Slayers Return

Last August I took a look at Slayers Perfect. My final conclusion was that it was a fun little watch, albeit a bit rushed. Its final rating was a 7/10. This week I'm going to look at the second Slayers film, Slayers Return. There are actually five films in the franchise at this point, the last one of which came out in 2001. Is the second film an improvement over the first? Let's take a look and find out.

The film furthers the misadventures of Lina Inverse and Naga the Serpent. A young woman named Saleena finds them and requests their help to save her ... village, which has been taken over and the villagers forced into labour unearthing some strange device. Lina agrees, much to Naga's surprise, when she hears the village's name and remembers tales of elven treasure. The humour in this is highly effective and enjoyable throughout. The story itself is much better paced than Perfect's. It does a good job of building up some suspense and the climax is both funny and interesting.

The characters don't have much depth. That being said, they are very effective from a comedic standpoint. They're ridiculous, absurd, and quirky. They all have a lot of comedic potential and their interactions are really funny.

The art is a lot better than it was in the first film. It's more like the actual series in that it looks like time and effort went into it as opposed to looking rushed. Its bright, vivid and the characters have interesting designs. The action scenes are really well executed and the backgrounds look nice.

The vocal cast remains excellent. Hayashibara Megumi and Kawamura Maria, both amazing actresses, are joined by Hiramatsu Akiko, Ootsuka Akio and Utsumi Kenji, all of whom are masterful at their craft. The music is really splendid as well.

The Ho-yay factor is a 2/10. There are a few moments where things between Lina and Naga look a bit homo-erotic, like Naga telling Lina to pay for her meals for the rest of their lives, but nothing substantial.

That's Slayers Return. It is an improvement over the first film, with a lot of that film's problems being absent. It has a lot of really funny moments, the art is great, the voice acting and music are excellent. If you want a good comedy, check it out. My final rating is a 9/10. Next week I'll finish up March with a look at Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu, unless something unexpected happens.

Better than the first film, for sure. There were more characters this time and it brought back the self-aware humour that I liked so much in the show.

Still absolutely no backstory to either Lina or Naga, though. This came out a year after the original show had ended and more than halfway into the second season. Perhaps they thought fans of the show at the time would watch the movie as well, but that just makes it dated and shallow.

Further more it doesn't help that the hwole film is like 5 scenes max, just stretched out to fit the one hour checkmark. Again, sometimes that ... works, sometimes it doesn't. Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublyof, for example (Why am I comparing Slayers to Andrei Tarkovsky?) can be summed up in only a few scenes and yet it manages to hold your attention for the entirety of the film. Same as Cassablanca, The Cube, Full Metal Jacket, Terminator 1, Breathless (the original from the 60s) John Carpenter's They Live; none of these movies have a huge variety of scenes like the big Hollywood stuff, they just have a few good ones and they make the most out of them. Yet the reason they're so memorable is becase each scene feels complete and adds to the film. There's very little of that in Slayers Return.

Despite the shallow plot, it is a plot. It beats whatever toilet paper tier they wrote in the first movie by a mile and the animation is still very pretty. I loved how blalant the bad guy was this time around. Gotta feel for the guy. So far, of all the Slayers films my money's on this one, even if it's decent at best.

Some interesting tension between Lina and Naga too. If it wasn't obvious before then it is now!

The ending song was nice too; very 90s.

The second film in the Slayers franchise finds Lina and Naga being approached by a young girl with a job proposition. Her village has been enslaved by a bad guy hoping to unleash an elvish creature that will lead him to world domination. Naga and Lina, hoping to make some money, wind up doing battle against this creature in a pretty underwhelming and otherwise unnecessary sixty minute film.

There’s really no point reiterating my thoughts on Naga and Lina, or the animation and music. There’s nothing that makes these films distinct in any way; neither from their predecessors nor from anime movies in general. This one ... has a weak plot, boring side characters, uninteresting action, and can be summed up as: eh. It has an occasionally decent chuckle here or there but I don’t understand the appeal of these. First of all, they have nothing to do with the vastly superior television series. The TV series is well-balanced, with a cast of characters that work off of each other and a plot that allows for enough action and comedy to keep the viewer engaged. The movies and OVA’s, so far, have showcased a very different Slayers, one that isn’t so much a parody of fantasy as much as a stagnant fantasy/comedy of its own.

A friend of mine put it best: the Slayers movies are filler. The problem is, filler is annoying in the context of an ongoing series (such as the Excalibur filler of Soul Eater) but even more annoying when it comprises an entire product (such as this, or the whole seasons of filler in Bleach).

Return isn’t a bad movie; it’s just another average, unmemorable money grab.