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I can’t tell which is more impressive, that this sprang from the energy of Streets of Fire or that 13 Sentinels sprang from the energy of this. 

The direction is genuinely kinda… bad(!) and has way too few flourishes of style for what this parade of empty calories it is and even moreso considering where it takes its influence. A prime example of showing its hand and how its not up to snuff when the montage at the end trying to go for a Streets of Fire falls completely on its ass as the TO BE CONTINUED finale reaches its crescendo. It’s all so dumb and nonsensical and no one acts like people or react to anything with the gravity each situations calls for…

…and yet. Maybe it is just that absolute wild manic energy of throwing EVERYTHING at the wall to see what sticks, having way too big ideas for this one film, prematurely ending as it truly dramatically begins. It is way too bold to dislike and even its flaws are super charming in their own way. The fact that it puts on no airs of substance or artistic merit makes the oscilation between the sincerely jovial messy baseline and how unhinged and hard it can truly go just astounding at times in how nothing seems to have stopped or been reworked after the first draft stage. It’s the anime equivalent of “I’m not even mad, I’m just impressed.”

We love seeing an overly ambitious shot for the goal up in the stars and this is it. This is the fertile ground that was laid and watered with all the creative conceptual juice so that many other things could sprint through and past its tracka in the ground, farther than its monumentally overreaching spirit could reach. At least it seemed to reach all the right hearts for those ideas to truly blossom into bigger and better things following it. 

I was lowkey hoping to just wind down with it and turn my brain off at the end of the day and surprisingly despite itself I waa rapturously immersed in its dreamlike limitless conceptual existence and realize I was seeing something legitimately fresh and majorly influential for so many things I hold dear. With time it has become a film of a collectice artistic subconscious rather than just the absolute MOST 1985 anime film it is.