SLAYERS MOVIE

DESCRIPTION

CAST

OVA AdventureSlayers Special
MOVIE AdventureSlayers RETURN
NOVEL ActionSlayers
ANIME AdventureSlayers

REVIEWS

• 

  TheRealKyuubey

  50/100
  This is what they mean when they say no D&D is better than bad D&D.

  Legend tells of a wandering sorceress... Short of both stature and temper, and lacking in endowment, she is nevertheless a force to be reckoned with. She is Lina Inverse, the spooker of dragons, the slayer of bandits, the traveling partner of Naga the Serpent. Together they venture wherever the wind takes them, dealing with a constant barrage of miscreants who either don’t recognize her from the tales, or just ignore the tales entirely, and foolishly challenge her over-powered might. Like, seriously, they do this a lot. Throughout this all, however, something strange has recently begun to happen... Lina’s been having dreams of a young male warrior and his blonde lover discussing a demonic invasion. In order to uncover the truth behind these visions, Lina will have to embark on an epic quest of swords, sorcery, frogs, jellyfish and hot springs as she bravely faces untold danger for a chance to make her boobs bigger!

  And earn some money, I guess.

  In 1995, JC Staff produced two adaptations of the Slayers light novels. There was a television series, helmed by director Takashi Watanabe, and a series of movies and OVAs which would be directed by Hiroshi Watanabe. No, I don't think they’re related to each other, nor to Shinichi Watanabe or Shinichiro Watanabe, who are also directors. There are a lot of Watanabes in Japan, it’s like one of their most common family names. Anyway, since the two Slayers properties were not intended to compete with one another, that meant it would probably be a bad idea to have them adapt the same exact material, so it was decided early on that while the TV version was going to explore the main canon of the books, the theatrical and stand-alone titles were going to follow supplemental material, mainly a handful of prequel novellas from a couple of years before Lina met Gourry and the others. Thus, Slayers Perfect was born, and since it was the first of it’s line to reach the states, we renamed it to Slayers the Motion Picture!

  Anyway, while the two entities were produced by the same company, they could not look more different, and that’s due to both the directors involved, and the overall budget situation. The movie was obviously going to have more money poured into it than the TV version, and... Well, okay, there were actually two directors on this film, I just said Hiroshi earlier because his name has become more closely connected to the franchise, as he was the one who JC Staff kept on for the rest of the Slayers movie/OVA canon. Both he and Kazuo Yamazaki had some very impressive work behind them before signing onto this project, and it definitely shows. The animation in this movie, at least for the time, was exquisite. There is an extensive amount of attention that gets paid to even the smallest of in character movements, down to such seemingly insignificant details that they could have easily gotten away with skimping on.

  Running animations are fully articulated, rather than relying on loops, and even in the most comically slapsticky moments, a character’s physical proportions are never broken or off model, nor does everyone move the same way, no, every essential character’s physiology is attuned to their personalities. Environmental effects are on point, from rustling trees to violent waves, and while I’m going to have some comments to make about the magic effects later on, they are drop dead beautiful at face value. Attacks like the Dragon Slave would eventually come to look a lot better in the show, but the movies get off to a much better start with their depiction. The character designs are a bit of a mixed bag, as some of the bandits that Lina has to deal with are a little too over-the-top in the fashion department, but the trade-off to that is that the main villain looks surprisingly cool in both of his forms.

  The English dub is also kind of a mixed bag, but to its credit, we are talking about very early ADV Films. What happened was, ADV had the license for the movies, but not the series, and I’ll definitely give them credit for trying to cast Lisa Ortiz to reprise the lead role, but she was apparently busy and couldn’t make the commute to ADV studios in Texas. They instead held auditions and cast Cynthia Martinez to what was apparently her first ever voice role, and yeah, I’ve talked about her before. Cynthia Martinez is the kind of actor who has a very unique voice(Think Veibae and Shylily) which gives her an extremely limited range, but she is damn fucking good within that range. She is also very easy to miscast, and while I don’t think she was miscast as Lina, it does unfortunately show that this was her first major gig. There are moments where she nails the character, bringing the exact same kind of energy that Ortiz did, and there are moments where she takes the character in a different direction, and still dazzles on her own merit. There are also moments where she kind of falls flat, not seeming to know what to do, or where the constant cracking of her voice(which works for this younger version of the character more often than not) goes a bit too far and makes her hard to listen to.

  She also at one point breaks out a half-hearted Brooklyn accent for some reason, which suggests to me that ADV didn’t really take this dub too seriously, as further evidenced by the constant bad impressions and hammy performances of most of the side cast. It honestly kind of feels like the director took a "Just try a bunch of random shit and we'll use the take we like most" kind of approach. Lina is inconsistent, but there are two genuinely good performances in this dub, although I should at least tell you to take that word with a grain of salt, because one of them... Kelly Manison’s performance of Naga... Is supposed to be annoying, and Manison understood the assignment. Her over-the-top laugh is actually slightly less grating than her sub counterpart, whose laugh sounds less like a human voice and more like a car alarm. She does a great job capturing the sub version’s arrogant haughtiness. The other performance I like is Andy McKavin as the villain Joyrock, who actually sounds way more interesting than the sub version, as McKavin is clearly having a blast hamming it up as an evil toad demon. Honestly, though, you could go either way with this one, dub or sub is fine.

  If you were to say that I have been a fan of the Slayers franchise for a very long time, you’d be both a little right, and a little wrong. I kind of have the same relationship with it that I have for the Starship Troopers and Pirates of the Caribbean franchises... I started watching it a long time ago, I love it no matter how silly it gets, and I’m partial to even the worst entries, although my willingness to defend them may vary. For this entry, the story was cobbled together from a bunch of shorter standalone stories in the prequel books, and it is unfortunately really easy for a movie like that to turn out poorly. Take for example the one or two odd Disney sequels that were strung together from the first few episodes of a doomed TV series. These movies are incoherent and full of dropped plot points and plot-cul de sacs, and they’re not fun to watch. And yet, even THEY have a better sense of story structure than Slayers the Motion Picture does. If we were to break this movie down into three distinct acts... As the time honored film making trope of the “Three act structure” dictates... Acts one and two would still kind of merge together, as the exact same shit happens in both. For the first forty minutes of this one hour long movie, the following process happens at least four or five times.

  1: Lina is minding her own business, maybe also dealing with Naga.
  2: She/they get attacked by random, interchangeable thugs.
  3: Thugs present little to no challenge and are dealt with quickly.
  4: Our heroes continue on their way.

  This happens repeatedly, and while the challenges presented do vary, the ease of which they are overcome do not, and this sort of material only ever works as a joke once in most stories, especially in such a short time frame. You would have to put a lot more work into making repeated instances feel constantly funny. Throughout this process, there are a few motifs going on. The first is, Lina keeps running into people who claim to be some number out of ten most powerful fighters on the island, this joke goes nowhere and the punchline is always the same. The second is, apparently these bad guys are being controlled by jellyfish? The third is, Lina’s dreams about the warrior boy... And finally, we keep getting looks at this ugly little frog boy named Michigan J Joyrock... Yes, he was named after a one trick pony Warner Brothers character who existed in near total irrelevance and obscurity until he became the mascot of the WB TV network... And frog boy was behind it all, mwa-ha-ha-ha!

  Throughout this process, nothing really interesting happens, other than a few of my very particular buttons being pressed. I think it's weird that so many people are obsessed with Lina's chest size, especially here where she's younger than in the series. I don't like how there's basically no stakes... Nothing is ever really on the line for Lina or Naga, even Lina's dreams aren't more than a mild nuisanc and the connection they have to Joyrock is mind-numbingly coincidental. They would have lost nothing by just not getting involved with anything. Also, one thing I cannot stand is when heroes recklessly cause collateral damage, and everyone just ignores the fact that the cars/buildings they destroy probably had some formerly alive people with them. This one isn't that bad, I've seen worse from various comic movies and the first episode of FMA Brotherhood... You just have Naga summoning a rock dragon that falls directly into a village and destroys a bunch of TOTALLY UNOCCUPIED houses.

  It’s at this point that Lina is offered money to kill the BBEG, and finds out about the fountain of growth, which means it took her forty minutes in this one hour long movie to actually have any kind of motivation whatsoever. Up until this point, Lina is just kind of traveling with Naga, because that’s just what you do with an annoying bimbo who keeps claiming to be your rival, just reacting to things happening to them with no real driving force behind their actions. That’s the first two acts, people, and the third one, while containing the best individual moments of the film, is honestly pretty rushed. After the king hires them to go to the ruins that Joyrock resides in, they get some sleep, and they just go there... And instead of exploring the ruins and experiencing some spooky and fun dangers, they just burrow to the bottom level at once and skip the dungeon entirely. Hey, movie... Hey, hey movie... If you’d cut a few of the bandit attacks earlier, you could have been able to include a much more fun extended dungeon sequence.

  Anyway, pretty much everything with Joyrock from here on out is pretty cool in content, it just needed a lot more time to work out and not feel so jarringly fast. The pacing in this movie is downright atrocious. I love everything about Joyrock, from his design to his dub voice, to his backstory and how it connects to Lina’s dreams, to the fact that he’s a villain who actually fucking kills people so the audience can buy him as a legitimately intimidating threat. Somebody call Sky God Eneru and tell him that’s a thing! He is the highlight of the movie, and his battle with Lina, Naga and more is pretty awesome in terms of the artistry behind it... Once again, more time and resources being spent here instead of being wasted on the repetitive bullshit from earlier would have been appreciated. Not only would that have helped accentuate the strongest aspects of this film, it would have cut down on the boring, frustrating material from earlier.

  And speaking of material from earlier, remember when I said before that I was going to have more to say about Lina’s magic attacks? Look, I don’t mind that her attacks look different from the way they were animated in the series. That much is actually kind of expected. I don’t mind that they sometimes have different names, like Explosion into Explosion Array, that’s just a small difference in translation. What bothers me is that the spells themselves are inconsistently portrayed, just in this one hour movie alone. For an easy example, her two most commonly used attacks are explosion array and fireball, but no two uses of these attacks look the same. Does she need to draw a circle around someone for explosion array, or does she not? The answer is yes. Does she have to twirl her finger slowly with the flame to use fireball, or can she just point at someone and say it? The answer is yes. Are her attacks only capable of slapstick levels of violence, IE charring someone but then they’re okay in the next shot, or are they capable of actual tangible damage?

  Oh wait, that last one is an issue in the series too... Actually, I’m pretty sure all of these issues were present in the TV series, I just didn’t think about them because I was being sufficiently entertained. Yeah, getting sucked into a story, feeling engaged and stimulated, that kinda shit does a world of wonders for your suspension of disbelief. It’s easy when you’re not struggling to keep your eyes open through repetitive, damn near plotless scenarios involving two characters who could be a lot of fun if one wasn’t so annoying, and the other wasn’t just drifting through the story with no drive or motivation. This movie is only one hour long, and yet it feels like at least twice as much. Hell, remember when I reviewed the first season of the series, and I said it reminded me of a really good Dungeons and Dragons campaign? This is the exact opposite, and I’m not gonna lie, if I had a DM who wouldn’t stop attacking me with random thugs that were easily disposed of, only to then rush through a kind of interesting BBEG plot in the last 15 minutes, I’d be feeling just as unmotivated as Lina.

  Slayers the Motion Picture is out of print, which is unfortunately the state of most Slayers media at this point. You can still find Slayers Revolution and Evolution:R on physical media from Funimation/Crunchyroll, but for everything else, you’re either going to have to shell out some serious money for used media, or put your pirate hat on. Thankfully, this particular movie is available to watch in both English and Japanese on Youtube.

  I am not saying there’s nothing good about Slayers the Motion Picture. Honestly, if you look hard enough, there’s some good shit in every Slayers property, you just sometimes have to wade through some shit to get there... And sadly, this movie is front-loaded with shit, to its detriment. The best way to approach it is probably to start from the thirty-eight minute mark and just pretend nothing existed before that, but you would be missing a few important pieces of context and information, so even that’s not ideal. On its own, though, this movie is both paced and executed horribly, making it really hard to appreciate the few very bright and shiny diamonds hiding in its rough. Still, if you’re game, the amazing production values and occasional funny joke might just be enough to get you through it.

  I give Slayers: The Motion Picture a 5/10

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