Review: "Mariko"
**SPOILERS for Wolverine, as you may have guessed**
So Friday night was the debut of two new animes fresh from Japan--Iron Man and Wolverine. I originally thought there would also be an X-Men anime airing, but apparently I was mistaken. And of course, THAT was the one I was most interested in seeing. :P So I just went with Wolverine instead (like you couldn't have guessed from the spoiler warning and episode title). I admit to a few misgivings about the series when I first heard of it--for starters, Wolverine doesn't exactly lend himself to anime style of drawing (very tall, very slender, etc.) except if you're basing him off the Hugh Jackman version, which has as much to do with Comics Wolvie as Jeep Swenson has to do with Comics Bane. But... actually... this was really good.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's go back to the beginning.
We start--where else?--in New York City, with the guy who is supposed to be Wolverine but looks nothing like him and Wolverine's Japanese girlfriend, Mariko Yashida, gettin' all cute and romantic-like on a cruise ship. Wolverine is voiced by Milo Ventimiglia (yes, the cute guy from Heroes. Or one of the cute guys from Heroes... never mind)--truly a textbook case of WTH Casting Agency if I ever heard it, but you'll be pleasantly surprised to know that he pretty much owns the role. It's not Hugh Jackman, it's not the insanely-deep-and-gravelly you get from stuff like X-Men: Evolution, but somewhere in between. And I actually really like it. He gets a little growly sometimes when necessary, but he's considerably more human-sounding than Wolverine of other cartoons, and I enjoy hearing it.
But anyway. Like I said, Logan and Mariko are very happy together, which obviously means something horrible is about to go down. Sure enough, a bunch of guys on rocket packs shoot up out of the river and attack the pair.
Cut to one year later, where Random Secret Agent Man/Clark Kent lookalike is running across a rooftop trying to escape some different bad guys, these ones with energy weapons. Logan shows up and stops them in a way only Logan can--with adamantium claws and Canadian beer. XD Apparently, Secret Agent Man (I'll just call him Sam because I can't remember his name at the moment) and Wolvie are old friends, and after the fight they go to a bar to talk. Sam has come all the way from Japan to tell Logan that he's found Mariko, who has been missing for a year by now. Turns out she was kidnapped by her father, who is the head of the Japanese mafia, and to make matters worse, she is being forced to marry some slimeball crime boss from Madripoor. He lives in a giant skyscraper in the middle of the island and got into power by killing his father.
If this guy's origin/residence sounds familiar to you, it should, because that's pretty much exactly the origin/residence of Authority villain Kaizen Gamorra. I'm guessing this is because those issues of The Authority and this episode were both written by Warren Ellis. So if Wolverine's story arc ends the way The Authority's did, Logan is going to misappropriate a rather large vehicle and slam it into the bad guy's giant skyscraper, killing him and all of his cronies. Calling it now, people.
As you might imagine, Logan is less than pleased that his girlfriend is being held hostage and immediately returns to Tokyo with Sam to get her back. Sam and two of his agents watch from the safety of their spiffy van while Logan approaches the Yashida mansion. He enters the garden and is almost immediately spotted by one of the numerous security cameras, prompting Mariko's father Shingen to throw a sword at Logan's head and force him to reveal himself.
Despite being outnumbered six to one, Wolverine proceeds to trounce Shingen's men. Despite seeing this one-man army kill all of his well-armed bodyguards with his bare hands, Shingen challenges Wolverine to a duel, promising to let Mariko leave if Logan wins. Logan accepts and... promptly gets his butt kicked. A lot. This is where Mariko kind of started to annoy me, because at several points throughout the fight scenes, she cries out "Oh, LOGAN!" or "Logan, NO!" and whatnot, when she knows perfectly well that the man has a wicked-awesome healing factor. He just got sliced in half? So what? He'll be fine in five seconds!
Just when it looks like Wolverine is actually starting to win, Hideki Kurohagi (Mariko's betrothed) shows up with a tranq gun and shoots Wolvie with it. Should have known a bunch of gangster's wouldn't play fair. Mariko says as much, and Hideki pretty much ignores her. Nice guy. The episode ends with Logan shaking off the effects of the tranquilizer and whipping out his claws, ready to continue fighting for his lady love.
And that was it. As you can tell by this rather short review, not a whole lot happened. It seemed more like setting up for future episodes. But that's okay, because it was still really, really good. Like I said, seeing Wolverine as an anime character is really, *really* bizarre and will take me some time to get used to. But it looks like it's going to be awesome, so get used to my reviewing it, because I'm not stopping until they stop airing new episodes. :-)