Battle Royal High School

Original Title: 真魔神伝 - バトルロイヤルハイスクール
Romanized: Shinmajinden - Battle Royal High School
Literal: Legend of the True Demon Lord

Plot Synopsis

A simple story about a high school karate master possessed by a demon lord who is his doppelganger and wants to enslave the world but first needs to destroy a demonic fairy who also wants to enslave the world and is possessing a demon hunter, and the high-tech temporal security officer who's trying to stop most of them. Or at least some of them. And there's also a love triangle.

Quick Review

Rating: 2.5 / 5
Reviewer: Marc
Review Date: 2006-09-03

Just the synopsis of Battle Royal High School is enough to make your head spin. Every cheesy anime cliche you can think of, at the same time! Seriously, it crams five different dueling factions into three bodies and only 60 minutes of anime. Frankly there's only one reason to watch it, though: A solid hour of superpowered fighting and stuff blowing up in graphic detail. Even if you do manage to follow the impressively convoluted plot, none of the characters are likable enough to care about, the love triangle is a complete afterthought, and none of it makes much sense anyway. But you probably won't care--you'll be too mesmerized by the exquisite detail with which the carnage and property damage is rendered. This may be from the late '80s, but it has detailed destruction like nobody's business. The best bit, however, is some un-destruction--the "hero" (if you can even call him that) reconstructs an exploded girl from the inside out. You don't see that every day.

In all, Battle Royal High School combines old-school martial arts action, splatterfest demon invasion, a lot of superpowered sword fighting, and a smattering of humor into one action-packed and thoroughly confusing nugget of anime, but the real draw is the amazingly well-animated carnage and property damage. If that's your thing, get some. Otherwise, forget it (though anybody with the stomach for it should see the girlfriend-reconstruction sequence at least once).

US DVD Review

AnimEigo's DVD is simple, but has about everything you could want. The video is a little harsh, but not bad considering the age of the production and there are no noticeable compression artifacts, impressive given the extreme density of linework in several scenes. The two-channel audio in both languages is acceptable, nothing more, and you can take your pick of limited subtitles or full; appealingly, even the credits are soft-subtitled, overlaid on the original Japanese ones. It includes the Japanese trailer for Riding Bean as an extra (I guess it was on the video originally?), but the only real extra is actually rather cool: There's an alternate video track with the storyboards for the entire production, following along with a little picture-in-picture version of the actual film in real time. Quite nice for those who like to see how storyboards translate into finished product.

There's also a "recipe card" in the box with AnimEigo's famed liner notes (also available on their website), but this title only has three comments, so it's amusingly lean.

Content Guide

AnimEigo calls it 18-up, though really 16-up is probably sufficient--it's way gory, but not that offensive.

Violence: 4 - Monsters of all shapes and sizes being ripped to pieces, and a lurid girl reconstruction.

Nudity: 3 - One scene with a fair amount, plus some naked female fairy-monsters.

Sex/Mature Themes: 2 - Some mature themes and an attempted rape, but nothing explicit.

Language: 3 - A reasonable amount of profanity (surprising coming from AnimEigo).

Notes and Trivia

Based on a 4-volume manga series, Majinden (魔人伝/魔神伝 - Legend of the Demon Lord), by Shinichi Kuruma (serialized between 1985 and 1988 in Shounen Captain Comics). The anime version covers about the first volume of the manga, and is somewhat "compressed," leading to the... dense plot of the anime.

Note that the way the title is written, the characters for "god" (人) and "human" (神) are overlapped, I assume in reference to the human Rikki and his demon-world counterpart. The anime title adds "true" ("shin") to the beginning, and also adds the (Japan-ized English) subtitle Battle Royal High School, which is where AnimEigo got the English title.

Gainax fans might note that this is a relatively early production that they had a hand in, although only doing a bit of assistant animation.

Japanese music fans might note that the end theme, MEDUSA, is written by Takahiro "Tak" Matsumoto, best known as the lead guitarist and arranger for B'z.

Random visual joke: In one shot where the school's shoe storage area is wiped out in a wave of destruction, among the flying debris you can catch a glimpse of a heart-sealed love letter, a nod to the anime standby of love letters that girls leave for boys to find on their way home.

As always, AnimEigo has the full liner notes and credits on their website (in this case, the liner notes are amusingly brief).

Availability

Available in the US from AnimEigo on bilingual DVD. Was previously available on subtitled or dubbed VHS, as well as bilingual LD (dub on one side, sub on the other).

Looking to buy? Try these stores: RightStuf (search) | AnimeNation | Akemi's a(nime)Store