DEMON PRINCE ENMA (2006)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Given that the 1973 anime adaptation of Go Nagai's same-year manga DEMON PRINCE ENMA is not available to me, I'm glad that the first Enma-emulation I stumbled across was 2011's GHASTLY PRINCE ENMA, BURNING UP. This anime was not only a good condensation of Nagai's rollicking manga, it even improved on the manga-artist's wandering plotlines. 

This four-part OVA series, directed by one Mamoru Kanbe, predated GHASTLY by five years, and purported to adapt Nagai's 2006 sequel-manga of the same name. The 1973 manga followed the adventures of four heroic demons seeking to return fugitive demons to hell, and the two humanoid protagonists, Enma and Yuki, are roughly in their teen years. (In the manga and the 2011 anime, Enma is drawn as if he were ten years old, but from his heady sex drive I assume that the character was probably at least fifteen but drawn in the "super deformed" manner.) 

But there was some difficulty in adapting the 2006 manga, in that Nagai only completed two installments. (There's a sequel to that series as well, but it's not by Nagai.) In the 2006 manga and anime, Enma and Yuki are now fully matured demons, and they pretend to be human "occult detectives" in order to track down and neutralize yet more demonic escapees. Possibly Nagai lost interest in the series or found some other series more engaging. The above illustration shows, though, that he didn't spare the raunch-power in his two episodes.

Kanbe's OVA series is completely different in tone. It keeps the base premise, of a supernatural detective agency run by Enma, Yuki, and their two nonhuman assistants, Kapaeru the water-demon and Chapeauji the talking hat. Kanbe's four stories concentrate largely on the sufferings of those afflicted by demonic possession, with little in the way of the action-sequences Nagai favored. In the first two episodes, Kanbe throws in a few sex-comedy sequences-- Enma ogles Yuki when her breasts get exposed, Yuki retaliates by freezing the demon prince in ice. But in the final two-part episode, the entire story is a downer. Yuki is possessed by one of the demons the team sought to exile, Kapaeru is killed, and though Enma saves Yuki and destroys her possessing spirit, the main human victim dies anyway. The demon-destroying scenes just barely edge into the sphere of the combative, and that's because Kanbe's main emphasis in all four episodes focuses upon the travails of afflicted people.

Only the first episode provides decent drama. In "Nobusama," a father, Heinrich, appeals to the Enma detective agency to find out if his daughter Lola is some sort of vampire, since various persons who were in Lola's company suffered violent deaths. The demon-detectives find out that a possessing spirit killed the innocents, but the evil spirit is in Heinrich. Yuki determines that Heinrich nurtured a jealousy of anyone else being near his daughter, even though consciously he was revulsed by his own feelings for her. This tragic denouement aside, the rest of the episodes, in contrast, are just standard creepy stuff. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with an adapter going his own way, as long as he produces something heartfelt. But someone wanting good Japanese horror would probably better off looking off for a less compromised OVA series.