Megazone 23: Part II (1986)
While I'd kind of forgotten about Megazone until I suddenly found my DVD set buried in a box, I always remembered Part II being spoken of with some reverance, and it certainly did not disappoint. Maybe I was just in the right mood for it, but I really loved this one; it's hardly a great work of narrative, but when I started thinking about how much it made me think of a music video, it suddenly clicked. I think it the music-video style visual storytelling is so strong here, you could watch it raw and still follow nearly all of what's going on with the outcast biker gang drawing ever closer to the heart of a conspiracy, as a war rages in the background.
There is of course a more elaborate back story at work, but having forgotten nearly all the details from Part 1, I was entirely happy to just drink in the amazingly over engineered visuals. For a (relatively) early OAV, there's some staggering attention to detail in the small things like the fingers of a hand flipping a light switch or someone pulling the cellophane off a pack of cigarettes, to say nothing of Yasuomi Umetsu's strikingly realistic character designs staying consistently on model throughout.
There's no great depth to the story, and it does get a little cheesy toward the end, but this film did absolutely everything I wanted it to, and looked bloody good while it did it, so I really can't sing its praises highly enough.
Except Eve's songs, they were kind of garbage.
