese Dialogue with English subtitles in 1995 and PAL VHS, English Dubbed in 1996, in the UK)
Japanese Title: Red Fang Blue Sonnet (Akai Kiba Blue Sonnet)
Runtime: 5 episodes x 30 mins

Sonnet Barje grew up in the slums of an unnamed US city. After being treated in an extremely cruel manner by a group of men, she discovers that she has the power of telekinesis and ends up taking revenge. Later she is rescued by Dr Merikus and who transforms her into a cyborg for the evil organisation Talon. A test in the Arizona desert, where Sonnet takes on and defeats a platoon of tanks and helicopter gunship, shows she can take on whole armies with the use of her heightened ESP solely by herself. Dr Merikus sends Sonnet to Tokyo to investigate a girl named Lan Komatsuzaki. Dr Merikus believes she is the “Red Fang”, an “esper” from a long line of Ancients who possessed incredible powers. Sonnet transfers into Osei High, Lan’s school, where Sonnet gains a reputation as being a “super lady”. She can speak seven languages, tops all her classes and is exceptional in any sport she plays. Lan however feels a certain unease about Sonnet and is wary of her. When she tells her guardian, investigative journalist and author Jin Kiryu, he laughs it off. He has taken care of Lan since she was small, and reminds her that her abilities as an esper are a gift and though she should show anyone her powers, she isn’t a monster. However Kiryu is aware that something inside Lan is changing her.

To test the hypotheses that Lan is an esper, Sonnet begins to create a series of accidents to force Lan to use her power. Sonnet telepathically drops a large neon sign on top of Lan and her friend Naru as they walk to school, but Lan moves the sign reflexively with her powers, out of harm’s way. This leads Lan to be more suspicious of Sonnet. Later that weekend, Naru, Lan and her half-brother Wataru head to the Japanese Formula One race as they received free tickets from Kiryu who was unable to attend due to work. In one of the corporate boxes above the general seating, Sonnet devises another accident in which she makes one of the race cars veer out of control and crash. This causes a chain reaction of accidents and eventually one of the race cars is flung high over the safety barrier into the crowd and into the path of Lan, Naru and Wataru. Lan almost subconsciously calls her powers and flings the car to the top of the corporate boxes, out of harm’s way. However Wataru has been badly injured. A man named Shuichi Torigai helps the group and goes with them to the hospital. Lan tells the ambulance officers that she has the same bloody type as Wataru and offers her blood for a transfusion.

Soon Wataru’s condition is stable. Torigai warns Lan to be careful of Sonnet as he leaves. She is rather surprised at this advice and tells Kiryu that she feels that Sonnet is after her. Sonnet is convinced Lan is the Red Fang. Dr Merikus arrives in Japan to confirm. He is greeted at the airport by representatives of Talon’s Japanese front, Azumi Industries. But upon travelling to the company’s experimental base in Narita, a group of bikers force them off the road and attempt to take Sonnet hostage (because as we all know, Japan is full of violent “Mad Max” style bikie gangs that attack people constantly). After making sure there are no witnesses present, Dr Merikus gives Sonnet the go ahead to dispose of the bikers. This display shocks the two representatives from Azumi, however they are also impressed. On a hunch Kiryu begins to investigate Azumi Industries after he learns that they are researching psychic powers as well as cyborg technology. The investigation takes him out of town which gives Talon a chance to pounce on Lan.

Dr Merikus orders Azumi agents to pose as policemen to trick Lan into thinking Kiryu has been hurt in an accident and take her out on a ship. There they lock her up, and Dr Merikus tells her that if she doesn't teleport, a time bomb will explode killing her and destroying the ship.While at first she panics and resists her captor’s request, eventually at the last second before the bomb explodes, Lan teleports and escapes. Dr Merikus has now confirmed she is the Red Fang and proceeds to the next stage of his plan. Knowing that Talon is after them, Kiryu decides to take Lan to an Esper expert, Dr Onagara. Although initially dismissive, Onagara is soon convinced of her power when Lan senses his granddaughter watching her, and later his horribly disfigured daughter Yuri, also an Esper. Onagara suspects that Lan has a hidden personality and she is suppressing her powers. After a number of tests where in one she leaves his house in ruins while under hypnosis, he concludes that she has complete control over her power. It's only recently that it has become more powerful. This due to the fact that she is finally "developing" as a woman (she's 17 but has only just gone through the final stages of puberty). Through the hypnosis, Lan also discovers that when she was young is was involved in a plane accident and was raised by wolves for the first few years of her life!

Unfortunately for Dr Onagara and his guests, Talon agents including Sonnet and Dr Merikus surround the house and take Lan and Kiryu forcefully. Dr Merikus orders them to kill Onagara, his assistant and his granddaughter, but Sonnet, who is beginning to question his tactics, secretly stops the bullets from killing them. The Talon agents set the house ablaze, but Onagara's assistant, daughter and grandchild are saved by Wataru and Torigai (or as Wataru nicknamed him, Bird). Bird reveals himself to be a prototype cyborg that Dr Merikus created. He rebelled and now fights against Talon. Meanwhile Lan and Kiryu have been taken to a secret laboratory. Talon wants to make clones of Lan so that they can have an army of Espers to do their bidding, and forcibly remove ovum from her to be planted into two surrogate mothers and a mechanical womb. Bird, Yuri and Wataru attempt to hatch a plan to rescue Kiryu and Lan.

I first saw this series in about 1996 when I started to get into anime quite heavily. I saw an advert of a local anime club, and I just wanted to come along to see some “Patlabor” TV episodes (the first two films had just been commercially released in Australia). However the club was also screening the first episode of “Blue Sonnet” that day. I was hooked. This show plays like a well written B-grade/exploitation flick. There's gratuitous violence, a bit of fanservice and nudity, 1970's-like superhero elements (a la Tatsunoko superhero shows like "Hurricane Polymar") and it's just completely over the top in just about every aspect. The oddest thing I discovered about this series was that was based upon a shoujo manga. Yes that's right. It began in the shoujo anthology “Hana to Yume” in 1975 and eventually finished in 1989. The manga which the OVA itself is based upon is actually called “Akai Kiba (Crimson Fang)” and the story is taken from an arc called “Blue Sonnet”. The manga was written by Masahiro Shibata whose only work published in English has been “Sarai” which was published by Comics One.

From what I’ve seen the OVA, like the manga does have a load of violence and nudity in it. Girls love exploding heads and naked women apparently. It’s kind of hard to fathom really. But then again look at the violence and bloodshed in CLAMP's “X” manga. However I think producers of the “Blue Sonnet” anime may have decided to amp up the violence and nudity content to make it more appealing to male viewers. Even though Sonnet is the bad guy, you really feel for her, especially after the opening sequence which shows her back story. She's been abused sexually, raped and is forced to be a prostitute. Of course she later violently kills the evil men that did this to her with the use of ESP. During the series Sonnet begins to change after she goes to school for the first time and realises what a normal life is like. She begins to question her life of violence and killing. The opening animation also shows Lan attacking Sonnet with her powers. This unfortunately doesn't happen in any of the episodes. Lan is just a normal reserved girl, except for the fact she has ESP, but she never lets anyone know she has it. She only uses it when she's in danger or upset, and then it's used almost subconsciously.

As the manga was rather long, it’s no surprise that there's a lot of storyline compacted into the five episodes, so with this review I had to cut out mentioning a lot of the minor characters and incidents that appear in the show. There are some real beauties. Dr Onagara's daughter, Yuri, helps out Lan when the Talon agents attack Onagara's house. Her back story is great. She was living with her boyfriend and has had a daughter with him. Yuri is a strong Esper, and Onagara wants her back to perform experiments on her. She won't go, so he tells the boyfriend about her abilities, and he leaves her. Absolutely depressed she attempts to kill Onagara and then throws herself on a fire. She is saved by Onagara's assistant, but due to injuries from the fire ends up a mute, blind and horribly disfigured for life. In another short sequence Lan has reoccurring nightmares of herself being carried nude by black hooded men towards a satanic looking altar. My absolute favourite scene though occurs in the fourth episode. Lan tries to escape from the lab with one of surrogate mothers. They head down a chute to escape guards and end up in a big vat of dismembered body parts and dead foetuses. Later, still trapped in the vat, the surrogate mother goes insane and cuddles one of the foetuses screaming that it's her baby and no one can take from her. Truly top grade horror-exploitation there. Still with all the horror and gratuitous exploitation-like atmosphere, the show never seems to take itself seriously. This is why it works so well.

The only real negatives of the show are the animation which isn't that spectacular for its time, especially for an OVA series. There’s also the lack of a conclusive ending. Will Lan and Bird continue to fight Talon? Will Sonnet finally rebel against Dr Merikus? Annoyingly these questions aren't answered in the anime. Like a lot of short OVAs based upon long running manga series, the series partly seems to be a ploy to get people to buy the manga to see what happens next. This OVA was released by Central Park Media (CPM) at a time when they had a dubbing deal with Manga Video in the UK. Manga dubbed a lot of their early titles, mainly because it was cheaper I suppose. Dubs like “Project A-ko” and “Dominion Tank Police” were a part of this deal. For whatever reason Manga didn't take on this project until two years after the US release. CPM didn't release it dubbed in the US either. It's a bit unfortunate as it's a really underappreciated anime.

Even though it may look like another needlessly violent anime that distributors jumped on in the early 1990's in spite of that fact, it is a really good show. It's origins from a shoujo manga probably helped the series have more depth than it would of had if it was an original screenplay. I really love this show so much that it was one of the anime which inspired me to review these out of print gems. The show hasn't been re-issued on DVD in Japan, so it looks like this is another anime title that will be lost forever. It's such a shame really. The good news is that despite being out of print for close to two decades, copies of the US and UK VHS tapes can still be easily found in the second hand market. “Blue Sonnet” is a hard anime to recommend to people. New fans will probably get turned off by the animation. Old fans might dismiss it as another overly violent anime that western anime distributors jumped on to make a quick buck. It's anything but that. It's a strange mix of violence, B-grade action, horror with elements of ESP and shoujo manga. It's a completely unapologetic action/horror series that's incredibly fun to watch. If you want something completely different from your average 1980's OVA anime, hunt down a copy of this series.