Introduction
I love the occasional dose of steampunk, and alternate histories make my entertainment synapses tingle. The old what-if question can often be just as stimulating as any vision of the future, and on occasion even more so, when you get to see a familiar world twisted ever so slightly askew. Unfortunately, getting such visions on screen is a rare occurrence, and not always successful. The less said about Wild, Wild, West the better, and I’d prefer to forget Sliders completely. Still, there was some entertainment value in League Of Extraordinary Gentleman, if only to see Sean Connery’s scenery chewing Allan Quatermain. The trouble with these alternate histories is that they are prohibitively expensive to bring to life, and unless there is an unmitigated success, then it will remain a genre that is only occasionally visited on screen. Budget is less of a problem for animation though, and imagination is the limit when it comes to what can be shown. Katsuhiro Otomo’s Steamboy wasn’t exactly that unmitigated success but was still better in my opinion than anything Hollywood has delivered so far. Now courtesy of Manga Entertainment comes another what-if anime story, Strait Jacket. It’s a three episode OVA series that has been re-edited into a feature, and asks what if magic co-existed with technology in the world.


In 1899, an experiment took place in a cathedral that demonstrated that magic could be brought into the world and made to serve humanity. Since then, magic has been used by the government, in medicine, in agriculture, in manufacturing and even in the military, in the same way that we use technology. It’s a world where electricity is used, machinery exists, and an industrial revolution of sorts has taken place, but the growth of such technology has been retarded by the existence of magic, which accomplishes the same results. But the use of magic exacts a cost, and those who overuse it risk mutating into demons and wreaking havoc on the world. To stop that happening, suits of magical armour called Mold have been developed to keep the user safe from the adverse effects of magic. They contain the power and stop mutation from occurring. But the armour isn’t perfect, and it isn’t sufficient protection for the strongest of magic addicts. Flaws may appear, while there are terrorist groups who inflict havoc by sabotaging magic users’ armour. To protect against this, the Magic Administration Bureau has been set up, and Sorcerists don special Molds to battle against the demons with powerful staff weapons. But these Sorcerists risk much in their mission to protect humanity. Their use of the magic is so extreme that each time they fight, they may turn into the very demons they fight against. Because of the distinctive armour they wear, they are called Strait Jackets.


This story is about a freelance/rogue Strait Jacket named Rayotte Steinberg, who battles demons on his own terms, with the aid of a magical halfling named Kapel Theta, child of an assault on her mother by a demon. With terrorist attacks from the Ottoman group on the rise, the MAB Tactical Sorcerer unit is seriously overstretched, and when the Sorcerists don’t immediately respond to a demon attack on a hospital, MAB operative Nerin Simmons takes a chance and asks Rayotte Steinberg for help. His methods are brutal and destructive, yet he gets the job done, but when the Black Dog unit eventually arrives, there is no love lost between them. Elite Sorcerist Isaac Hammond sees the quasi-legal Rayotte as the sort that give his unit a bad name. Nerin decides to rehabilitate Rayotte, and formally recruit him to the MAB, but Rayotte has a dark past that haunts him, while the MAB aren’t the noble defenders of humanity they appear to be.


Picture
Strait Jacket gets a fine 1.78:1 anamorphic transfer, clear and sharp with strong colours, and only a smidge of NTSC-PALness about it. The character designs are impressive and the animation is as strong as you would expect from an OVA budget. What immediately strikes you is the steampunk design, with an interesting blend of technology from yesteryear with the trappings of magical ‘technology’. The mechanical design is excellent, with the blending of 2D animation and 3D CGI invisible and seamless.


Sound
You have a choice between DD 5.1 and DD 2.0 English along with DD 2.0 Japanese, and a translated subtitle track. My preferred option of the Japanese track is more than acceptable, with the stereo effect presenting the action well. However, I did sample the English 5.1 track and it’s a full-bodied wine of a surround track, and easily edges the stereo in terms of placement of effects and presence. Fortunately, the cast is excellent, and all the English voices suit their characters well. I see no drawback here in watching the English version at all. The music is a little misleading at first, offering an almost mediaeval air to the story as it commences, but it soon settles down into something a little more appropriate to the tale, and approaching theatrical levels of orchestration.

Extras
Just the animated menus to marvel at here, as well as trailers for the forthcoming Dead Space: Downfall, Death Note, Bleach, Hellsing Ultimate, Tokyo Zombie, Karas, and the Mirror’s Edge computer game.

I do wish that if Manga insist on cutting and pasting these OVA episodes together as a feature, that they would put the original opening and ending sequences in the extras. They don’t here.


Conclusion
Strait Jacket was a blast, a concentrated dose of anime entertainment, a bit of old school fun in these more enlightened times, with its sorcerer warriors versus mutated demon action, but then ultimately it all falls a little flat. My initial response is to file it under the mindless fun category, which is a shame, as it really wants to be so much more. After all, the premise grabbed me instantly, an alternate world where magic takes the place of technology, and the attendant problems that arise. There is a good deal of thought put into constructing this alternate reality, and the results on screen are rewarding and entertaining.


There is also something of an allegory in progress here, with this society’s problem with magic akin to our own reliance on hi-technology and the problems it generates. The demons and the havoc they wreak on this world are its version of global warming and pollution. They even have their problem with terrorists, although there isn’t the time and space to really get into the Ottoman group’s motivation. There is also the question of the demons that result from excess magic, are they victims or a scourge on humanity. What of those like Kapel Theta who get caught in between and suffer through no fault of their own? There is just a hint of moral complexity peeking from beneath the action surface, and it does leave me curious.


The strongest part of the show is the characterisation, with Rayotte’s complex hero certainly compelling. His relationship with his charge Kapel Theta is a strained one, which all harks back to their first meeting. It’s something of a pattern that goes all the way to when Rayotte was trained by a Strait Jacket in how to fight demons, and then had to face his mentor succumbing to the magic. He’s got that ever-attractive trait in antiheroes of simultaneously harbouring a death wish while fighting like the dickens to stay alive. To contrast him is the by the books Isaac Hammond, the Strait Jacket who works for the MAB. He chose this career after being saved with his sister by a Strait Jacket from a demon, and wound up idolising the warriors as heroes. He sees himself as a hero, protecting the populace from the scourge of demons, and takes damaged goods like Rayotte in the same line of work as him as a personal insult. Yet the two are skilled and competent in their own ways, and when they have to, they work well together.


The problem with Strait Jacket is that it’s just too short. 76 minutes just isn’t enough to develop a story, characters and a world, and in the end something has to give. In Strait Jacket’s case, it’s all three, as the resulting show really just offers action and eye-candy, animated flair and the sort of magical mutants that put me in mind of Tetsuo’s transformation at the end of Akira. Strait Jacket promises much, yet delivers little more than a brief action diversion. I suppose it’s a good thing that it leaves you wanting more, but the question becomes will more ever be made? Strait Jacket feels very much like a pilot for a bigger, deeper and more complex show. Now it’s just a matter of waiting for someone in Japan commissioning and creating a full length series, someone in the US liking it and paying to licence it and dub it, then seeing it eventually come to the UK. Strait Jacket; looks bigger on the outside than the inside.