LADY DEATH (2004)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

I didn't follow Lady Death's comics-career in the nineties. The extent of my thought about her was that though she was one of the many "bad girl" protagonists of that decade, I thought her costume was sexy without being over-the-top.

Going only on a Wikipedia summary, the comic-book character sounds like she owes something to Marvel's 1970s character THE SON OF SATAN. Said character in turn owed much to the book ROSEMARY'S BABY, in which Satan had relations with a virtuous mortal woman and conceived a child-- but in the Marvel feature, the offspring grew up to battle his infernal progenitor. In the original comic book for Lady Death, the horrific heroine starts out as Hope, the adolescent daughter of a 15th-century Swedish nobleman, Matthias, and his virtuous but deceased wife. Unknown to the innocent girl, her father is a demonologist who intends to use her as a pawn in a war to oust Lucifer from Hell and take control. Eventually Hope is hurled down to perdition and becomes transformed into Lady Death, who battles both Lucifer and her evil father.

The movie keeps the broad outline of this origin but seeks to whittle down the number of characters. Now Matthias merely poses as a mortal ruler, but in truth he's Lucifer in disguise, and his imposture is part of some involved scheme to persuade Hope to rule in Hell as an ally. This contrivance never tracks very well. In his mortal ID the Devil arranges for Hope-- who only wants to marry her boyfriend Niccolo-- to be burned at the stake as a witch, knowing that only by resorting to appealing to the power of Hell can Hope save her mortal life. Hope ends up in Hell, but when her father's true nature is revealed, she rejects his patronage. He responds by tossing her out of a window and into a raging torrent, which doesn't exactly make Matthias/Lucifer sound like much of a master planner. Hope survives, and with the help of a Satanic rebel, she takes control of a contingent of Hell's zombie denizens. Transformed into the white-hued Lady Death, she eventually storms Lucifer's castle and battles him in a lively swordfight, to gain control of Hell.

The animation is merely competent, while the script by Carl Macek-- largely known for providing English scripts for dubbed anime productions-- is pedestrian, in that we never see even good basic melodrama in this daughter-father conflict, not even on the level of the aforementioned SON OF SATAN series. A few lines suggest that Hope, in her desperation to survive, has turned her back upon the world of the living, and that, in a sense, Lucifer has succeeded in convincing her to spend her life in Hell, even if it's as his opponent. But at no time does the character do anything but go through the motions of her "heroine's journey." The lack of humor, except for a few jocular lines from a jester-demon, adds to the general inertia of the narrative. DEATH was the only original release from now-defunct ADV Films, an early pioneer in releasing anime for American consumption.