A little while back, I decided to sit back and finally watch the Lensman animated movie, released in Japan in 1984. It is a very loose adaptation of Galactic Patrol, which I've reviewed here along with all the other main Lensman novels by E.E. "Doc" Smith.
The original cut of the movie is largely abandonware these days, so you can easily find it online if you want to. There's a cut by Harmony Gold (butchers and imprisoners of Macross) that shifts things around a bit and cuts out some of the Japanese weirdness.
Speaking of Japanese weirdness, they wrote a song for this movie! It's a new-agey, strange kind of song. The most memorable part of it is when a chorus yells "Staaaaar-ship!," and the rest is goofy Engrish. Parts of the song pop up during random establishing shots, in a method that reminds me vaguely of some other movie or show that was in the culture around then... but I can't quite put my finger on it.
Other Japanese weirdness goes hand-in-hand with compressing a whole big novel into a 90-minute feature film. For instance, Kimball Kinnison is no longer a dignified and decorated officer, he's a standard anime protagonist, a young man of about eighteen, wanting to see the galaxy. His father is a tried-and-failed Lensman. Kim gets his Lens from another dying officer--which, if you've read the books, is absolute canon-poison, and everybody in the movie also seems to think it's unheard-of, but it's never explored in detail. Just roll with it.
Getting a free Lens from a dead body means no training, no subtlety, and no intrigue. The goal of the movie is to get the plans contained in the Lens (ostensibly the plans that novel-Kim was transporting in the book) to the Galactic Patrol. This extremely basic plot is executed reasonably well, if somewhat predictably, with our protagonists getting into a few bumps and scrapes along the way.
Land on a planet, action scene, repeat. There are no spy-rays, so escapes are greatly simplified compared to the book.
Names are thrown around with wild abandon. Blakeslee is now a bad guy. A person named "Bill" appears but he's not a Kinnison disguise. The thional mine planet, Radelix, is mish-mashed with Miners' Rest. Chris is a bit older than Kim, working as a medical officer on a Patrol ship. Buskirk is turned into some kind of weird minotaur guy who was friends with Kim's dad.
At least Buskirk gets a space axe.
On the plus side, the hand-drawn art is very good. There are some excellent creature designs, including a few different species of monsters on Delgon, including the Overlords. Helmuth is cool and intimidating, he talks just like in the books, and his gradually-shortening list of underlings are unique and well-drawn. The mechanical design is also top-notch, when it's hand-drawn.
There is some extremely primitive CGI used in the movie (the Harmony Gold version skips most of it). It is extremely dated by today's standards, and looks pretty bad, but according to the credits, they had help from MIT and I gotta give them a little credit for trying it.
One other advantage that the movie has is the combat, especially the ending. The novel's ending was so abrupt that I thought I skipped a chapter. In the movie, there's a long, drawn-out fight between Kim and Helmuth that is entertaining and has good gravity, compared to the rest of the movie.
All in all, it's not a bad movie on its own, but it pales in comparison to the book in a variety of ways. The plot and writing are meh, the writers seem to corner themselves and come up with goofy solutions a couple of times, and there's no subtlety or intrigue. Pretty much all the humor is slapstick or delivered along with some slapstick, so the dignity of the characters suffers compared to the book. The only character development seems to be that Kim and Chris become fond of each other. Still, the action is practically non-stop, and, as I mentioned above, the hand-drawn art is frequently impressive.
Watch it if you're a fan of janky old sci-fi anime. If you're a Lensman fan, watch it if you're a die-hard and want to see everything, or if you're willing to give it some space as an imperfect adaptation. Otherwise, you may want to steer clear.
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