Cartoon Corner- Slayers Special

Originally posted at the DL December 2015

Box calls this Slayers: The Book of Spells, but it's labelled as Special in the actual OVA.  'sides, any Slayers fan material I run across always, always uses the Japanese terms so.



ED-S (In My Unlimited Desires)- The I Want song!  Being Slayers, it's a sultry rock ballad about how Lina literally wants everything, because there's always another desire after you think you're happy.  So you have to keep the journey going, forever.  Honestly, among the Slayers songs I'm familiar with, this is actually my favorite, based purely on the sound.  The content is pretty perfect for this set too, which is definitely bonus.

So the OVA here is basically three episode-sized short stories in one package with little except maybe chronology tying them together.  One of the things I've been chewing on for the topic is how to tackle things like shorts, and I think an anthology like this is a good intermediary.  So we'll look at each part first before the overall analysis.

The Scary Chimera Plan- The only Dragon Slave between the two OVAs!  And actually it's an imagine spot.  But in general this is the 'humorous' (being Slayers they all have some humor, but Scary Chimera Plan is nonsensical except as humor) one of the set, but it's very... off-beat.  A lot of it is depending on the viewer to kinda mind-break along with Lina at Naga (or Diol's) anti-logic.
Of course it has Naga turned up to 11 so there's that.
Actually though despite some repeated visuals all over in that sequence there's something very charming about watching the Nagas swarm and destroy the castle.

Jeffrey's Knighthood- The entire short rides on how well you buy into Josephine's antics (Jeffrey's legit annoying as hell, and part of the conceit is that Naga and Lina don't get to do much.)  It's an interesting thing because it starts kinda funny, then gets tiresome, then suddenly they play is seriously in three different contexts and it actually gets much funnier.  Well played.

Mirror, Mirror- So this one is like 50% music video.  Two songs in fact!  Run All the Way is honestly pretty magnificent.  Or maybe I just like Lina singing about her position as a living avatar of selfishness.  Or at least presenting herself as one.  Touch Yourself (really?  That's what it's called?) isn't quite as good, buuuut it does play over a montage of setting werewolves on fire rather than, uh, Lina and Naga running so there's that.  Anyway the central gag to this one is Mirror Lina, and honestly the longer it goes on the more Lina's reaction of abject horror actually starts to rub off on the audience, which is kinda cool.  The sheer wrongness of it really builds up well, like angles without angles and colors that are not colors.

A lot of this depends on you already understanding, or picking up quickly, who Naga is as a character and how she relates to Lina.  Sadly for us, these come after the first Slayers movie and I, uh, don't have any of those and couldn't tell you for sure if I've seen them or not.  But Naga's pretty straightforward at least.  Still, Lina seems downright cruel here in a way she never comes across in the series, but I suppose she is a touch younger which may play a part.  I do wish the set had a clearer overall focus, like some sort of sense of why they're even bothering talking to the crazy people they are, because in the end it gives off this sense that the first two shorts are really just filler with no particular ties to reality, with Mirror, Mirror being an actual story about Lina and Naga's wandering.  I mean I guess I shouldn't worry that much about Slayers canon but evaluating this as a whole rather than three completely disconnected things does sorta diminish the value of the first two shorts.

A lot of how Slayers is usually remembered is reflected much more strongly in the OVA here than in the seasons.  It's off-beat, character focuses, with lots of the characters being OP as fuck.  The seasons themselves have more layering and character moments, and are almost certainly better shonen (even if some of them fall into the traps of the genre more than I like), but watching this would definitely get you up to speed a lot faster.

Ratings- 6/10, 5/10, and 8/10, for Scary Chimera Plan, Jeffrey's Knighthood, and Mirror, Mirror respectively.  As a collection, 7/10.