While Amy and I were browsing around a Japanese gift shop on Sawtelle this past weekend, I saw a Hong Kong DVD with the first eight episodes of the anime show Angel Heart. After I picked it up, I learned that the AH tv series just started in Japan in October; and that the first Japanese DVD of the series would not be out until April! So this DVD is unlicensed, I betcha. Hong Kong tends to be pretty lax about copyright enforcement.
Angel Heart is based on a manga by one of my favorite manga creators, Tsukasa Hojo. Back in the early '80s, Hojo created the delightful Cat's Eye, about three leotard-wearing, art-stealing sisters, which was adapted into two terrific anime series by studio TMS. After Cat's Eye, Hojo did City Hunter, an adventure/comedy strip about Ryo Saeba, a cool professional "sweeper" who exuded sangfroide until he encountered an attractive woman, at which point he customarily devolved into an embarassing horndog. (Think Brad Pitt mixed with Jerry Lewis.) CH was also adapted into several anime series -- by studio Nippon Sunrise -- and an early '90's live action movie starring Jackie Chan as Saeba.
Angel Heart is a sequel to City Hunter. It features one of those darned trained-since-birth teenage assassins, code-named Glass Heart, who at 15 has already killed 50 people and is sick of it. She attempts suicide, damages her heart, and undergoes a heart transplant. The donor of the heart is one of the City Hunter cast members (I won't reveal who, in case there are readers or viewers out there); the heart was stolen en route to an organ bank. After a year of being in a coma, Glass Heart now has the memories of the heart's donor overlayed on hers. Meanwhile, Saeba is searching for her. AH takes place in the same demimonde of crooks, assassins, bartenders, corrupt politicians, Yakuza, rich losers, and weary mercenaries as City Hunter.
The anime version of Angel Heart is produced by TMS, and at least in the early episodes the animators are pulling out the stops to duplicate the heavily-detailed semi-realistic look of Hojo's work these days. (Typically, animation quality tends to slack off in later episodes.) That, the moody jazz score, and the return of the voice actors from the City Hunter series make Angel Heart fun to watch.
Cat's Eye has never been legally released in the US in either manga or anime form. A few volumes of City Hunter's manga was released here by Hojo's own company a couple years ago, before it went out of business in the US. But the City Hunter anime has apparently been a big success for American company ADV films, which has released hundreds of episodes of the series on DVD. I'm hoping that ADV or someone else releases Angel Heart, so I can buy it with a clear conscience.
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