Those Who Hunt Elves
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Okay, it seems that these days it isn't just The Army of Darkness' Ash trapsing around the dimensions. It seems that, somehow (and no one's telling me exactly how either) three people from Japan move from our universe to a fantasy realm populated by all sorts of fantasy-style creatures. And they just happen to bring along a huge fully-fueled combat tank loaded with all sorts of high-powered firearms. Yeah, right. I had the same reaction. | Anyway, it seems that each of the three have unique powers. There's the mature actress who can deceive anyone with her art, and the muscle-bound and brain-scarce martial artist guy, and the girl in some type of a schoolgirl-like uniform who knows all there is to know about weapons and tanks. Mmm-hmm, this is definitely a fantasy. So you see these three don't want to remain in the fantasy realm, they want to go back home. Of course, with their powers they could take over the realm but I guess they miss miso soup and Pokemon too much. The trio enlist the aid of an elven sorceress who attempts to cast a spell to send them back home, but the muscle bound dude totally ticks her off with some comments from the peanut gallery and the spell misfires. Now it's sent to the four corners of the realm in pieces, each piece etched on the bare skin of an elven maiden. Five pieces in all. So our intrepid trio must search out the five pieces by finding elven maidens and disrobing them to see if they have part of the spell. Simple enough? First off, this is perhaps the ultimate in pandering to those of the "pointy-eared" fan club. Almost to the point of parody. The storyline is disjointed, inconsistent, and hard to explain other than the basic plot of three travelers going from town to town stripping the clothes off of elven women. There's something disturbing about it too. The humor is quite low-brow and far from subtle, consisting of characters running around and acting quite psychotic. I guess it could be considered fun, but I've long grown out of accepting this as quality humor. I mean, Dragon Half did this over five years ago and was much, much better at it. In the AD Vision -- sorry, ADV Films -- dub, the voice acting is passable although over-emotional voice inflections dominate over the more subtle tones that seiyuu in Japan seem to have mastered. Audio and picture transfer is of the usual par quality, and transfer artifacts are few. Right now only VHS is available and I don't know when the DVD will be out, but I suspect there won't be too much of a difference in picture quality with perhaps an improvement in sound quality as seems to be de mode of most anime DVD releases. Would I recommend this? Well, it is a good example of the "zany" anime, not as crass as Ping Pong Club and not as energetically delightful as Dragon Half. It's worth a view, though it remains to be seen if the humor can keep up over the entire series run. |