Chances are, if you’re from an older generation, you’ve probably been affected (or infected as the case may be) by Anime long before you ever realised it. A lot of Saturday morning TV shows proved to be something of a gateway with titles like Transformers, Speed Racer or Battle Of The Planets causing a thirst for a particular animation style that grew unsuspectingly at the years went by. While my first taste of Anime was arguably Transformers: The Movie, I feel that somewhere in my clouded memory, it could actually have been 1984’s Lensman that might have been the film thst started it all. A have incredibly vague recollections of a teacher, who blatently couldn’t be bothered to teach in the last day of term, sticking a VHS tape into the battered school video player and playing this to a class to shut them up long enough until summer holidays started. Such is the case with any Anime plugged into the brain of a small child, Lensman proved to be something of a non-rent paying tenant in my pulsating brain for decades to come…
The galaxy is in turmoil as the evil leader of the Boskone empire, Lord Helmuth, wages war on virtually everything they can find while running a lucrative drug operation on the side. The only ones who can stop them are the Galactic Patrol and their elite members, the Lensmen, who are chosen to wield great power that’s harnessed within a lens-like device embedded in the back of their hand.
However, while this war rages on, simple farm boy, Kimball Kinnison toils on the fields of his father’s farm until fate (and possibly some influence from Green Lantern Comics) sees a fatally wounded Lensman crash land and bestow his lens to the stunned kid before he croaks. Now suddenly burdened with the gargantuan task of having to transport vital data to the Galactic Patrol and realising that the Boskone fleet is heading toward their location, Kim is further stunned by the revelation that his father, Gary, helped found the interstellar peace keeping service and could have been a Lensman himself if he hadn’t lost an arm in combat. So while Gary runs interference with Lord Helmuth’s underlings, Kim and his best buddy Van Buskirk (think half Nick Frost, half buffalo) head off into realms of adventure they had never dreamed of.
It’d fairly trippy too as their quest brings them face to face with many freaky allies and situations that feel like they’ve wriggled out of the pages of 2000 A.D.. Teaming up with Galactic Patrol nurse Clarissa MacDougall is normal enough I suppose, but after tangling with drug addicted snails and stumbling upon a planet oppressed by Helmuth’s rule, they also get aid from diminutive, mohawked party pensioner, DJ Bill and guidance from Worsel, a reptilian Lensman who is so badass beyond belief, he could probably save the entire universe on his lonesome.
It’s pretty apparent that Lensman owes more than a little debt to the estate of George Lucas as its tale about lowly farm boys suddenly finding themselves becoming tbe lynchpin of an entire, galaxy spanning battle introduces itself as being wildly overfamiliar right from the word go. However, while directors Kazuyuki Hirokawa and Yoshiaki Kawajiri (who went on to helm the likes of Wicked City, Ninja Scroll and Cyber City Oedo
808) are obviously having a whale of a time plundering wholesale from a galaxy far, far away, they can’t be held entirely culpable for the grand theft Star Wars that’s being staged before our very eyes. You see Lensman is based on a series of novels by a writer named E.E. Smith, but while a lot of his concepts sound suspiciously familiar, the Anime take on his multi-book space opera gives it a typically visual boost that carries you past any acts of intergalactic plagiarism. However, when you realise that Smith not only published his first Lensmen book in the 50s and is often referred to as the father of space opera, I guess turnaround is fair play…
Anyway, now that that’s all dealt with, Lensmen proves to be a textbook example of both the best and worst things about the entire medium. The visuals are a vibrant, brain-frying experience that merges eccentric character design with experimental CGI graphics to create expansive and hallucinogenic worlds that not even Lucasfilm and ILM could hope to match. However, in comparison to the rainbow coloured universes and various surreal extraterrestrials (the alien disco looks like something right out of Ace Garp Trucking Co. from 2000 A.D.), Kimball Kinnison is about a bland a lead as… well as Luke Skywalker was and the actual plot literally has us zig zagging across the universe with no real intrest in locking us down with an actual plot.
Elsewhere, while the titular lens obviously wants to be as iconic a lightsaber or a Green Lantern power ring, the fact that it’s hardly used makes it fall quickly into the fantastical special weapon also-ran bargin bucket along with the Glave from Krull and that blade launching, triple sword thing from The Sword And The Sorcerer.
However, while Lensmen may not crystalise its world building as solidly as either Star Wars or some of other the noticable Anime from the era, there’s still enough cool shit scattered around to make something of a cherished (if extremely hazy) childhood memory. Chief among these is the character of Worsel, a dragon-faced Lensman who can uncoil his arms to make wings that allow him to soar at blinding speeds; but aside from this, he also has the rather positive demeanor of a really friendly call-line operator which makes him super-endearing. Also stepping up to fill the charisma void created by the human characters is burly comic relief Van Buskirk (it feels like everyone in this film has the sort of names usually found in a Coen Brothers movie) who blunders through the flick as a cuddly best bro who seems to be one part Brian Blessed to two parts Chewbacca and proves to be exceptionally handy with a rocket launcher in a pinch. On the flip side, the villains aren’t exactly Darth Vader quality, their abstract designs are still pretty cool to look at – especially the little red one that bounces around the place like an overstimulated shuttlecock – and the villains fly around in fighters shaped like human brain matter.
The level of strange is nicely measured too as the filmmakers nonchalantly deliver utter madness into our trusting, childlike eyeballs. I’ve already mentioned the stoned snail creatures a couple of times already – which, to be honest, still isn’t enough (druggie snails, people!) – but an extended speeder bike sequence and an absolutely mental subplot involving repeated disco brawls between assorted creatures is still fun.
However, while certain aspects of the movie certainly stuck themselves directly into my grey matter, a rewatch proves that Lensman is curiously forgettable and feels more like an overblown Saturday morning cartoon rather than a towering, stand alone space opera with trippy undertones.
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