Gunsmith Cats (ガンスミス キャッツ) is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Kenichi Sonoda. It was published in Kodansha's seinen manga magazine Monthly Afternoon from 1991 to 1997 and was followed between 2004 and 2008 by a sequel series Gunsmith Cats Burst which included the same characters and situations. The series describes the adventures of young women fighting crime in Chicago.
Nineteen-year-old Irene "Rally" Vincent operates the titular "Gunsmith Cats" gun shop but also works as a bounty hunter,
which is the impetus behind many of the stories. She is assisted in
both activities by her housemate, former prostitute "Minnie" May
Hopkins. Rally is an expert combat shooter and marksman with just about
every firearm in existence, as well as a brilliant driver. May is an
explosives expert, knowing the inner workings of and many uses of all
manner of explosive devices. Teenage ex-burglar and lock-picker Misty
Brown later joins the team and there is also Becky Farrah, a top, if
expensive, source of information on underworld activity.
Bounty hunting has of course led Rally to make many enemies, most
notably Gray, the leader of gangsters whose use of armaments, including
bombs, have likened them to terrorists; and Goldie Musou, a leading
figure in the Mafia who uses drugs to manipulate people to the point that they can be brainwashed into killing their nearest and dearest. Bean Bandit,
a man who specializes in delivering illegal goods, often features as an
alternate ally or enemy—depending on the behavior of his clients, most
of whom are being hunted by Rally.
Attention to detail.
Shelby Mustang GT500 just because.
OVAs.
A three-part anime adaptation was created. This adaptation is an
original story for the characters but includes several references to the
manga storyline. The character of Becky is given an increased role
compared to the manga.
Produced by OLM and directed by Takeshi Mori and Kazuya Murata in 1995.
The anime was based on the homonym manga series written and illustrated
by the above mentioned Kenichi Sonoda. After leaving anime production company Artmic to work
as a comic artist, Sonoda presented some of his story concepts and
illustrations to Kodansha. These did not impress the editors but an
illustration of two girls caught the attention of one of them, who
suggested Sonoda develop a concept for it. Sonoda stated in an interview
that the drawing was the genesis for the series. At the time Sonoda did
not have any plans for the illustration but decided to expand his
Riding Bean concept into a developed story. Due to licensing issues,
Sonoda was originally unable to use the Riding Bean concept or character
around the time he was creating Gunsmith Cats. However, during the run
of the series the rights were returned to him and he added Bean Bandit
into the series.
Although Sonoda was a fan of the Japanese police drama
series Taiyo ni Hoero!, he decided the show did not fit his preferred
Western style. The story is influenced by American gun-action movies
such as The French Connection and The Blues Brothers. Sonoda chose the
Shelby Cobra GT500 as Rally's car after realizing that the cars in
driving movies from the 70s were often Ford Mustangs. He researched the
various models and selected the GT500 because it was the most powerful
rather than any attraction to the car itself. When drawing guns, Sonoda
would use a combination of magazines and his own replicas. Character
names were taken from American TV shows such as Bewitched and The
Fugitive. The character of Minnie-May was the result of a compromise
between Sonoda and the publisher.
Ladies with guns.
Product placement.
Review.
Gunsmith Cats almost entirely revolves around 3 very American clichés: the fascination for guns, Muscle cars (1967 Mustang GT), and big breasted women. While it's true the Japanese have been somehow infatuated with American pop culture, this OVAs serve as the ultimate example of that. They really tried as hard as they could to pay homage to all these things they love from the USA.Now, whether that is a good or a bad thing, I'll leave it up to you.
Our heroes are 2 chicks that illegally
sell guns in "gun free" Chicago in order to combat oppressive gun
control laws. They are also bounty hunters, because hired guns are
better than a police force. The depiction of Chicago is as accurate and realistic as it gets. However, you can't skip the fact everyone now speaks perfect Japanese. Maybe this story takes place in a different timeline where either Americans speak Japanese as their native language, or they finally started learning different languages to get a wider view of the world's rich cultures. Selecting the English audio track in your DVD/Blu-Ray will obviously render this comment worthless.
GTFO Mustang!
Driving skills.
Pursuing that "we love America in Japan" the OVAs put our ladies against stereotypical enemies America would have. For instance, Natasha Radinov, a Russian spy that seems modeled after a Soviet Union communist extremist. Moreover "her" surname should be "Radinova" suggesting she's a Lesbian stereotype that may seem of poor taste today. What happens next are plenty of ridiculous car chases and
shootouts. Continuing with the Japanese fascination with American pop culture,these OVAs may or may not remind you of The Dukes of Hazzard, car chase wise only because, there are no Daisy Dukes or Dodge Chargers. Neither will you find any of the nudity, and sexual innuendo from the original Manga. Another weak point in my book.
Music wise it comes as no surprise the soundtrack is made to emulate all those 70s action TV shows and films with cars, detectives and spies. Jazz, funk, disco, R&B are all there to get Cowboy Bebop as jealous as fuck.
This as far as Fanservice will get here.
Pages from the limited edition book included in the blu ray set.
Overall, Gunsmith Cats could have been a much more faithful to the source adaptation but instead producers chose to make it a standard made for TV show.Not having every original character, and all the spice they added to the Manga, makes this 3 part OVA a forgettable experience. Even though, the show does have its fans (the Blu Ray box set in different editions proves it) I think Aika, and Shin Cutie Honey, are more faithful to the source material and not afraid of showing a little T&A and sexual innuendo here and there.
And there you have it fellow connoisseurs, Gunsmith Cats! Make sure you read the Manga to get the missing potential the OVA didn't have.
Here's the original 1995 trailer:
Here's the opening in full HD as taken from the Blu Ray:
Hello there fellow readers! We're not dead! (at least not yet) After some months of adulting and of course, watching vintage Anime and movies we return to celebrate the big news: Macross will be legally available outside Japan! And in order to celebrate we'll review one of Shoji Kawamori's coolest 80s works because, we've already reviewed every Macross available to date, so second to none!
クラッシャージョウ(Crusher Joe) is a series of science fiction novels written by Haruka Takachiho and published by Asahi Sonorama
from 1977 to 2005 (an additional trilogy was published between 2013 and
2016). During the late 1970s one of the founding fathers of Studio Nue, Takachiho decided that besides being a designer he would try his hand at penning novels. The result was Crusher Joe, a group of anti-heroes who were not the typical self-sacrificing types but noble in their own right nonetheless. Obviously, these characters casually became the archetype of what a group of anime heroes would be during the 80s.
Crusher Joe was made into an animated film in 1983, and a pair of OVAs in 1989. The film version won the Animage Anime Grand Prix prize in 1983.
The movie and the OVA series are currently licensed for English language release by Discotek Media. Go get them while they're hot!
The original VHS some of us got to rent long ago.
The definitive 80s hero team.
The movie adaptation was produced by studio Sunrise and
directed by Yoshikazu Yasuhiko who's not really done much in terms of
directing, but more in terms of animation direction and character
designs on series such as Mobile Suit Gundam.
In this movie we follow a team of Crushers comprised of Joe (voiced by Takemura Hiroshi), Alfin (voiced by Sasaki Run),
Ricky (voiced by Ohara Noriko) and Talos (voiced by Kobayashi Kiyoshi). Crushers are intergalactic jacks-of-all-trades who will
take on any task for the right price. Joe and his team are tasked with
helping escort a cryogenically frozen heiress to a medical
facility. However, something happens during warp and they end up
nowhere near where they were supposed to go, and the heiress and the
people who hired them are nowhere to be found. The pirates have been
playing them for fools in order to escape, but Joe doesn't like being
fooled and goes to track the pirates down to get his revenge and to
rescue the human cargo.
Crusher Joe isn’t a deep or mind expanding film, instead it’s a fun
action packed, often funny and beautifully animated sci-fi adventure
with great characters. However the world of the crushers is incredibly
well realised with insane attention to detail like many anime features
of the 1980’s. No doubt the novels helped fill in a lot of background
detail to give it that Star Wars-like “lived in universe” feel.
Incredible mecha designs by Shoji Kawamori.
This machinery looks important.
The film’s plot is cleverly linked to set pieces and characters, so you never feel like "hey, whatever happened to watchamacallit?, or "Why did they show that if it didn't add up to the story?".
Everything you could want from an action adventure is in this movie
somewhere. Beautiful women (more nudity would have been nicer), archetypal heroes, bad guys that are both scary evil and comedic enough, awesome mechanical design (what else can you
expect with Shoji Kawamori, Sunrise and Studio Nue all involved) and an
incredibly fun scene where during some downtime our heroes inadvertently
end up wrecking an entire disco after a fight breaks out that
culminates in riot police being dispatched.
Our heroes are such interesting protagonists that it's impossible not to root for them in every challenge they face. Mainstream movies need more slightly gray anti-heroes these
days which is probably one of the reasons why the big screen
adaptations of Marvel’s Guardians Of The Galaxy have proven so popular despite being based upon rusty stereotypes from the past decades.
80s Hero hair.
A toast to heroes!
If you like the look of old school Animé the likes of Space Battleship Yamato, Super Dimension Fortress Macross, and especially Mobile Suit Gundam you’ll love the
movie’s character design and furthermore if you like the work of Sunrise
and Studio Nue you’ll really dig the general world and technology
aesthetic present in Crusher Joe. A lot of Sunrise staff who worked on the original Gundam
shared duties on this film including the director/character designer
Yoshikazu Yasuhiko. Also in a little nod to Gundam there are several
blink and you’ll miss em cameos of the character that would become
Sunrise’s mascot, Haro the little tennis ball-like bouncing robot from
Sunrise’s original Mobile Suit Gundam and later seen in Gundam Zeta. If you're familiar with it, you may find it three or four times during in the movie. There is also a scene featuring a
drive-in movie that features Kei and Yuri the two protagonists of Crusher Joe creator Haruka Takachiho’s other most famous workThe Dirty Pair.
Looking back across 20 years of anime history, the Crusher Joe movie had a lot going for it. The 1983 feature was the first theatrical production of Sunrise, the studio that was poised to dominate much of the anime scene for the next two decades. Shoji Kawamori, gave an early demonstration of his amazing talent for Mecha Designs. It featured the first-ever animated appearance of the Dirty Pair. Star Wars was taking the world by storm, and Crusher Joe was a galactic space opera in the best George Lucas tradition.
Cool mecha.
Beautiful aircrafts.
Plot wise things are unpretentious and straight forward. One is able to glean from the dialogue that Alfin used to be a
princess of some sort before joining the Crushers,
and that Talos was a former associate of Joe's father, but that's all
the history given on these characters. Reading other reviews, I noticed some people saying the main characters lack personal identities beyond cliched archetypes. Things like Joe's the badass leader,
Talos is the heavy, Alfin's just "the girl" and Ricky's just "the kid",
and that's probably an opinion from younger Anime enthusiasts. At the time this movie was made not a lot of characters had these features in common, and while it's true these personality traits became overused during the decade, I wouldn't see this as negative aspect of the movie and subsequent OVAs.
Roughly five years went by before Joe and his team returned to anime, this time in the form of two 1-hour OVA
episodes. Once again we find intelligent stories with a down to earth perspective. Nothing's pretentious. Just the right amount of character development to remind the viewer he's here for the adventure. The shorter running time and more polished look
of these installments make them more watchable for newer connoisseurs that dislike handmade animation and praise boring CGI as an actual artistic feature.
Disco music made a comeback in the future.
Psychedelic future.
Crusher Joe's one definite strength is its
musical score. To their credit both the movie and the OVAs feature full
orchestral arrangements at a time when synthesizers were the preferred
scoring method. Crusher Joe sounds every
bit as grand as Star Wars, Buck Rogers and the other outer space epics
it tries to imitate. Obviously, this is my opinion. Like I've said above, to enjoy this anime at its fullest, you may need to be older in order to understand the technical limitations of the time. A lot of reviews criticize the soundtrack as a no standout generic soundtrack you could be playing in the background while reading, cleaning or doing whatever you do, save for paying attention to the music. To each his own but bare in mind, this soundtrack was actually written and played by real musicians. It wasn't made in a computer app.
Overall I have to say that I really enjoyed this movie. I had been told
before hand that I was probably gonna to like it, but I did not think I
was going to like it as much as I did. The action in this movie was
really good. They did a nice job making it so that our main characters
felt strong and good at what they are doing, but at the same time they
managed to keep them from being so overly strong and cool that no one
would ever be a threat to them. This was shown especially during a fight
at the disco where they would both beat people and get swarmed and
overpowered. Other things I thought the movie did really well was the
animation. The way they portrayed expression in the characters using
more cartoonish animation techniques really did wonders for this movie. I
also really liked that instead of having what the characters were
thinking and feeling show through inner monologue, they used the
animation and expressions of the characters to get that through to the
viewers.
Blink and you'll miss all the action.
Wear a mask and keep the distance.
Now I have a lot of praise for the show, but I also have a minor thing to say. I
think they could have explored a bit more, such as the whole Crushers
organization and some more villain motivations and how they were
connected to the events that took place, but I think they did an OK job
at that anyway. I would really recommend people give this movie a watch. I
don't understand why it's got such a low rating on sites like MyAnimeList , let's not forget this movie won the Animage Anime Grand Prix prize in 1983.
Haruka Takahisho said "...While observing this developing trend, thanks to "Star Wars" and all, I
began to think that maybe my own stories could finally get published! So
I pulled all my scrapbooks from my high-school days out of the storage,
and began "novelizing." It took me two whole weeks to complete, and the
end result was basically the first printing of "Crusher Joe." Now, this
sold rather well, made many people happy, and I was requested to write
sequels to it. And thus, it began its life as a series!"
Bad guys and fast cars.
Somebody's gotta clean this mess!
About the making of the Crusher Joe movie he recalls "...When I finished writing the first "Crusher Joe", the editors
were asking me who I wanted as illustrators for my novel. Without
hesitation, I recommended Yasuhiko Yoshikazu, who worked as the
character designer for "Raideen."
But Mr.Yasuhiko insisted, "Look, I'm an animator, not an illustrator,"
so he steadfastly refused to do any illustrations for me. But, after
three days and nights of constant begging, he finally said, "Oh, what
the hell!" You see, one of the troubles was that Mr.Yasuhiko had this
belief: "Real animators draw using pencils only, because real animators
don't use ink!" But I told him, "It's no problem - You just go ahead and
draw with pencil, then I'll Xerox them and send the copies to the
publisher." He was, at last, convinced. Since that day, Mr.Yasuhiko
worked prolifically not only as an animator, but also as an illustrator,
and even as a manga author.
Because this combination --- Takachiho & Yasuhiko --- had produced a
hit, Sunrise wanted to release "Crusher Joe" as their first original
theatrical anime production. This led to the theatrical version of
"Crusher Joe."
