GHASTLY PRINCE ENMA, BURNING UP! (2011)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

*SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS*

I hadn't heard of Go Nagai's manga "Dororon Enma-kun" or any of its reboots until stumbling across this subtitled 2011 series on streaming, mostly derived from the 1973 original. Since most of the other Nagai works I'd encountered didn't seem as well-organized as GHASTLY, I read the '73 manga online, only to find that it was like a lot of other Nagai productions. tons of transgressive scenes of sex and violence, with an insubstantial plot that pooped out at the conclusion. Therefore I credit the writer-director of the anime series, Yoshitano Yonetari, with having firmed up the weaker aspects of the source material.

Nagai still deserves high marks for the inventiveness of the basic scenario. In the Hell of Japanese belief, the ruler King Enma becomes irate that certain demons have escaped his domain to wreak havoc on humanity. Caring more about his proprietary rights over his subjects than about human suffering, the monarch assigns his nephew Prince Enma to corral the escapees. To this end the king gives Enma a fire-staff weapon and three helpers. Two are just minor figures, a kappa-spirit named Kapeuru and a living hat named Chapeujie, while the third is a powerful snow-woman, Princess Yuki. Enma and Yuki have a thing for one another, though Yuki plays hard to get while Enma is an unswerving perv, always ready to peep on her or feel her up. (The Yuki of the original manga is not nearly as forceful as the one in the 2011 anime, since 2011 Enma frequently gets his ass kicked for his molestations.)

The early episodes are very "monster-of-the-week," as the four-person "Demon Squad" begins the task of tracking down various vicious demons. In the manga they get aid from a human boy, but in Yonetani their aide is a human girl, Harumi, who's frequently grossed out by the licentiousness and irresponsibility of these "good demons." Many of the fugitive demons also inflict absurd curses on humanity, like making them unable to stay on the feet, or causing a "fattitude plague" in which almost everyone on Earth becomes fat enough to roll along like a beachball. 

One structuring addition by Yonetari is that he interpolates a character from one of the ENMA reboots, one who was originally a female version of Enma named Enpi. In the manga Enpi was much like another Enma character, Kekko Kamen, who went around semi-naked most of the time. Yonetani makes Enpi a separate character, the older sister of Enma, and gives her a quixotic mission. Enpi constantly undermines the Demon Squad's efforts because she wants to make the whole world "overflow with titillation and delight."

Another added wrinkle is that 2011 Enma, unlike the 1973 version, wears a piece of metal headgear called a "Fire Crown." A number of demons want to remove the crown for whatever reason. Enma doesn't remember the crown's purpose, except that his vanished mother and father gave it to him, but of course he's willing to burn to ashes anyone who tries to take his things.

The third and last improvement is that, while the manga-version of King Enma has no big plot in mind when the series commences, Yonetani's version is working hand in glove with the denizens of Heaven. Both parties need to power their realms with "psychowatts" derived from human beings, and the easiest way to gain that power is to bring about a major cataclysm that ends most of human life. This sort of chaotic apocalypse occurs in a lot of Nagai manga, though it's only suggested at the end of "Demon Prince Enma."

Yonetani manages to tie together Enpi, the Crown and the collaboration of Heaven and Hell in a pleasing way. Enpi eventually reveals that the siblings' parents created the crown to control Enma's lusfulness, which had become so pronounced that he apparently tried to sex up his sister. It's not clear why Enpi became more oriented on promoting disorder later on. Still, she's instrumental to showing how Enma can unleash the power of lust to rebound upon both angels and demons. Instead of bringing about humanity's destruction, the denizens of Heaven and Hell become so horny that they have a mass orgy. As it happens, the orgy unleashes so much energy that Heaven and Hell no longer need to kill people to get psychowatts for their realms, and so humanity gets to live.

So Yonetani succeeds in making all of the grossness and weirdness of the series' twelve episodes work together coherently, as well as giving the viewer all of Nagai's characteristic sex and violence. (At times the two get combined: in two separate episodes, the boobs of female characters become so large that they can be used as bludgeons.) All of this wackiness is given a serious undercurrent by the end theme song, which starts off singing, "Sooner or later, everybody's gotta die," but concludes with the life-affirming "We are still alive!"