...There was "Golgo 13: The Professional."
World-renowned professional assassin Duke Togo - code-named "Golgo 13" - has just eliminated his latest target, Robert Dawson, the 29-year-old heir to Dawson Enterprises and the son of billionaire oil industrialist Leonard Dawson. The elder Dawson swears bloody vengeance against Golgo 13 for killing his only son, using all manner of underworld hit-men, government- and military-trained professional mercenaries and genetically altered superhuman freaks to take out Golgo 13, who carries on with other unrelated assignments that take him from California, to Italy, to Brazil, and finally back to the United States.
Golgo 13 is a ruthless and amoral professional assassin - one who is 100%, lethally committed to his chosen line of work. He is so devoid of humanity and emotion, that much of the film's emotional drama evolves from other character's reactions to him and his activities, which lends the picture a rare degree of unpretentiousness and amorality. Yet, you still root for the guy for some reason, even though he seems completely unrelatable. And YET - yet! - he is also identifiably human: he gets wounded several times during the course of his frequent and bloody battles, and still keeps on to his next job.
"Golgo 13: The Professional," first released in Japan in 1983, was the first Anime' (Japanese animation) film to be adapted from the long-running Manga (Japanese comic book) series that was first created in 1968 by Japanese author Takao Saito; two other live-action films based on the Manga had been released previously in Japan - one featuring the late martial arts superstar Sonny Chiba. The film was directed by Osamu Dezaki and it's a remarkable achievement in several respects.
First of all, "Golgo 13: The Professional" is as "realistic" an Anime' film as this sort of production is likely to get - "realistic" in the sense that the action and drama feels real and fluid within the context of an animated motion picture. In an irony, while many Western films made in the late 1990s and early 2000s would imitate the frenetic visual style and pacing of Anime', "Golgo 13: The Professional" mimics the tone and style of Western action films and spy-thrillers, with a film-noir visual touch (including "split screens, sketchy freeze-frames, and psychedelic visuals," according to a review from Allmovie) and a jazz-infused film score by Toshiyuki Omori (which is reminiscent of Lalo Schifrin's work on the American TV series "Mission: Impossible" and other action films from the 1970s).
The film's action scenes are fast and violent. And did I mention that there was a lot of violence in this movie? As well as frequent and explicit sex scenes & nudity (and a sequence of a brutal and repeated rape)? "Golgo 13: The Professional" is definitely animation for adults - animation for adults that has since become quite common on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, but not so much so in 1983. And it needs to be repeated, that such scenes of explicit bloodshed and graphic sexuality were also something that the film picked up from Western film productions made in the '70s and early '80s.
Lastly, while "Golgo 13: The Professional" may not always get the recognition it deserves in this aspect, this film does have some strong historical significance: it was the first animated film - Japanese or otherwise - to incorporate computer-generated imagery (CGI) with traditional hand-drawn cel animation. The sequence in question comes at the film's heavily-touted pre-"Die Hard" climax set at the Dawson Enterprises high-rise in San Francisco and involves Golgo 13 ascending the building while being assaulted from the outside by the military helicopters that were sent to dispatch him. Despite this ground-breaking special effects sequence, the CGI visuals don't match up very well with the hand-drawn animation - the only real flaw here, though I guess the technology just didn't exist at the time to blend CGI and hand-drawn animation more seamlessly.
I first saw "Golgo 13: The Professional" on VHS right after I graduated high school back in 2004, and I also remember that it was one of the first truly adult Japanese Anime' films I ever saw - since upon a viewing today I was reminded of the extremely bloody violence and sex scenes, though I don't remember the film's story being so complex and having a number of different plot twists and turns over the course of its rapid-fire 94-minute running time.
"Golgo 13: The Professional" is a film worthy of any Anime' film fan's library and comes highly recommended. (And I also finally saw where Quentin Tarantino lifted a famous scene from this film and re-created it into the Anime' sequence in "Kill Bill." You will know which scene I'm talking about when you see it.)
7/10.
World-renowned professional assassin Duke Togo - code-named "Golgo 13" - has just eliminated his latest target, Robert Dawson, the 29-year-old heir to Dawson Enterprises and the son of billionaire oil industrialist Leonard Dawson. The elder Dawson swears bloody vengeance against Golgo 13 for killing his only son, using all manner of underworld hit-men, government- and military-trained professional mercenaries and genetically altered superhuman freaks to take out Golgo 13, who carries on with other unrelated assignments that take him from California, to Italy, to Brazil, and finally back to the United States.
Golgo 13 is a ruthless and amoral professional assassin - one who is 100%, lethally committed to his chosen line of work. He is so devoid of humanity and emotion, that much of the film's emotional drama evolves from other character's reactions to him and his activities, which lends the picture a rare degree of unpretentiousness and amorality. Yet, you still root for the guy for some reason, even though he seems completely unrelatable. And YET - yet! - he is also identifiably human: he gets wounded several times during the course of his frequent and bloody battles, and still keeps on to his next job.
"Golgo 13: The Professional," first released in Japan in 1983, was the first Anime' (Japanese animation) film to be adapted from the long-running Manga (Japanese comic book) series that was first created in 1968 by Japanese author Takao Saito; two other live-action films based on the Manga had been released previously in Japan - one featuring the late martial arts superstar Sonny Chiba. The film was directed by Osamu Dezaki and it's a remarkable achievement in several respects.
First of all, "Golgo 13: The Professional" is as "realistic" an Anime' film as this sort of production is likely to get - "realistic" in the sense that the action and drama feels real and fluid within the context of an animated motion picture. In an irony, while many Western films made in the late 1990s and early 2000s would imitate the frenetic visual style and pacing of Anime', "Golgo 13: The Professional" mimics the tone and style of Western action films and spy-thrillers, with a film-noir visual touch (including "split screens, sketchy freeze-frames, and psychedelic visuals," according to a review from Allmovie) and a jazz-infused film score by Toshiyuki Omori (which is reminiscent of Lalo Schifrin's work on the American TV series "Mission: Impossible" and other action films from the 1970s).
The film's action scenes are fast and violent. And did I mention that there was a lot of violence in this movie? As well as frequent and explicit sex scenes & nudity (and a sequence of a brutal and repeated rape)? "Golgo 13: The Professional" is definitely animation for adults - animation for adults that has since become quite common on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, but not so much so in 1983. And it needs to be repeated, that such scenes of explicit bloodshed and graphic sexuality were also something that the film picked up from Western film productions made in the '70s and early '80s.
Lastly, while "Golgo 13: The Professional" may not always get the recognition it deserves in this aspect, this film does have some strong historical significance: it was the first animated film - Japanese or otherwise - to incorporate computer-generated imagery (CGI) with traditional hand-drawn cel animation. The sequence in question comes at the film's heavily-touted pre-"Die Hard" climax set at the Dawson Enterprises high-rise in San Francisco and involves Golgo 13 ascending the building while being assaulted from the outside by the military helicopters that were sent to dispatch him. Despite this ground-breaking special effects sequence, the CGI visuals don't match up very well with the hand-drawn animation - the only real flaw here, though I guess the technology just didn't exist at the time to blend CGI and hand-drawn animation more seamlessly.
I first saw "Golgo 13: The Professional" on VHS right after I graduated high school back in 2004, and I also remember that it was one of the first truly adult Japanese Anime' films I ever saw - since upon a viewing today I was reminded of the extremely bloody violence and sex scenes, though I don't remember the film's story being so complex and having a number of different plot twists and turns over the course of its rapid-fire 94-minute running time.
"Golgo 13: The Professional" is a film worthy of any Anime' film fan's library and comes highly recommended. (And I also finally saw where Quentin Tarantino lifted a famous scene from this film and re-created it into the Anime' sequence in "Kill Bill." You will know which scene I'm talking about when you see it.)
7/10.