One of the most memorable early scenes of the 1980s home video anime Crying Freeman goes like so.
The setting is Hong Kong, outside the massive super-yacht that serves as the headquarters of China’s most powerful triad: the 108 Dragons. A very important meeting is underway in the ship’s interior. The powerful crime lords await their most skilled assassin: the one, the only, Crying Freeman. Each of the crime lords, dressed in traditional Chinese garb, are introduced to Freeman. They physically embrace their new leader in dramatic closeup, all to the tune of vaguely Sino-sounding synths.
Lastly, after this has been going on for a surprisingly long time, a wire-haired old man takes his turn in hugging the assassin. The camera zooms in, and, accompanied by a musical sting, the old man’s eyes flash an electric blue. His mouth opens agape, revealing sharpened steel points where his teeth should be. Rasping, he begins to bite into Freeman’s neck.
Close up on shocked faces in the crowd. Freeman lifts the vampiric septuagenarian bodily, and, flipping backward, slams the man’s head into the ground with an impressively gory effect. The attacker was a rival assassin in disguise; a strangely plotted hunt for the mole who let him in gets underway.
Welcome to the ridiculous world of Crying Freeman.
A New Era for Japanese Animation
The Crying Freeman OVA anime series is the tale of one Hinomura Yoh, a famous Japanese potter. A convoluted yet short series of events sees Yoh kidnapped by the infamous 108 Dragons, the most powerful Chinese assassination ring in the world.
As he is forcefully inducted into this world of assassination, brainwashed into becoming the perfect killing machine, Yoh gains the very imposing moniker “Crying Freeman.” “Crying,” because he cries whenever he kills. Freeman, literalistically, because he wants to be a free man. Joining Freeman is a ragtag group of various assassins, villains, and your episodic Femme Fatales – who seem to exist mostly to hate and then fall helplessly under the sway of Freeman’s pure, dragon-tattooed machismo. (Did I mention this is from the 1980s?)
What makes Freeman interesting – beyond the sheer schlock factor – is that the show is a perfect encapsulation of the era of anime on videotape. This occurred as the culture in Japan was changing, as national wealth and technology allowed a niche medium to blossom into something often technically impressive and narratively hilarious.
The original Crying Freeman manga is the creation of Koike Kazuo. Koike is easily one of the most admired creators of the nebulous seinen demographic; manga aimed at a slightly older male audience, from high schoolers through men in their 40s. Koike’s most famous work is the highly acclaimed Lone Wolf and Cub, a samurai manga that made it big not only in Japan but abroad; he also created the famous Lady Snowblood, whose film versions Tarantino is such a fan of. Koike is particularly well-known for his hard-boiled, violent, mature series. (Although he’s also the author behind the infamously excessive portrayal of a hyper-dangerous 1980s New York in his comedic police procedural, Mad Bull 34.) On Crying Freeman, running from 86-88, he delivered on these themes in spades.
The Crying Freeman OVA series, starting in 1988, is a perfect example of its era of anime. Episode 1 released at the very height of the massive economic bubble of the 1980s, when Japan was monetarily at the top of the world. The Japanese economic miracle, the envy of countries world over and a source of cultural anxiety for many in America and elsewhere, had lifted a once-impoverished nation out of the post-war doldrums and created a massive Japanese middle-class with stable lifetime employment (終身雇用, shushin koyo) and cash to burn. Money flowed into personal coffers and production war chests alike; Japanese who had loved the anime TV shows of the 60s and 70s were coming of age and suddenly had a purchasing power no previous generation had known before.
Home Video – the “Third Medium”
This all coincided with the emergence of home video in the late 1970s, as videotape technology – for decades the prohibitively expensive domain of industrial studios – became obtainable for the average household. This meant that movies and TV, once singular events to be remembered but rarely ever returned to, could suddenly be reengaged with over and over from the comfort of a family living room. In the words of anime historian Jonathan Clements, this “…transform[ed] the available archive of anime resources from an exclusive club into a mass-market phenomenon.”
Home video was becoming a “third medium” in addition to the older mediums of theatrical films and TV broadcasts. In the 1980s, as there steadily came to be VHS players in almost every household, rental stores exploded onto the scene. They became a cultural touchstone that, unlike in the US, remains strong today. (Anyone who has spent long enough in Japan will have wandered through the shelves of a Tsutaya, stacked high with an endless selection of rental DVDs. Some vintage VHS rental shops are still operating, too.)
With this emerging avenue to sell anime productions to a newly affluent, more adult audience, animation studios began outputting riskier, niche, or just plain risque products than what could be put on conservative, generalized TV broadcasts or into expensive theatrical runs. The result was the burgeoning OVA/OAV industry – Original Video Animation. From the first OVA, 1983’s Dallos, directed by Oshii Mamoru (of Ghost in the Shell fame), direct-to-video anime became a mainstay; in many ways a distribution method around which the modern anime fandom developed, in both Japan and the US.
The Power Behind the (18+) Curtain
Behind the ever-increasing glut of short manga adaptations and one-offs was a shadow industry – the massive market of animated pornography. Although hand-drawn erotica has a much longer, deeper history, very few works of animation in Japan could be called as such until the 80s. The prevalence of cheap VHS players, however, changed all this; with many households suddenly having more than one TV/VCR in separate rooms, animated pornography suddenly became a viable option for “motivated” consumers and producers.
A perhaps uncomfortable bit of history is that the first such 18+ anime OVAs were both focused on the lolita genre. These featured characters designed to look underaged. The lolita boom of the late 70s and early 80s began as a fad centered around fan obsession with Clarrise, the heroine of Miyazaki Hayao‘s first film, Castle of Cagliostro. As the 18+ anime industry expanded, however, the focus quickly shifted from the particular niche of lolita.
Meanwhile, more “legitimate” animated fare still attempted to share in this market by creating products that tip-toed between titillation and more marketable storytelling and optics, mixing violence and mature themes believed to attract a very predominantly male audience ranging from high-schoolers to middle-aged men. In the 80s, the result was the production of a great deal of critical trash, but also many pulpy, artistic (or pulpy and artistic) classics. These ranged from Oshii Mamoru’s elegiac Angel’s Egg (1985); genre-defining cyberpunk classic Bubblegum Crisis (1887); the horror-fantasy action OVA films Wicked City (1987) and Demon City Shinjuku (1988); and Gainax’s space opera mech series Gunbuster (トップをねらえ!, 1988).
OVAs to the USA
Crying Freeman, one of many, many OVA manga adaptations, also follows this formula to a T. It’s hyper-violent and near-pornographic; it’s the exact sort of creation that flourished on the direct-to-VHS market of the 1980s, the type whose cheap licensing rights and shock value made OVA’s the prime candidate for distribution abroad. No wonder Americans of the 1980s and 90s associated “Japanimation” with violence and nudity; these were the types of products showing up in Blockbuster and Hollywood Video, plastered uniformly with “for mature audience” stickers. (One could often find a copy of harmless Astro Boy sitting next to hyper-violent M.D. Geist. Both possessed the same “mature audiences” label.)
But more than just a vehicle for softcore insanity, OVAs provided animators with the budget and leeway to flex their creative muscles; they also allowed animation studios to spend a few hundred thousand dollars worth of yen on relatively short but intense niche projects that they could claim more ownership of than ever before. The result is a time period where money, creativity, demand, and the visual and aural aesthetics of the 80s coalesced into a medium still beloved worldwide, even as its exact styles and ethos have since disappeared.
Localization Nation
Indeed, it was the same economic power that, in part, allowed anime to arrive overseas while still maintaining its distinctly “Japanese” quality. Previously to the 1980s, anime was licensed to markets in places like the USA with the intention of denuding the product of all traces of foreign, Japanese “otherness.”
The result was shows like Astro Boy (originally Tetsuwan Atom), Speed Racer (Mach GoGoGo), and Battle of the Planets (Science Ninja Team Gatchaman); shows which proved extremely popular with American children, but which had been altered enough in the localization process that US viewers never even realized the shows were Japanese. The popular sci-fi Robotech is an extreme example; it wasn’t even one anime show, but rather an amalgamation of three. (Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA.)
Japan’s economic might of the 80s, however, provided the country with a newfound mystique. The very fact that anime was Japanese could now be counted on as a factor to draw in a curious audience. Add in the exciting shock of violence and sexuality depicted in a medium almost universally believed to be the domain of children, and you had the start of a burgeoning cult following beyond the shores of Japan.
Encounter with Freeman
The early 2000s; this same sort of mystique could still be counted on in the US. Indeed, it was similar themes of adult overseriousness that drew me to Freeman while still a middle schooler. I’d already started seeking out anime at those same Blockbusters and Hollywood videos years before. By this time, I’d seen quite a few movies, OVAs, and TV shows; but when I encountered Freeman (maybe in an issue of Animerica?), the idea of an anime more along the lines of serious, violent, and adult live-action Hollywood movies sounded pretty appealing. (And yes, Freeman has been adapted into a Hollywood movie; a cheesy 1995 affair staring Mark Dacasco.)
Even with my less-than-picky attitude towards anime at the time, something about Freeman felt off. Sure, the first episode had some striking violence and an intriguingly mature set-up. But it was just so… stilted, even in what ended up being the best two episodes of the show. Worse, the characters are just, for lack of a better word, strange. Character backstories – even those of the primary characters – hardly matter to the story. Plots change at the drop of a hat. (Or a full set of clothing, as happens so often in Freeman.)
But this silly characterization is actually sort of the whole charm, watching it now. My taste for good bad film is much more advanced now than as a middle-schooler. And Freeman – it’s just so…wondrously schlocky and weird. The outdated foibles which lessened my enjoyment in the 2000s now appear as part of the nostalgic gestalt of the 80s – a gestalt which, despite problematics, can still be treasured.
Straddling the Decades
As a show which began in the late 1980s and ended in 1994, Freeman is also in the interesting position of straddling the eras of the height of the economic bubble and the first years of the resulting crash. All six episodes were released at least one year after the last; Basically, we move through over half a decade of real-time between the release of episode one and episode six.
By 1994, the economic bubble was well and truly ended, even as money spent on anime video only increased. Reflecting this, Crying Freeman’s animation style changes as the years go by, with different directors, animation directors, and staff working on different episodes. (The show also becomes markedly more explicit as it goes along.)
(Courtesy: Far East Films)
This 6th episode marks the end of Crying Freeman’s direct adaptation of the manga, as the only Freeman episode to feature an original story made for the anime. What’s interesting about this episode is how much the animation style has changed since 1988 and the release of episode one. It still features hand-drawn cel animation, but the colors and shading are really starting to take on a 90s aesthetic – the colors are bolder, although at times flatter. It’s an interesting mish-mash of character design principles from the 80s with animation techniques from nearly a decade later.
A Verdict that Won’t Leave You Crying
As a show, Crying Freeman – full of disrobed knife fights, racial and national stereotypes, and silly plot contrivances – is ridiculous. It’s problematic, and it’s often just baffling – but it’s also a fairly beautiful example of the sort of anime that was possible in the late 80s and early 90s, while video still ruled and the bubble was still strong enough or its aftereffects still present enough that real money could be invested in a long-running mature series. While there still are anime being made for older audiences – and, honestly, likely better anime than Freeman – it’s still a relic from a bygone time. A problematic, silly time, but anime is often still both of those things – just in different ways.
As it stands, Freeman makes for great B-movie night viewing, when you can crack open a beer with friends and have a laugh. Like much of the great schlock of the period in both Japan and the US, your enjoyment may varyl it’ll depend on how much you can stomach random sex scenes, misogyny, and gratuitous violence. Unlike much of the best-of-the-worst in live-action form, however, Freeman has some true talent behind it in the form of its (usually) impressive animation. None of this makes it good – but, for the most part, it does make it fun.
Changing Eras
By the time Freeman ended, the economic bubble of the 80s had been popped and gone for three years. The so-called “lost decade” (失われた十年, ushinawareta junen) had begun. Rental stores survived but were majorly impacted. OVAs were still selling well – and would even have a major boom in ’95 – but the nature of the industry had changed. Anime became more risk-averse.
OVA live on today, but in a very different form. This change has come in part because of the emergence of late-night television spots as the locus of adult-oriented anime. Bloody, sexually charged shows which could never air during primetime can now be relegated to 2 or 3 AM. The result is that the modern OVA often exists as special episodes affixed to manga or following up popular anime series and featuring content explicit enough to prohibit even the late-night TV slots. Recent examples include OVAs for popular, sexed-up shows like High School DxD and Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?.
And yet, the anime fandom as a whole – and so many visual media fandoms worldwide – owe a huge debt to the pioneering era of home video. To quote again from Clements, “there may well have been connoisseurs of Japanese animation in the past, but it was only in the 1980s that the audiences gained the means to retain their connoisseurship, to discuss it and pass it on, creating a discourse and an archive that could articulate “anime” as an object of inquiry, appreciation, and consumption. Thanks for the most part to video…Japanese animation was able to experiment in the new area of material intended for ‘adults,’ itself creating new forms of consumption.”
The world of Freeman and of that style of OVA is a thing of the past. But, thanks to the existence of home and now digital media, it’s a past we can return to literally any time we want to. And in the case of this ridiculous series, I’m glad I did.
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Sources
Crying Freeman. (1988-1994) . Toei Animation. English Version produced by ADV Films.
Clements, J., & British Film Institute. (2013). Anime: A history.
Sevakis, (2012). The Anime Economy. Animenewsnetwork.com
