Like a punch that reduces the human skull to so much tapioca, the anime explosion of the 90s literally blew my mind as all these animated titles suddenly flooded the market in tbe UK. No mere cartoons, these movies came loaded with graphic sex, hugely exaggerated acts of violence and wild plots and once I found I could get my mitts on such titles as Akira, Wicked City and (ahem) Urotsukidōji, it opened up my bloodshot eyeballs to its absurdly stylish pleasures of an entire genre that had previously only been hinted at with repeat viewings of Transformers: The Movie and Battle Of The Planets (more accurately known as Ninja Team Gatchaman).
Leading the charge during those glory days of animated exploration was obviously Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira, but backing it up was the post apocalyptic lunacy of Toyoo Ashida’s Fist Of The North Star – a merciless rabbit punch to the senses that made up for a noticable lack of logic with bursts of phantasmagorical violence as obscenely buff dudes liquify internal organs like they’re getting paid for it.
In the aftermath of one of those nuclear holocausts that many anime movies keep banging on about, Earth is a ruined, desert wasteland that sees the scraps of mankind struggle to survive while Mad Max style gangs get up to all sorts of debauchery. In this barren world we find Ken, a master of a particularly lethal and destructive martial art and his fiancee, Julia, who hope to heal the world with a bag of seeds. However, their noble mission is thwarted when Ken’s former friend, Shin, turns on him after confessing his love for Julia and defeats his ex-bro in open combat and then compounds his victory by inflicting further wounds and them leaving him bleeding to death in the dust.
Witnessing his defeat is Ken’s older brothers, the deformed, jealous Jagi and the ambitious Raoh who believes that he should been the one named Fist Of The North Star, and not his battered sibling. But while Raoh visits his father to announce his superiority, Jagi goes all Lion King and hurls the wounded Ken into a bottomless chasm, because in a world as ruined as this, being such a shit head can only be a virtue.
A year passes and Ken resurfaces as a man who wanders the wasteland, rescuing the weak from marauders by using martial arts abilities so fine tuned, he can make a man’s head explode ten seconds after he’s hit them. But after rescuing a pair of kids named Bat and Lin, he gets involved in a quest that will not only have him confronting all those who have wronged him and finally reunite him with Julia, but it will put him in the crosshairs of Raoh who has been working overtime to announce himself as the ruler of the world.
Can Ken’s way of the literally exploding fist finally see him getting justice in a world where the best way to protect your interests is to pop your rival’s head like a water balloon.
There are a lot of things that Fist Of The North Star is missing – a coherent story and a complete lack of logic being only two of them – and yet while this tale of gargantuan shoulder pads and exploding torsos may be as about as deep as a paddling pool during a water shortage, you can’t deny that it does everything it says on the tin. If I had to concoct a quick mash up to describe the movie, I guess Mad Max II meets The Story Of Ricky would be pretty accurate with a smattering of Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns thrown in for good measure and while it’s all incredibly 80s (even the background characters are ripped as Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime), no other genre can do the whole style over substance thing better than some super splattery anime.
For a start, all the character models look like they’ve been carved out of granite with permanently clenched jaws and shoulders so broad, no average doorway could hope to accommodate them – Jesus, even Ken’s eyebrows look sturdy enough to pull a truck if he chose to actually change his facial expression. However, truly the best thing about Ashida’s approach to what is already greatly exaggerated material is how much the movie relishes stretching reality into the realms of utter bullshit with no explanation whatsoever just so the movie can be endlessly cool as fuck. For starters, there’s the whole people-exploding-with-a-single-punch thing which gives the animators plenty of opportunities to whip up endless examples of spectacular body horror as skulls, torsos and other fleshy parts detonate with all the ferocity of a Scanners movie. It may not exactly be high-brow, but it’s endlessly entertaining and the whole act of having someone get utterly nailed with a stiff right hand and then watching Ken nonchalantly walk away like a gunslinger while while his opponent talks trash blissfully unaware they’re about to burst like a fat guy’s shirt proves to be immensely satisfying even though the movie repeats it ad infinitum.
The film has rather an amusing lack of regard for continuity too, with various adversaries blantently changing sizes from shot to shot in order to ramp up the scale of the fights. It’s not unusual for some random thug suddenly shoot up from a healthy six foot five to an utterly ridiculous twenty meters and back again just to help create an awesome shot. It’s also unclear why some other people also have random superpowers as the dub I’m familiar with deems it a low priority to explain itself. Is the dude who can turn his skin to iron and the massive fat guy with the dough-like belly using some other form of funky martial art, or are they just mutants – the film decrees that it can’t possibly matter when there’s way more blood explosions to squeeze in.
Some might understandably find such grotesquely macho posturing obviously absurd – the women are literally nothing more than prizes to brawl for – and the film’s aggressive need to spray blood everywhere every four minutes feels somewhat immature when there’s barely any real characterization or plot to speak of. But the minimalist storytelling works hand in hand with the ultra-violence to create a fantasy film that almost veers into arthouse due to the weirdly abstract nature of the piece. Well, that and all the body-popping; and I’m not talking about the dance, either.
Ferocious, unrestrained by anything approaching reality and metal as fuck, Fist Of The North Star may have datedly a mite awkwardly here and there (a magnificently cheesey 80s rock ballad “Heart Of Madness” plays over a climactic fight like the worst kind of Rocky montage) and yet those who grew up with this level of insanity during their formative years will no doubt recalls Ken’s screechy lightning punches with a big smile on their faces.
It’s big, it’s ridiculous and it stick a muscular middle finger up and anything even resembling rudimentary physics or biology – but isn’t that the whole reason we love anime in the first place? Punch. Crunch. Splat. End scene.
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