Area 88

Overview:

In the last couple years, Area 88 has seen an explosion of popularity here on MAL. This makes it a rather tricky title to review. It used to be criminally underrated, but now it's actually in danger of becoming overrated. While Area 88 is a strong OVA and does a number of things really well, it also has some aspects that really bug me.

The Psychological Effects of War:

Area 88 is entirely devoted to showing the horrible effects that war has on the human psyche. It's not just PTSD or even the dehumanizing effect of how soldiers learn to see their enemies. Once you go to ... war, it's immensely difficult to adapt back to civilian life. Soldiers have a hard time relating to civilians, who have never been in real danger and can't possibly understand what they've been through on the front lines. This leads to social isolation, depression, and often suicide. Many former soldiers become mercenaries because they feel they don't have a home outside the battlefield.

Literature devoted to this topic bloomed after World War 1 with the writers of the "Lost Generation" like Hemmingway, Wilfred Owen, Remarque, etc. In the Western world and especially the United States, these themes made a huge comeback in films, shows, and literature of the 1970s and early 1980s following the Vietnam War. It was this second wave that directly inspired Area 88. The mangaka, director, and anime writer had never been to war themselves, but they saw the critical success of American movies like Deer Hunter, First Blood, Platoon, etc. They wanted a piece of that pie, so we got this anime. To be fair, it's pretty damn good and handles the topic with respect. Unfortunately, the plot is...kind of a mess.


Plot: (Spoilers Ahead! Skip plot section if you don't want anything spoiled)

Shin is a Japanese commercial airline pilot who is in love with the daughter of an airline CEO. Unfortunately, the CEO is an evil asshole and collaborates with Shin's traitor "friend" to create a ridiculous scheme to get rid of Shin. Do they put a Yakuza hit on him? Nope. Do they pay off a waitress to falsely accuse him of rape and fire him? Nope. Do they get him drunk and trick him into joining the Iranian Air Force during the Iran/Iraq War? If you guessed that last one, congratulations! You win!

I'm dead serious, that's really what they went with. Now they can't call it Iran for legal reasons, but it's a Middle Eastern War raging in the 80s with Soviet fighter planes vs. US fighter planes. It's clearly supposed to be the Iran/Iraq War. Shin of course rejects this once he sobers up, but the Iranians absolutely REFUSE to let him back out. The fate of the war clearly hinges on this commercial pilot with zero experience piloting fighter jets, doesn't speak a language anyone understands, and has no desire to be there. It turns out the Iranians were smart like a fox because this airline pilot is immediately the best fighter pilot to ever live...for no reason! Even Erich Hartmann and Manfred von Richthofen bow down to Shin. Oh, and he can instantly speak Farsi, or they all learned Japanese...or the writer wasn't thinking.

Shin becomes a super successful pilot and gets all over the news as a modern fighter ace. This infuriates evil CEO, so he commences what might be the most pants on head retarded sub-plot I've ever seen in anime! He flies to France to hire the Italian Mafia to steal an F-16 and fly it into Iranian airspace to somehow find and shoot down a specific pilot! Jesus fucking Christ! This is "galaxy brain" shit! Shin keeps surviving while his co-pilots all die. He's able to get out of the war but can't adapt to civilian life. Instead, he decides to return to the battlefield and go out in a dramatic blaze of glory! That last part honestly feels like something Hideo Kojima would write...minus the nanomachines.


Art:

The dogfights are well animated and well-choreographed. This is some beautiful, hand drawn 80s animation that has aged very well. The character art has kind of a Leiji Matsumoto feel, but it works. I don't have anything negative to say about the art, it's pretty spectacular.

Overall:

I feel like I've been unfairly, overly harsh on this anime, but I can't discuss this title without mentioning some of the issues. Maybe this would work better if it were set in the modern Congo with 2 grizzled mercenaries meeting. One is an American soldier who fought in Iraq and the other is a Russian soldier who fought in Chechnya. Area 88 is beautiful to look at and has all the potential in the world, but the show we got is more a flawed diamond in the rough than it was a flawless masterpiece. That's just my thoughts on it though. I would still definitely recommend watching it!

Area 88 is a 3 part OVA that adapts the manga Area 88, written by Kaoru Shintani that was published between 1979 and 1986. The OVA released between Feb 5 1985 and Jun 15 1986, and produced by Studio Pierrot. It was directed by Hisayuki Toriumi (Tekkaman)

Area 88 follows Shin Kazama, a pilot working for Yamato Airlines. Shin gets tricked by his best friend into signing a contract that ties him to the foreign legion of a remote country called Aslan, where he gets stationed at Area 88. The foreign legion are almost like hired mercenaries. Aslan has been split into two sides and a ... civil war has broken out, and both sides are doing everything they can to win this war. Shin just wants to get out of this hell and get back to his normal life and his girlfriend, but there are only three ways to do that. One way is two serve his three years, another is two earn 1,5 million dollars to pay himself out, and the third way is to desert.

I have to say, the story in this OVA series sounded fairly interesting going in to the show. However, after a while I realized that it wasn't quite as interesting as I thought it would be. The dogfights were cool and all, and I liked seeing Shin struggle with having to kill people just to buy his own freedom, however, when we first meet Shin he has already killed quite a lot of people, so I also feel this disconnect from him since he's already turned into a very capable killer. I feel like one of the things this show is going for is trying to sympathy towards Shin and his situation, cause it is a very shitty situation for him, but ultimately it just felt kinda cheap to me. Especially when his "friend" who tricked him into signing the contract is portrayed as such a one dimensional villain.

The characters in this show felt very standard in my opinion. You have our protagonist Shin Kazama who's the unlucky soul who got tricked into fighting in a war he wants nothing to do with, and all he wants to do now is go home. Then you have Micky Simon, who ends up becoming one of Shin's friends at Area 88, but again there is not really that much to him apart for a little backstory that explains why he's there. You also have Shin's girlfriend Ryoko Tsugumo who's the daughter of the owner of Yamato Airlines. Her entire role in this is basically just to worry about Shin and eventually trying to bring him back from Area 88 when she realizes that he has been tricked and sent there. The last character I wanna touch on is Satoru Kanzaki. He has been Shin's best friend since they were at the orphanage, and together with Shin they both became pilots working for Yamato Airlines. Satoru is very jealous of Shin though, cause he is a better pilot than him and he got the daughter of the company, and Satoru just hates people who are more successful than him in general, so he plots to send Shin away, take over Yamato Airlines and steal Ryoko away from Shin.

The animation in this series is something I have to give credit. It looks really good, and no, I am not just talking about Shin's fantastic hair. The movement is very smooth and the attention to detail in the fights were extremely cool to look at. It made me very immersed in the aerial combat which is a huge part of the OVAs.

The music in this show was pretty decent in my opinion. While nothing I would listen to outside of the show, it did complement the series fairly well. But at the same time, there is not a single piece of music that I felt stood out in the series.

Overall I have to say that I'm disappointed in this series. I was expecting something a little better than what I got. We basically got two stories wrapped up in one. One story was about a man who had been unwillingly drafted into the millitary to fight in a war that he has nothing to do with, and the other story was that of a long distance relationship and believing and trusting the other. However, I do not think that any of those things were handled all that well. I will even go so far as to say that if it were not for those fantastic dogfights on display I would not have liked this at all. That more or less saved this series for me and made it an ok watch, since it is such a big portion of the series. But when they were diving into backstory or trying to explain why things had worked out the way they did for everyone, I just felt like it was lacking all the way through. I wish I could be more positive on this show, but sadly I just feel like it has a few too many problems when it came to telling it's story, and I think it would have been way better as simply a series about millitary pilots with cool dogfights.

My flatmate and I are both anime people. There\'s just not enough stuff out there, so every now and then, when a "classic" series surfaces, we\'ll have a look at that. Being big on Macross Zero and Yukikaze, I thought Area 88 might have been an interesting watch - aircraft anime before the age of CGI. I mention my flatmate because it is from him I gleaned the phrase that so succinctly describes Area 88\'s many failings: The Powah Of Cool.

Kazama Shin is a top airline pilot, cozy with the company boss\'s daughter and poised to become a bigshot. So, naturally, ... his best friend hoodwinks him into signing a mercenary pilot\'s contract in order to nick all that from him. But he cannot take Shin\'s Powah Of Cool. Against the odds Shin survives, and his candyfloss-haired squeeze happens to see him and his Cool Powah pictured in a magazine. Given hope by his Powah Of Cool, she tries desperately to save him, but time is running out as the enemies of the Fictionalistan mercenary airbase Area 88 is advancing. Shin must stay alive long enough to raise the $1,500,000 buyout fee. He must learn to kill to stay alive. And so on.

Now, in all fairness, back in 1986 this was probably the cutting edge of animation. The attention to detail was probably groundbreakingly good, with many sleek aircraft faithfully reproduced. Probably. But in 2007, it has aged badly. What we are confronted with here is not dissimilar to the famous car chase in Bullitt, in that this may have been amazing, influential and formative in its time, but most of what it has since inspired has undeniably eclipsed it in every way. Now, it\'s extremely dated, and the likes of Macross Plus and Yukikaze are so far ahead it\'s difficult to take it seriously now. Only the uniquely different aircraft sounds remain even remotely impressive.

Characterisation is also extremely formulaic and by-the-numbers; a supremely skilled yet emotionally vulnerable hero, a sickeningly ultrafeminine, vulnerable and ineffectual heroine, a villain as inept as he is recycled, a clutch of cardboard-cutout manly men of varying morality as supporting cast, the odd spot of blatant racial stereotyping for good measure...even for 1986, this aspect of Area 88 is far from groundbreaking. The development of these characters towards the end defies all logic in its attempts to hammer home ideas about the terribly terrible, tragically tragic things war does to men and the people they love - things we\'ve all heard about umpteen times before, and things that sit a little uncomfortably with the glorification of air-to-air combat.

And how it just loves to glorify that. Here, in the aerial battle scenes, the Powah Of Cool is most in evidence. Shin and his buddies have so much of it that they barely need twitch to destroy 10, 20, 30 enemy fighters; the number of planes downed must run into hundreds of thousands every year. A brief burst of cannon fire will bring down an enemy, yet they never come close; enemy missiles are dodged or evaded, but Shin\'s missiles always strike home; Shin dodges and jinks like a hoverfly with Parkinson\'s, but enemies drift across his gunsight as if he were in a shooting gallery. Flying a fighter jet is apparently as easy as a stroll in the park, at least for Shin.

Yet despite his Powah Of Cool, Shin has never been able to reconcile himself to the killings he must commit in his role as Area 88\'s number one combat pilot. Now, you may be wondering at this point what precisely is stopping him from just getting in his plane and leaving, blowing away anyone who tries to stop him with his Powah Of Cool. Me too. All the way through, I wondered why he didn\'t do this; but this idiocy is as nothing to the way things progress in the final story. Suffice it to say this becomes a characteristically classic Japanese tragedy, in a way few people who claim a modern mindset will understand, let alone sympathise with.

Overall, this is one for history-of-anime completists or the most determined old-style anime fans only. Modern aircraft anime has this beaten until it cries in every way. I found I really had to force myself to watch all the way to the end, and I was counting the minutes until that moment arrived.