Demon City Shinjuku

CPM

82 minutes
English/Japanese
English Subtitles
12/01/1998

I've never liked those U.S. Manga Corps keepcase slips, the bar down the side with "Anime DVD" printed in really big letters. I know what I'm buying, I don't need something I can read while legally blind to tell me. It's just kinda garish. But hey, at least they're not making snapper cases, but that's much like a guy spitting in your face instead of directly in your eyes. It's better than nothing, but you'd probably rather have neither of them than the choice between one or the other. On the DVD tip itself, it contains one of those wonderful"Meet the Cast" special features where you get to see things that you're going to see in a few minutes/already had seen a few minutes prior. I don't get it, but I guess this means you're getting a big hunk of phlegm both in the face AND the square in the eye. Wonderful!
Demon City Shinjuku is the story of a boy who would never grow up and his faerie companions. No wait, that's Peter Pan. Shinjuku is about this terribly tough guy named Revi Rah (Whose name is remarkably fun to say) who totally busted up a lot of stuff in Tokyo. Revi reminds me this mishmash of Billy Idol and David Bowie from The Labyrinth. It's one or the other, sometimes its both, but one thing is clear: The Japanese totally have a secret crush on 80s American hard rockers, and possibly the basic tenements of "Glam".

Demon City Shinjuku is all about our boy Kyoya, your very standard impetuous youth that has to save the world but doesn't really care to do so. All he wants to do is make soda cans levitate in the air and slice them down with a wooden sword. And I say "Well, why not? What's the harm?" You've gotta do what you love, be it soda cans or dub actresses who force Southern accents onto poor, unassuming animated Japanese waitresses. Okay, fine, so you've got to make a living, but sometimes enough can just be enough

Ten years prior to the main events of the film a man, Kyoya's father, is fighting with the wonderfully named Revi Rah on top of a building. You'll know Genichiro, the father, because he has that standard beard the TRUE badasses have, loses TWO limbs in the fight. Even after all this he's still going. But then gets knocked down into a pit. It's all really very sad and touching. It's a powerful testament to the human spirit, Genichiro losing all those limbs and whatnot, and I think we all learned a lesson that day we first saw it on the Sci-fi Channel's Saturday Anime. The lesson is this: If you're going to have a guy that has a beard like that and dies before he gets more than three lines off, you really should have him voiced by Mike Reynolds. It's a stretch of logic to even comprehend how this man doesn't have a part in this movie. It's STREAMLINE, man.

I wouldn't say to you that Demon City Shinjuku is particularly well put together or pushes any boundaries or anything but it's still solid many of the important fronts. Kyoya is your basic 'save the world' guy. He's a high schooler, but this is not all too easy to pick up on. The dub never mentions it and the guy looks like he's not a day under 25. Sure, it's kind of weird that he's got a crush on the daughter of the President of Japan, who looks more like she belongs in a pair of feetie pajamas than anything, but I just figured "Hey, it's Japan! That's what they do over there!", I didn't think that this would be the first show in the world where a character actually looked older than they were.
Other than Kyoya's mercurial attempts at dodging age classification there's nothing in Demon City Shinjuku that you haven't seen done somewhere else, anywhere else, and maybe better too! There's an obvious subscription to the 'weirder = better!' mentality and it's pretty easy to describe the movie as a version of Wicked City without any of the blatantly gratuitous or just plain gross sex that peppered that movie. Demon City Shinjuku doesn't include any gun toting super-secret agents, but it steers clear of mouth rape worms too, so I'm willing to say that the field is pretty much even in that respect.

This is old school anime at it's best. I mean, this was hearkening back to the late eighties anime with all their ridiculous monsters and curses where they don't belong in the dub. You've got crazy teleporting huge spider guy, gender ambiguous illusion weaver thing, seductive acid spit snake woman, scary flaming child ghost girl. Oh, the list is just so beautiful! I could watch this over, and over. And since this is one of films that came on Sci-fi when they had their Saturday Anime... I did. I must've seen this movie twenty times, not including the three or four times I've seen the DVD.

Don't get me wrong, nothing really gets new, I never pick up stuff I missed the first time around. I don't get fresh and bolder insights into the characters personality. However I DO get to see the aforementioned badass villain, the sultry redheaded snake woman, a ring that shoots lasers, a two headed German shepherd, a midget Latino with rocket-powered roller-skates, and a hell of a lot of soda cans getting sliced by a wooden practice sword. That being said, I don't really know if there's anything else I can give to you to provide more of an impact.