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Summary: End of the world forecast in lackluster anime adventure
Comment: CRYSTAL TRIANGLE: THE FORBIDDEN REVELATION (1987) is a feature-length Japanese animated tale about an archaeologist who locates a pair of crystal triangles that hold some kind of ancient message from God about a great catastrophe befalling Earth in the very near future. The hero and his team, in trying to decipher the warnings, travel to some of Japan's sacred sites for help, but must contend with the CIA, the KGB, Yakuza gangsters, demon monks, and some powerful behind-the-scenes entities. It's all incredibly complicated and doesn't really add up to much, despite the hints of a non-human ancient race at the heart of it all. The surprisingly light-hearted tone is signaled at the very beginning when Kamishiro, the archaeologist, and Juno, a CIA agent masquerading as a professor from New York University, in a fight with Arab rebels, ignite an explosion at a Stonehenge-like site in the Arabian desert that causes each of the stone monoliths to topple like dominoes, one at a time, and respond with a hearty laugh. The hero's most memorable line, just before the climax, is "Your move, God." There's a distinct nationalist streak in this production, with its positioning of Japan as the guardian of the keys to both Earth's distant past and its ultimate fate, forcing both the U.S. and (now-defunct) Soviet Union to cool their heels while waiting on Japan. The story isn't helped by the crude animation style, with very simple, often awkward character design, limited animation, and a surprising lack of detail in the background art. It looks less like a 1987 film than like a TV episode from the 1970s. Some of the dialogue on this Japanese-language soundtrack is spoken in the characters' own languages, i.e. the Soviets speak Russian to each other while the Americans (including the President) speak English to each other, all heavily Japanese-accented. (The similarly-themed anime feature, SPRIGGAN, made only eleven years later, is, although flawed, a far superior production in every way imaginable.)
