Film Credits

Screenplay by: Nobuaki Kishima

Directed by: Kazuyoshi Katayama

Starring: Tomokazu Seki, Junko Iwao, Kikuko Inoue, Tetsurou Sagawa, Kouji Shimazu, Shinsuke Chikaishi, Kazuhiko Inoue, Norio Ootsuka, Yasunori Matsumoto, Kaneto Shiozawa, Masara Takashima, Rin Mizuhara, Takehiro Mirozono, Kazunobu Chiba, Kouji Ochiai, Kaori Yuasa, Hiroki Takahashi, Kazuya Ichijou, Gen Takamine, Masato Hijikata, Hideaki Oto

Review

Super Atragon is a very well done OAV (original animation video) based upon Shunro Oshikawa's popular novel Kaitei Gunkan. (The OAV series was released in Japan in 1995 under the name Shin Kaitei Gunkan, which roughly translates to "The New Submarine Battleship"). The series is also based in part on the really fun 1963 live-action Japanese special-effect film, Atragon. In "Episode One: Zero Hour to Extinction," we are taken to 1945 and the final days of World War II. The battleship "Ra" encounters an identical battleship, and the two accidentally engage in battle. We find out that a strange female being, Annette (Junko Iwao) is helping run the "Ra," and that a similar female, Avatar (Kikuko Inoue) is on the other ship. Both ships go down in the fight, and are seemingly gone forever. The storyline then moves forward fifty years to the present day, and something is causing the ice in Antarctica to melt. The cause is believed to be a huge black monolith found in the area, and a U.N. team is sent out to investigate the matter. The monolith turns out to be a gigantic cylindrical object that is continually growing in size, and they are unable to destroy it with nuclear warheads. The monolith then turns its face to the U.N.'s naval fleet and destroys them utterly through the use of huge flying "gravity lenses." Before long, we discover that Avatar is in charge of the monolith, and that she is a member of a race living deep inside our planet - a race that wants nothing more than to destroy all life on the surface. Coming to the rescue is the latest incarnation of the "Ra," a secret flying submarine-battleship containing a powerful force field and a giant drill on the front end.

Just like the original live-action film, Super Atragon is a heck of a lot of fun. The storyline is excellent, as is the animation and the character designs, and the entire production has a touch of class. The anime even has a wonderful, full orchestral score composed, arranged and conducted by Masamichi Amano (he also composed the music for Urusei Yatsura 1: Only You, the Giant Robo series, and the various Urotsukidohji OAVs). I can't say enough good things about this episode, so I'll go onto the disc features.

A.D. Vision released their laserdisc edition of Super Atragon back in August 1996. The disc itself looks absolutely terrific - the image is always sharply focused, the color transfer is very strong and very accurate, and chroma noise is mostly nonexistent. In fact, the transfer is so good that you can occasionally see minute scratches present in the original film cels! As I said, this is one good looking disc! Because of Super Atragon's direct-to-video OAV origins, the transfer is a full-frame version and nothing is missing. Since this episode run only 51m28s (not 60 minutes as listed on the jacket), I was hoping that A.D. Vision would split the episode over two sides in CAV, but such is not the case - the episode appears in CLV on a single side (this is my only quibble with this laserdisc, and it's a minor one at that).

A.D. Vision bilingual laserdisc presents the original surround stereo Japanese-language dialogue on the analog channels, and an English-dubbed surround stereo version on the digital track. Both of these tracks are CX-encoded. While I am always very much in favor of listening to the original Japanese-language of any anime title whenever possible, I honestly have to say that the English-dubbed tracks were surprisingly well done. Usually, English dubbing fails to provide an accurate representation of the original Japanese dialogue, either with regard to content or presentation. But in the case of Super Atragon, the dubbing was nearly always faithful to the original, and the voices and tonal quality generally matched as well. Again, I prefer the original Japanese-language dialogue myself, but for those of you without closed-caption decoder (for the English subtitles), the English dub more than adequately fills the void. With regard to the audio quality of these two soundtracks, the sound is well-defined and the mix is powerful and exciting.

In order to support the original Japanese-language dialogue presented on the disc, Super Atragon has been encoded with closed-captioned English subtitles. These subtitles can only be read through the use of an external decoder. As has become standard with A.D. Vision, this English translation of the original dialogue is very accurate, very thorough, and very readable. Additionally, the captions also display the original Japanese vocal artists during the end credits sequence (the end credits appeared translated into English at the end of the disc itself, and only the English voice-over artists are represented in the regular credits).

Super Atragon was manufactured at Sony, is Table of Contents encoded, and contains a total of 32 unlisted chapter markers. The orange-and-black disc labels are pretty neat, and feature a sort of "cracked" pattern.

I don't know how many episodes are contained within the series, but A.D. Vision has announced that a second volume is forthcoming on laserdisc sometime in the future. I can't wait to see the further adventures of Super Atragon, and once you see this first volume, you'll undoubtedly feel the same way.