Now here’s a fascinating little slice of the late 1990’s! Neo-Ranga is a story about the titular God/Kaiju/Mech in service to a trio of Japanese sisters, and all the mayhem the arrival of such a thing might cause.
The show starts, promisingly enough, with Neo-Ranga itself rising from the sea as per Toho’s King of the Monsters on a march for where else by Tokyo.
We’re quickly introduced to our main characters, the Shimabara sisters Yuuhi (the youngest at 13, and the most aggressive), Ushio (middle sister at 15, principled and empathetic), and Minami (the eldest at 24, working several jobs including a publicity agency).
And before I go on, I do mean quickly. Neo-Ranga is a 48 episode show, but that’s in a technical sense. Neo-Ranga episodes are significantly shorter than normal, something like a heaping half the length, so in a lot of senses it has more of the weight of a normal 2-cour 24-episode show. In other senses, they do write it so that each episode is a meaningful bite of story, so there are kind of 48 episodes worth of material here. Sort of. It’s different.
In any case, after one episode of Neo-Ranga rampaging with some sense that the sisters and the little tribal boy, Joel, who came to visit them, know about it, we’re taken to a flashback where it’s revealed that they recently traveled to the island nation of Barou. There, they’re informed that the three of them, collectively, are the island’s new king, because their brother went and married the princess and both have since croaked without issue.
They’re taken to encounter the island’s god, Ranga… or, since it’s a new manifestation, Neo-Ranga by their late brother’s analysis. This frightens them and they return to Japan without taking royal responsibility, which it seems has provoked their dedicated guardian god to just go find them.
Ultimately, Ushio is able to tame Neo-Ranga, and the show starts to get involved in this web of what it means to have this 80-foot tall indestructible magic god-mech-thing in the middle of Tokyo. Some people think this is amazing, others want them all gone, the government and the yakuza are both interested, you get the idea.
Overall, the three sisters end up taking different stances. Yuuhi is all for using Neo-Ranga’s power to help, even if that power is destructive in nature, openly advocating for unleashing the fury on bad folks like organized crime. Ushio is more of a moderate. Though she’s the one who bonds most with Neo-Ranga (and Joel, who provides a window into it, with such truths as the fact that it’s capable of moral thought) she doesn’t want to use it to excess, and while she’d like to help where able she values not being a nuisance to people more highly. Minami takes the practical stand. She’s older and wiser after all, and does her best to handle the media and even the government, eventually having their house regarded as a Barou embassy in order to forestall more heavy-handed action, for instance.
Not that this spares Ushio from the occasional PR shot. One might say it’s even necessary for the “embassy” ploy.
Don’t expect too much of this.
Now, we go through quite a bit of integrating with daily life, during which the main antagonist is a group known as the National Interest Party who help fill the space to unite shady government officials with ordinary criminal Yakuza.
Eventually, though, we get the plot point that Ranga is not a solitary existence when, during an otherwise less relevant visit to a familial home town, the gang discovers another god entity. This one is insane and dying and doesn’t last long, but the idea that there are other sealed “Gods” is relevant for the end of the first season.
That comes when the government of Japan, supposedly under the thumb of the USA (though that’s made more muddy later), creates a legal Catch-22 that Ranga can’t be allowed to live on Japanese soil but also can’t move through it so an attempt to return to Barou would be an act of war.
Eventually, with military hounding the people the sisters had bonded with, they decide to risk that and exit Japan. This causes the real problem conspiracy, the Kyoshinkai, to reveal itself. Who are they? A shadowy cult that promotes the revival of the Kyoshin, “gods” like Ranga in their service. They even use a likable tertiary character from Barou as the core of their resurrected monster, trapping her as its hood ornament. Ranga tries to fight it, but the sisters don’t want their friend squished and force a hasty retreat.
Wherever they go, though, they have a bad day.
After Ranga saves them from this predicament, they decide to face their foes and head back to Japan. Ranga even sprouts wings for the event. Ant this… is the cut between what are technically the two seasons of Neo-Ranga.
The second season starts by explaining that… we’re back to the first season loop! They’re in their house, and dealing with slice of life problems. Though there’s a tenuous truce between Japan (run by the Kyoshinkai, who actively demonize Ranga and gain the faith of the people with economical speed) and Barou allowing this go go on, it is tense, and the Kyoshin become a constant threat, even after Yuuhi rescues the little girl they had driving the first one, treating us to frequent battles between Ranga and something at least his own size.
The Kyoshinkai are all over the map as antagonists. In theory they’re extremely creepy and very heavy, and some of their plans, like forming their own sort of red-gloved Hitler Youth and having one of its members, who had been a close friend of Ushio in the first season, pilot a Kyoshin in a semi-brainwashed attempt to fight her and Ranga to the death, land hard.
On the other hand, there are their less effective plans, like using washed-up clowns with an umbrella routine to fight Ranga with an umbrella Kyoshin. Or destroying Christmas.
That one seems to work out for them. They don’t take down Neo-Ranga of course, but they do seem to destroy Christmas. Though Yuuhi wanted to ruin Christmas herself with a Ranga rampage, which is the emotional crux of the two-part episode on the topic.
The show goes from silly to heavy as lead in the transitions, so unless you’re seeing a later part of a serial episode, you don’t know if you’re going to get zany antics and light action, legitimate action (like the episode where Ranga battles an ever growing blob monster Kyoshin to save Osaka, where Godzilla is outright referenced for his propensity to destroy Osaka Castle. Ranga does not.), or really dark stuff where humans are the real monsters.
This takes a turn, fittingly, on one of the heavy sequences. A woman wanted for murder by the Kyoshinkai hides out in the gang’s neighborhood, hoping to escape to Barou. She might or might not be guilty of any killings, but what’s certain is that a friendly man who has helped the sisters a lot (particularly acting as one of the major secondary characters for Minami and possibly a love interest for her), and who is helping shelter her against Ushio’s desire for justice, did murder her father… and didn’t serve a lot of time for it.
Ultimately, Ushio is put in a position where she might have killed the woman to protect Yuuhi, and she has a big breakdown about justice and responsibility. Ranga has a breakdown too, putting on a new face and going flying. When he comes back, he disgorges a person from deep inside… none other than the elder brother who supposedly died and made the girls king.
This end run is where a lot of things that have been seeded through the whole show start to pay off. I haven’t mentioned several of them, but suffice to say the terminology we hear was set up, as were the characters. It’s not like they didn’t have the time to do it.
First of all is the Treacherous Teacher. He’s the guy in the screenshot up above. In the early show, he was a bit of a dork and seemed a little oddly close to his student, Yuuhi, giving her personal lifts and such. Later on, we find out he’s aligned with the Kyoshinkai, but he still tries to cozy up to the sisters, especially Yuuhi.
Here we come to the awakening of the final Kyoshin, Ibuki. The teacher gives himself to become its core, piloting it not by riding around on its shoulder but by going to a dark space inside and getting half fused with the walls. This is evidently a one-way trip for him because he’s not special like the sisters. During this arc, we find out that he was a classmate of big brother, and also that he most certainly has the hots for Yuuhi… who was a little infant when he was pretty much an adult. Creepy, but the show as a whole is really inclined to draw Yuuhi in “sexy” setups and treat her as the Femme Fatale of the sisters so I’m not sure where to blame the character and where to blame the writers for this uncomfortable turn.
As an aside, this does extend to drawing Yuuhi looking at least a bit older than her canon age (in fact, I think she gets a more mature design than Ushio some of the time), which I consider a mercy. Characters are fictional and ages are numbers, Yuuhi fanservice is not as troubling as, say, Vividred Operation fanservice where the tweens are drawn more like tweens.
Anyway, Ibuki actually manages to defeat and seemingly kill an uncontrolled berserk Ranga, but then the teacher gets burned. In fact, the whole of the Kyoshinkai get burned and murdered by a mysterious Barou lady who had been allied with them the whole time and who seems to be big brother Masaru’s lover when he recovers from his coma. Though it’s seeded that he might not really be Masaru, since he’s missing a relevant scar and is overall inexplicable.
With the teacher hung out to dry and the “god” Ibuki washed up, Ranga revives and finishes the job, answering Ushio’s call as she does the meld piloting (from which she can recover). However, all is not well as the real final plot has been brewing while all this was going on.
The two important words for this plot that had been seeded throughout the show are Suura (enigmatic beings, sometimes said to be evil, sometimes said to be Ranga’s type of entity, or something Ranga destroyed, and also apparently the ancestors of the Shimabara bloodline, hence why the sisters can bond with Ranga) and Tao. Not Tao-pronounced-Dao the philosophy, hard-T Tao, which was introduced sort of as the Force, and sometimes as a true god in its own right. The latter interpretation is what the show rolls with going forward.
I don’t mind the ambiguity on these notes, since it feels like something the characters in the show wouldn’t have a clear picture of.
Anyway, a wormhole appears in space, showing a star about to go supernova. Humanoid entities with their own Kyoshin-style vehicles appear, known as Curiotes. They claim to be the servants of the God Tao, who wants Ranga dead on pain of supernova obliteration for all of Earth.
In this, there’s a setup to have another fake-out Ranga death (which causes the supernova to be called off), in which it’s revealed that Masaru and his treacherous lover (we see a scene where he’s not around where she admits to murdering her sister because Masaru loved her, which lines up with a story about his girlfriend mysteriously committing suicide in high school) are themselves Curiotes. Masaru offers that the sisters can ascend as well, if they help him finish the job.
Minami accepts reluctantly, with hints (later somewhat confirmed) that she has somewhat incestuous leanings having been put in place. Yuuhi accepts eagerly because, well, she wants to be the Space King rather than the Island King, or so she claims with most of her character up to this point suggesting it’s honest enough. Ushio isn’t there for the pitch and has her own plan to power Ranga back up and take on Tao if she has to.
During the resulting battle, Masaru shows no human empathy when Minami wavers, only offering that since human mores won’t bind them, she can have what she always wanted. She rejects this offer hard, and the Curiotes-style mech she and Yuuhi were piloting discorpreates. Minami decides to join Ushio in resistance, while Yuuhi goes and visits brother and sister-in-law in the depts of their thingy.
However, this turns out to be a ruse. Yuuhi has noticed that this whole operation seems to mean Tao is afraid of Ranga, and Yuuhi is one to align herself with the greater power. She carves Ranga’s spiral mark to remind the Curiotes of their defeat in the pre-historic conflict between their order and Ranga, debuffing them, and goes and joins team Ranga.
With the sisters together, it’s time to triumph, unlocking Ranga’s true power of time manipulation to hit the Curiotes with their own attack from a few seconds in the future, destroying their ride and causing the ascended humans to escape back to Tao with their tails between their legs.
In the wake of this, Yuuhi wants to declare a Gurren Lagann and go to space to take the battle to Tao, using Ranga’s power, but Ushio wants to make the best life she can on Earth. The open-ended end.
There is a lot to take in during this final arc, with probably more lore and worldbuilding dropped in the last ten episodes than in the entire show up to that point. It wears the weird pacing oddly well, but it means that trying to hit the beats meant leaving some things out.
For instance, there was some vague mention of “paradise” in narrations earlier in the show, such as it always being part of the sign-off for the next episode preview. But in the final arc, everyone, especially Ushio, can’t stop talking about finding paradise, what paradise would be like, and if such a thing is possible on earth. It’s suddenly really over-spoken, even worked into conversations where it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but again as a viewer you were primed for it.
The story of Tao, the Curiotes, the Suura, and Ranga comes out piecemeal, out of order, and with a lot of lies before getting to something like the truth, but we’d been hearing myths for a long while and just didn’t know they had significance. Even Ranga’s time powers are mentioned in passing far earlier than they’re needed, just in a way where you don’t necessarily think this show would ever actually pay it off.
The last ten episodes or so of this show are an absolute ride, getting into some of the best madness that’s somehow both clearly in the shadow of Evangelion and somehow nothing like Evangelion. This is a show about mortals (including Ranga, who is identified as being essentially human-like and non-divine in the ending despite the power that makes Tao quiver in its god-boots) beating up God and taking his stuff because freedom is good and tyranny bad, not a show about existential depression.
It’s not quite as hard up for the indomitable spirit as Gurren Lagann, what with a lot of sympathy going to Ushio’s desire to choose peace if Tao doesn’t want to start something again, and a grim reminder of the cost of conflict when it’s revealed that the little Barou girl sacrificed herself to Ranga before Ushio took over, but it’s more aligned there, with the Curiotes as sort of predecessors to the Anti-Spiral in both their vibe and their sudden appearance.
But then, there’s the getting there.
I may have sounded negative, but I didn’t actually dislike the early parts of Neo-Ranga. We got a frankly awesome “rampage” early on ending with the sisters taking charge, a kind of fun but light middle until the season changeover, and then a heavier but still fun segment sparring with the Kyoshin.
It is, honestly, all good material… but I can see how this would probably bother some viewers. If you’re looking for some awesome kaiju-scale action, you’ll get it… kind of, or if you’re very patient. It is pretty much a whole season before Ranga has any opponent that can actually pretend to be on his level, and even then some of the Kyoshin are absolute clowns. Evangelion may have had the DDR episode, but that’s about half of the conflicts even in Season 2.
Still, I feel like there was a consistent vision behind it, and that’s the most appealing thing about the show. While it goes nuts at the end, that’s a fun nuts and was kind of contractually necessary for a while after Eva. Until then, there’s a sense of… what if something huge and wondrous actually existed? How would people react? A lot of folks would get used to it pretty quickly, but some never would. And that’s kind of how Tokyo reacts to Neo-Ranga and is what the first season largely explores, with the second thickening the plot until finally the whole thing gels and we get one of the better crazy esoteric “mecha” endings.
Yeah, the end of Neo-Ranga is explicitly open, with worry for what will happen to Ushio’s dreams should Tao return to menace humanity again, but it doesn’t have the faults of, say, RahXephon’s reset, and features a really good giant monster mecha thing fight rather than suffering total budget failure. It really is the one that actually sticks that weird landing.
Though I put “mecha” in air quotes there because… yeah, I’m not really sure this one counts. I wasn’t about to delay this review a week and find a different show, because Neo-Ranga gets put on lists of mecha shows all the time, but I’m not sure it counts any more. True, Evas are biomechs with lots of weird stuff, and we sort of accept their lineage, but there’s not really any point where Ranga is treated as a machine. Even the weirdest mechs are usually at least presented as created things. I guess the Kyoshin, being soulless and helpless without pilots, feel more the part and Ranga is explicitly compared and contrasted with them… but it’s still weak. He’s compared with kaiju about as much.
In terms of the flow of the story, I guess it does have more in common with the mecha genre than the monster genre. I’m not counting that against the show, but I thought it bore mentioning.
So, here at the end, I’d like to touch on the fact that whatever else it might be, Neo-Ranga is a phenomenally mismarketed show. For some reason, all the posters and ad copy, even information you’ll likely find on resource sites nowadays rather than back in 1998 where ad copy was all anyone would realistically have to go by, focuses on the sisters in a style of tribal war-paint that they never get involved with. Here are some of the posters and DVD covers for this show that you’re liable to find.
That has… a certain vibe, doesn’t it? Pale-skinned (sometimes paper-white) maidens with glaring red war paint and not a lot else, possibly with a big robot/kaiju/thing also included on some level. It gives some impressions of the show: a feral setting, ferocious action girls with big weapons, heavy fanservice. Maybe they call the big thing when a monster of the week gets too spicy? One of the posters makes Ushio – empathetic, moralistic Ushio – look like a femme fatale, dressed in naught but a sword with some kind of giant at her beck and call. Of course, none of those really match what’s put on the screen. If I hadn’t been warned, I might have been a little annoyed by that.
Now, these designs also do appear in the OP and ED segments of the show, but that’s really advertising material too. I suppose I need to acknowledge that they got animated somewhere along the line, but not for the meat of the outing. Even the tribal costumes they wear a few times in the show, which are exceptions and not the rule, have different designs.
Now, I saved this material for the end because it’s something of a sideshow. Nothing about the adverts has any bearing on the quality of the show, or it’s letter grade. But frankly this is too interesting a topic to not bring up when talking about Neo-Ranga, both because you all deserve to see the cool designs that seem to belong to a different show, and because it’s interesting to speculate on how and why this could have come to pass.
Now, while I have never been part of an anime production, I do know something about creative processes in general. Sometimes, ideas can morph quite heavily in the early phases. This is pure speculation on my part, but it’s easy to see Neo-Ranga starting out with the idea of it being this action-heavy tribal-set outing, and perhaps a sketch of the sisters being produced at that time. When it shifted even in pre-production to a different story with different vibes, someone (likely more than one someone) didn’t want to totally bin the designs and thus decided to develop the posters and such from them.
At the same time, it’s equally likely that these sorts of images may have been generated wholecloth for marketing. It’s no secret that “sex sells”, and while the show is fairly tame in its fanservice the splash art I’m talking about ranges from at least somewhat spicy to borderline erotic. Did someone in charge of selling the show say “We have three sisters and tribal designs, use them together even if they don’t normally meld.”? Possibly.
And there’s the fact that several of the promotional images are quite dark in their apparent tone as well as fanservicey. There’s another dvd cover (two variations of it, in fact, one where the sisters are in their natural shades and one where their skin other than their faces is turned jet black, presumably to censor their lack of clothing a little) featuring the sisters half-sunk into a black surface with red whorls, presumably the body of Neo-Ranga itself. It’s somewhat like their final episode piloting position, but with the war paint and in different poses. Yuuhi and Minami are posed for a mix of fanservice and threat and the looks in their eyes are dangerous, but Ushio top and center looks like she’s being crucified.
It’s hard to imagine so much specific art being created if there wasn’t some sort of drive or ambition. The late 90’s and early 00’s were full of dark shows where the sheer style of these images wouldn’t be out of place. They were clearly in vogue, and I suspect at least some of the staff of Neo-Ranga wanted to stand with that.
Instead, they made Neo-Ranga, and created this fascinating little window onto a world that might-have-been with the harsh shadows of Gasaraki or Evangelion and a sort of fantastical tribalism that would have presaged Macross Zero. I can’t say if the Neo-Ranga depicted in the posters and DVD covers would have been better, but it certainly would have been something unique and different.
Digression over, how fares Neo-Ranga – the real Neo-Ranga that we got, not what might have been – in terms of its letter grade?
After all is said and done… I did very much enjoy this show. I liked the characters, even if Yuuhi is a little problematic. I liked the worldbuilding, and even how it was resolutely rough around the edges. I liked the ending, and better than a lot of landmarks.
All in all, I think Neo-Ranga earns a very respectable B+. It is a longer show, being 48 bites and about the runtime of a standard 24, and a lot of that is not-quite-slice-of-life plot of the week, but knowing what you’re getting into and not being misled by the ad copy and posters? I’d say it’s more than worth a watch.