Mega Man – Upon A Star (1/2 out of 4)
Simply Put: A finish line, hobbled over, for the visualization of cartoon heroes.
It’s pretty boring for being three episodes long. The character personalities are flat and somewhat annoying, the plot is silly and redundant, and probably worst of all, it mixes up talking down to the viewer like an idiot with being educational. There are way too many montages of Mega Man and Yuuta flying across Japan with the latter informing us about something we could have just as easily looked up in an encyclopedia. After the villain, Dr. Wily, creates a giant Samurai robot to terrorize the city, Mega Man and Yuuta determine, long after the Samurai robot has already been destroyed, that Dr. Wily created the machine to look like it did because, “ancient Japanese people were scared of Samurai.” Cause, you know, it has nothing to do with the fact that there’s a Godzilla sized robot in the middle of the city. But wait. What’s that sound? Could it be the sound of a check box being marked on a sheet labelled “Easily Inserted Factoids?”
When Keiji Inafune, the creator of Mega Man, was asked about the conception of the character by the now defunct US edition of Play Magazine, he had this to say:
“‘We were all about the same age, and were all from this generation that really grew up on anime,’ reveals Inafune, speaking about the game’s creative staff. ’So the Rockman character is really based on Japanese animation. And when we were making him, at the time, Nintendo games really did not have a huge focus on the characters. It was more the game, not…you know, they didn’t really have great characters, and a lot of the time, so long as it looked like a person, that was good enough. And then, when you think about it, even Mario back then, he fired fireballs…out of his stomach? Or…you didn’t know where it was coming from, but it doesn’t make much sense. Why is it coming out of his stomach? So, it’s like, when we made our Mega Man character, you know, if this person’s really going to fire, where is the fire going to come from? It’s going to come out of his hand or something. His hand transforms into a gun and you can actually see it come out of his arm. We wanted to make sure that the animation and the motion was realistic and actually made sense. So with Mega Man, we had this perfect blending of game character with animation ideas. So you have the game world and anime world all blended into one.’”
Telling, no? If one were to ponder what anime the creative team may have been interested in before arriving at the point of designing a multi-million dollar franchise character, one would have to start with Astro Boy, and not just because he and Mega Man are both robots that do battle with other robots. We need only look to one of the many incarnations of Astro Boy to notice the design similarities. The body shape, the roundness of the head and eyes, the segmentation of the body, the slight baby fat in the cheeks, the briefs worn on the outside, right on down to the poses and expressions of intrepid determination; all these speak to the sort of now unspeakable sampling that Inafune and his team surely depended on, consciously or not, in their early creative years.
Most telling, however, is the widow’s peak they share. For Astro Boy the widow’s peak comes from his metallic hair, while on Mega Man it is formed by the pointed dip in the center of his helmet. If you follow the lines this creates all the way around the character’s face, you’ll notice that the distinct shape of a heart symbol is formed. What this does is convey a subliminal message of purity, innocence, and love, subconsciously telling an observer, “I’m someone you will enjoy looking at for long (and costly) periods of time. I’m filled with love, and I can be your friend.”
(Rumor has it, actually, that the first Mega Man game was supposed to star and be about the Astro Boy character in the first place. It would certainly fit within Capcom Corporation’s early string of games based on lucrative and recognizable animated properties. Interestingly enough, Astro Boy ended up having his own games later down the line anyway, some of which were awful and one of which was fantastic, and Mega Man went on to just have mostly terrible anime and increasingly irrelevant games. So goes the elongation of a franchise character).
(And I mean elongation literally. If one observes the development of Mega Man’s design over the course of his existence, one sees a transformation towards being leaner, more angular, and longer limbed. We surmise that Capcom wanted to compete with the image put forth by Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog character, himself a blue sports car of a design, who had set the bar in terms of appealing to then teenage video game players).
There are important differences, though, that one senses in a side by side comparison of the two. Osamu Tezuka had nobler purposes for his character, and this is reflected in the way Astro carries himself on the covers and promotional art of the books. His expressions reflect an innocence of deep knowledge about people, but somewhere in that green naiveté there is a sense of duty, kindness, and humane friendliness. That contrast, and the story potential that accompanies it, isn’t really present in the early images of Mega Man. In his early years, promotional art of Mega Man had him looking bewildered, like a Loony Tunes character in mid-stride. This loud, action packed presentation was little more than a colorful grab for attention in which the character itself was part of the advertisement.
Continuing to ponder inspirations, one next considers Dragonball, a show and comic consumed by school boys and grown men all across Japan. Again one notes Goku’s similarly diminutive stature, his pudgy frame, but the item of interest is the eyes. Early Mega Man designs used simple black dot eyes, and like Goku (and many other characters) this simplicity allows for a narrow yet vivid range of expression. When Mega Man or Goku or any such simply designed character shows an emotion, be it determination or wonder, there is absolutely no ambiguity about the emotion they are feeling. This lack of ambiguity allows for, and I would say begets, amplification, which is precisely the thing you want when you are selling a character to children who cannot interpret a personality in multiple dimensions. The style tells you everything you need to know without needing to do any hard work.
When one talks about character design as it regards the Mega Man character, however, the most prominent and common topic of discussion is not the original incarnation but the western cover art of the first game of the series. Amongst video game enthusiasts, the box art has gained a degree of infamy for the woefully inaccurate depiction of the game it was supposedly advertising, and as such has commanded an unusual amount of examination for such a thing. An article by the humor website, Something Awful, perhaps puts it best:
“Nearly everything in the image suggests that instead of playing or at least seeing the game firsthand, the artist was given a few vague details and told to ‘have at it with some watercolors for half an hour.’ Note how Mega Man’s arm cannon has been replaced with a generic handgun, clasped in a hand that appears to be horribly broken. Reflect upon the look of sly constipation on Mega Man’s forty five year old face. His body – clad in an oddly colored uniform – appears to be in the middle of M.C. Hammer’s signature dance move. Then there’s the burning skyline of a futuristic Hawaii, only accessible via giant floating golden cuff links.”
Though it truly is hideous, this box art represents the first instance of explaining the qualities of the character outside his creative nest. The question we must ask is not what this depiction of Mega Man is or isn’t in and of itself, but what does it tell us about the visual qualities the team felt were most important to convey to their distant and uninformed counterparts in the US? It is in that communication that we will further understand the connection between his design and personality.
The first item of interest is the facial expression. We can reasonably guess that the first trait they told the new artist to show was determination. In the larger eyed manga aesthetic of the late eighties and early nineties, determination tended to look more cute than fierce, and this holds true for Mega Man as well. He rarely looks angry in any of his original mug shots, more so flustered at his predicament of having to fight off so many enemies. These are paired with other pictures of him in the moment of attack, which is when he gets his focused expression. In that moment he’s in the zone and can’t be touched, and this is when his body will strike the coolest poses, he’ll kick his legs out to balance himself after firing a big laser, and he’ll raise his arm in reaction to the recoil.
The pose in the Western box art is stiff, off-model, and silly looking, but it suggests a state of preparedness and alertness that accompanies an individual in the midst of dangerous surroundings (or possibly in the midst of taking a dangerously large dump). Mega Man seems to be leaning forward and flexing his arms in tense anticipation of an approaching enemy. His free arm seems ready to deliver a punch should his firearm fail to function or run out of ammo (both of which are impossible in the actual game).
I find it interesting that they kept the widow’s peak. How does a detail that small make it into the Western translation, and yet the end result demonstrates such carelessness and lack of research? Especially for such a simple design. The same could be asked of the spherical ear pieces on the helmet, or the large boots and gloves. These things are all present in the original, so we are led to think that the changes were prompted not by the outfit, but by the personality that wore them. The Western team must have seen the original artwork, taken one look at the somewhat babyish hero they were being asked to sell to American boys raised on He-man and GI Joe, and said, “no way.” Yet they still may have been under constraints to stay close to the basic image dictated by whatever sample artwork they’d been given. Thus, in my mind, they drew up as complete a list of visual traits as possible, handed said list to the first artist they could find, and picked the first portrayal they thought they could sell in time to get the damn thing out on the shelves.
That’s a pretty elaborate sequence of events, but its the only thing I can think off that explains the enormous differences and considerable similarities between the original and the Western version. It has more in line with the process of adaptation and localization than outright remaking the character. Whatever the Western team personally felt about original design (and neither I nor anyone else seems to have the story behind the atrocious box art), enough qualities were clearly deemed appealing enough to try and transfer them over into the Western box art and produce an image that hearkens back to its predecessor more than its reputation would have us believe. For all the deserved bad rap the box art gets, it could have been much, much more unrecognizable. The fact that it isn’t leads us to think that original design had more say in the Western art than any of us may have thought.
That seems like a good place to start talking about the show. The material amounts to three pilot episodes for a proposed Mega Man television series for American children, and the only point of interest it has is the opportunity to see the original Mega Man character design moving in action. One might point to the Ruby Spears produced cult hit Mega Man cartoon series as greater serving this end, but that show is a completely different animal in that it features adult sized character models, putting it more in line with typical American children’s cartoons like GI Joe. That show belongs to a completely different design sensibility, while Upon a Star’s intent was to faithfully reproduce Mega Man as Japan knew him in the art of the games. How they chose to animate him has its own implications, and it reveals more in motion about who Mega Man is.
In this regard, the show amounts to about one minute of useful material, but my goodness what a minute it is. You need watch no further than the opening credits of the first episode to simultaneously realize what these animators were capable of, how they interpreted Mega Man, and what could have been.
Imagine a wordless forty five minute or hour long TV movie of Mega Man just taking down robot masters to kickass guitar solos like the one in the video. Each fight in those credits is animated in beautiful fluid motion, and Mega Man himself is spry and acrobatic in a way that is quite pleasing to the eye. Part of the excitement (and disappointment) is the music video style editing, where they cut during each climactic moment. Mega Man throws rocks at Charge Man [cut], Mega Man punches Wave Man out of a waterfall [cut], Mega Man gets helped by Proto Man to defeat Gravity Man [cut], and so on. Imagine if each fight was animated and shown in full, with similarly animated movement? It would just be joy to watch, in the vein of something along the lines of Samurai Jack. That show was one of the best video games ever animated for television, and if one wants to have a successful foray into adapting video games as TV length animated material, then Samurai Jack, with its sparse dialog and visual splendor, would be the template to follow. Samurai Jack understood that the less you talked, and the more you popped the eyes of your viewer, the more successful you would be as an action cartoon. Talking doesn’t really help that much when it comes to entertaining children, unless those children are adults who think extra lip flapping is somehow legitimizing their comics and cartoons (see The Dark Knight, Watchmen). Instead you need to speak in visual language, such as movement, size differential, color schemes, etc. These things provide character and depth just as well as the spoken word, and in some cases they speak even more truthfully.
See, when you try to shoehorn themes and dialog where they don’t belong while adapting what is primarily a visual medium, then your chances of being faithful, much less succeeding, are very slim. You’re basically shooting yourself in the foot by taking that approach. While watching Mega Man – Upon a Star, I got so bored in between the fighting scenes (which never reach the heights of the opening credits) that I couldn’t even remember what events happened even though it was only three episodes long. Who cares if Mega Man learns about Japanese festivals? Who cares if he rides a Japanese train and learns about overcrowding? I threw my hands up in frustration when they showed Mega Man having trouble using chopsticks, despite the previous episode blatantly telling us that Mega Man doesn’t eat human food because he’s a robot. Why the hell is he using chopsticks then?
Whoever directed that opening knew what Mega Man was really about, and he knew what it was about Mega Man games that appealed to people. As much as people try to fool themselves these days that it was a moral battle between good and evil, or a heroic journey in the vein of Joseph Campbell, the truth is that Mega Man wasn’t about any of those things. Mega Man is a friendly looking plastic toy kicking evil robot butt to the sound of shredding guitars and pounding bass in the early to mid nineties. He’s your best friend every Saturday morning at 9:30 am. That is the aesthetic of Mega Man. The secret of his character, revealed by the love and style poured into the opening, is that he is not really a character at all. And you know what? That’s just fine! It’s a realization and acceptance of the truth. He has no real personality, no purpose other than too look awesome, and for about one minute in animated form, he achieves that with flying colors. To think he could have achieved it for a half hour, or an hour,or maybe a full series in the days of youth, and you feel like punching whoever had the idea of poisoning it with the wrongheaded goal of being educational. What a waste.
-Fiero
Post Script
Here’s another possible design influence that I hadn’t noticed until later. At the beginning of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (released in theaters in 1984), there’s a scene where the title character is standing atop the shell of a dead Ohm. If you take a look at her blue gloves and the shape of her blue stirrup leggings here, they seem awfully similar in shape to Mega Man’s long blue gloves and boots.
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