クラッシャージョウ/ Crusher Joe (The Movie)

This poster has all the feels.

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 work The 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."

 

You can read the full interview at Animeigo.

 

Here's the original Animeigo movie/OVAs trailer:

 

Here's the Blu-ray box Japanese trailer:

Here's every Japanese TV ad for the Blu-ray box set release: