Disaster Report: RECORD OF LODOSS WAR: CHRONICLES OF THE HEROIC KNIGHT

The 1980s are considered by many to be the glory days of the anime OVA, but the 1990s was no slouch for the format either.  While the number of OVAs decreased due to Japan’s economic recession and changing trends in media, there were plenty of excellent, influential, and fondly remembered OVAs that came out during that decade.  That being said, in the 1990s animation studios began to view OVAs less as a place to experiment and more like the seed of a potential new franchise, complete with a TV-length adaptation.  Over the next few months, I’m going to be exploring how three very different OVAs got lost in translation in their transition to television in the late 1990s, all at the hands of the same animation studio.  Let’s begin with the oldest of these OVAs: Record of Lodoss War.

Record of Lodoss War began life as a Dungeons & Dragons campaign created by Ryo Mizuno and some other writer friends in the early 1980s.  He would compile transcripts of their game sessions for Comptiq magazine, where they proved unexpectedly popular.  Within a couple of years, he and his friends were using their experiences to create their own RPG system while Mizuno began to adapt those transcripts into proper light novels.  It was not too long thereafter that the first book in the Lodoss War series was adapted into a 13 episode OVA by Studio Madhouse in 1990.  It tells the tale of Parn, a young man who yearns to become a hero like his father.  He ends up on an adventure alongside a group of various warriors, tricksters and sages, including a young elf girl named Deedlit.  Together, the group set out to bring peace to the land by taking on a body-swapping witch, a devious wizard, a mysterious black knight, and a powerful and ancient dragon.

It’s hard for modern viewers to grasp the impact that Record of Lodoss War made in its day.  It came out at a time when Western-style fantasy tales were a novelty for otaku, thanks to a boom of tabletop RPGs and video games.  High fantasy anime were rare, and few of them before or since could hope to compare to the OVA’s lavish animation and Nobuteru Yuki’s elaborate, elegant character designs.  Deedlit in particular became the breakout star of the series and she remains the mascot of the franchise to this day.  It proved to be so influential that much of the OVA’s novelty has been diluted by 30 years of imitators. These days, fantasy anime are a dime a dozen and many a light novel author owes a debt to Record of Lodoss War (even if that influence may be a generation or two removed.)

Record of Lodoss War also did well internationally.  The OVA was first released by Central Park Media (under their U.S. Manga Corps label) in 1995, and proved to be just as much of a hit with American fans as it was with Japanese ones.  It helped that it was more accessible to newcomers than most anime releases of the time, as its reliance on familiar fantasy tropes and stunning visuals made it an easy sell.  It also helped that it received a dub that was better than average for the era.  While modern viewers might find the performances a bit inconsistent and stiff, the English adaptations of both its opening and ending remain a gold standard in anime song adaptation and it would serve as the debut for the beloved dub voice actress Lisa Ortiz. 

With more books to adapt and a worldwide audience eager for more, it’s no surprise that producers would want to make a TV-length Lodoss War project.  Unfortunately, the original staff had long since moved on to various projects, and Madhouse was busy on shows like Trigun and Cardcaptor Sakura by this point.  Instead, the job would go to another studio: Anime International Company, aka AIC. 

AIC had made a name for themselves in the 1980s and 1990s by producing many of the most popular OVAs of the era.  They were relative newcomers to TV anime, having only produced one show before bursting onto the scene with 1995’s Tenchi Universe.  By 1998, they were bigger and busier than ever, but their success was starting to become a double-edged sword.  While AIC’s OVAs and film output looked as good as ever, their TV shows were a different story.  Many of the studio’s best and brightest staff were busy on those aforementioned OVAs and films, which meant that their TV productions were mostly left to the studio's B-squad.  They were churning out eight to ten animated projects per year by that point, so no doubt that tight deadlines and staff exhaustion also affected the quality of their output.  Something ultimately had to give, and it so happened that one of the victims would be the show that came to be known as Record of Lodoss War: Chronicles of the Heroic Knight.  Fittingly, it debuted in the especially cursed spring season of 1998 alongside many other notoriously bad anime, including Brain Powerd, Lost Universe, and previous Disaster Report subject Weiss Kreuz.

Chronicles of the Heroic Knight has long been famous for having one of the greatest anime openings of 1990s.  Part of that is due to the song itself, “Kiseki no Umi.”  It’s one of many fine collaborations between composer Yoko Kanno and voice actor/singer Maaya Sakamoto, who was only 18 years old at the time.  Its exotic beat evokes the rocking of waves as Sakamoto sings of a love that will not only endure separation but the very forces of the elements.  Then there’s the animation, which was was the work of animator Kazuto Nakazawa.  At that time, he was best known as the character designer for the El-Hazard franchise; in more recent years, he’s made a name for himself as a director on shows such as B: The Beginning and Fena: Pirate Princess.  His take on the older characters is simpler than Nobuteru Yuki’s, but manages to retain some of the charm and exquisite detail that made them so special in the first place.  We see some of the old cast set against beautiful and moody locales, the new cast in the midst of battle, and even a Kanada-style dragon!  20 years later, it’s still some of the most impressive 90 seconds you’ll see in anime.

That same opening became notorious as one of the greatest bait-and-switches in anime history.  While it would be unreasonable to for anyone to expect a full-length Lodoss War TV show to maintain the same production values as the OVA, it’s not entirely unreasonable to expect that same show to bear some resemblance to its own opening.  What viewers got was far, far short of even that goal.

The animation for Chronicles of the Heroic Knight starts off poorly for the first eight or nine episodes, and only grows worse from there.  Characters start going off-model more and more frequently, motion grows increasingly stiff and dependent upon poorly done loops, and battles become little more than narrated slide shows.  Bad animation is far from the only issue, though.  It’s clear that the show’s director, Nobuhiro Takamoto, had a vision for this show and that vision was “split screens.”  Every episode he handles directly features them prominently, and every instance is as jarring as it is inept.  Between this and the frequent use of postcard memory-style montages, Takamoto is clearly trying to ape Osamu Dezaki but has no understanding the meaning or purpose behind these techniques, which only further highlights his ineptitude as a director.

The only exception to this parade of animated failure are Episodes 7 and 20, where Kazuto Nakazawa served as animation director.  The split screens (mostly) disappear, everything from the storyboarding to the effects animation takes a step up in quality, the fights become more fluid, and there are moments of wonderful gestures and facial expressions scattered throughout.  In those moments, the viewer gets a glimpse of what this show might have been with just a little more care and talent put into it.  Watching these episodes made me feel a bit like Molly Grue before the unicorn: Why was all this effort made here and now?  Why not before, when this show was still new?  As delightful and unexpected as these moments were, they were all too fleeting.

There’s one more visual flaw, although this one lies with the editors instead of the animation staff.  Like a lot of anime at the time, Chronicles of the Heroic Knight was shot not on 35mm film but on 16mm.  It was more economical, and in the time before HD television the trade-off in picture quality was seen as an acceptable loss.  That said, it was also much smaller in size, which made it harder to physically edit.  Worse still, the editors on this show worked not on a negative but on the original masters themselves.  This meant that more often than not, every shot change leaves an ugly (if brief) scar on the bottom of the image.  These blink-and-miss distractions are all over the show, and in every instance it creates a distracting visual stutter.  While the original OVA got a beautiful HD remaster from its 35mm masters, the TV show languishes in this poor SD state, edit scars and all.

The poor animation of Chronicles of the Heroic Knight exposes one of the great faults of the Lodoss franchise: its writing.  It’s clear that Mizuno and his players didn’t do much to expand upon their characters beyond their respective classes and this didn’t really change in the transition from game to book to anime.  That effort seems to have gone instead into the mythology and politics of this universe.  There’s so much discussion of the conflict between the gods of destruction and light, the exploits of legendary heroes of the past, and the power struggles between the various kingdoms of Lodoss, but it’s always delivered in clunky infodumps that not only fail to make the lore engaging but also stop the pace of any given episode dead in its tracks. These were also problems with the original OVA, but the fine animation made it easier to ignore them.  It's also not helped by the Japanese cast, who are a noticeable step down from the sparkling all-star cast of the OVA.  They aren't terrible, but they don't bring the same amount of energy and character to the proceedings, save maybe for Maaya Sakamoto who is wasted on the useless half-elf mercenary Leaf.

Maybe the lack of complex character writing wouldn’t be so obvious if the story weren’t so biased against certain character classes.  The writers clearly don’t like bards, as the only one we see is nothing but a tag-along and a nuisance.  They don’t have much respect for axe-wielding tanks, who frequently end up dead and immediately forgotten by the rest of the cast.  They definitely don’t respect magic-wielding classes.  At one point in the show, the sage Aldonova outright states that “people usually look for heroes in times of war, and the people suited to being heroes aren’t priests or wizards.  Just warriors.”  The only exception to this are the elves, and that is almost certainly due to the fact that they tend to also be cute girls.  In the world of Lodoss, the only people who get to achieve anything and save the day are guys with shiny armor and swords, and this TV show is obsessed with one sword guy in particular.

Chronicles of the Heroic Knight is constantly held back by its need to remind viewers of its past in general and Parn in particular.  The first story arc is meant to be a reunion of Parn’s party after 5 years as they more or less redo the story from the second half of the OVA, but mostly it’s about reinforcing how awesome Parn is.  Everyone else becomes little more than a cheerleader for him on the sidelines. Not even Deedlit is exempt, as aside from the odd magical assist she's there mostly to imply that the two have since become a couple (even if there isn't the slightest trace of anything stronger than friendship, much less intimacy, coming from Parn).  

This wouldn’t be so much of a problem if Parn were the least bit interesting to begin with, but there's nothing there for the writers to work with.  In the OVA he was nothing but a dumb kid looking to prove himself.  By the time the show starts, he’s already proven himself as a hero so he has nowhere to go as a character and no personality to fall back upon.  The only character to rival him in hype and tedium is Ashram, a ambiguous black knight from the opposing kingdom of Marmo.  So much to-do is made over Ashram's nobility and prowess and the parallels and rivalry he has with Parn, which culminates in a mediocre minute-long fight that ends with a draw as Ashram runs off to start a new series.  When the show ends, the final shot is not of the triumphant cast of new characters or a shot of a peaceful Lodoss but instead Parn and Deedlit riding into the sunset, as if the show was about them all along.  In some ways, Parn feels the ancestor to characters like Sword Art Online's Kirito and all those who came after him: a boring, overpowered cipher of a fantasy hero who doubles as a cheap power fantasy for its young male audience, only this time with a dumb Gambit head-sock.

You would think that things would change after the story undergoes a 10 year time-skip and introduces the new protagonist Spark.  After all, he starts out with a lot more motivation than Parn: he’s the son of a chieftain, but he wants to earn his knighthood through merit alone.  Over the course of the show, he has to learn how to be a leader and to stop overthinking his problems.  This could serve as a perfectly good foundation for a character arc…if the story didn’t keep interrupting it to check back in with Parn.  Poor Spark suffers the same fate as everyone else: shoved to the side so that Parn can show off while everyone praises him  No matter how much things try to change, it always comes back to Parn.

The sad thing is that Spark gets off lightly compared to the rest of the new cast.  Most of them are defined only by their respective races and character classes, and what few story hooks they possess are dropped by the show’s midpoint as it stomps its way from one battle to the next.  The only exception is Neese, the resident white mage/love interest.  Her story feels like something out of fanfiction, as not only is she the super-powered daughter of two former cast members but is herself the magical McGuffin around which the villain’s plan revolves.  Sadly, her fate is to be a damsel in distress, although interestingly enough she manages to save herself from the death goddess that seeks to possess her in the end.  It's not enough to counter the fact that she spent the previous seven episodes doing nothing but crying in pain and moaning Spark's name or that she spent the entirety of her time willingly walking towards danger for no other reason than the plot demands it...but it helps a little.

The last few minutes of each episode are devoted to Welcome to Lodoss Island, a chibi comedy short ostensibly based on the spinoff 4-koma manga of the same name.  I’ve actually read the first volume of this manga (which was also released by Central Park Media), which takes some silly yet well-earned potshots at the story and cast of the original OVA.  It doesn’t bear much resemblance to the short seen here, which is composed mostly of eye-rolling, untranslatable puns and a silly storyline about Spark and Neese taking cookies to a dragon.  It’s actually quite unusual for a comedy short like this to be part of the actual show; typically these were made to be post-credit gags for home video release and sticking it so haphazardly at the end kind of throws off the show's serious tone.  Then again, maybe the staff at AIC were just grateful that they could hand these shorts off to a different studio and reduce their own strained workload.

Record of Lodoss War had been a big hit for Central Park Media, so it was only natural that they would license Chronicles of the Heroic Knight in 1999 and market it heavily in the anime publications of the day.  Sadly, no amount of marketing could hide the show’s faults and fans swiftly declared it a dud. CPM’s dub certainly didn't do it any favors.  It was directed by Michael Arbin, who had been a writer on the OVA's dub.  Sadly, he proved to be a far better writer than he was an ADR director.  It has many of the usual faults of 1990s anime dubs: the dialogue is awkward, the direction is stiff, and its need to stick to the lipflaps leaves it feeling unnatural.  The only highlight is Crispin Freeman, who does his best to give Spark a lot of boyish, affable energy.  He can’t entirely overcome the bad direction, but he’s the only cast member who seems to be trying.  

Record of Lodoss War: Chronicles of the Heroic Knight never really had a chance to stand on its own.  Just as Spark cannot step out of the shadow of Parn’s exploits, so too can this show not escape the legacy of its own predecessor.  Without the beauty and the novelty of the original OVA to support it, the show laid the faults of both the show and the franchise bare for the world to see.  Even if it had somehow lived up to the promise of its opening or overcome the limitations of the source material, it was always going to suffer in comparison.  Even those old enough to remember the OVA prefer to forget that the TV series existed at all, and that might be the greatest kindness it could receive.  

Sadly, this was not the first OVA spinoff series that AIC and Nobuhiro Takamoto managed to screw up.  The year before Chronicles of the Heroic Knight premiered, they had already done some damage to the studio's biggest property …but that’s a story for next time.