Monday, November 19, 2001

Leda: The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko



Genre: Fantasy
Parental Guidance Recommended
1985 Mutsumi Inomata (creator), Kunihiko Yuyama (director), Kaname Production, TOHO




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Leda: The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko Items
Cover Description:
Yohko Asagiri's an ordinary high school student, and she's in love with a boy who doesn't know it. To help things along, she's written a song to explain how she feels...but that song has quite a bit more then a couple of good bridges and a strong middle-eight. Yohko learns this when she's listening to it and is magically transported to Earth's other-dimensional sister world 'Ashanti.'

It turns out that her song is quite popluar with the locals...one might say they're breaking down the doors to get the only copy and a stereo to play it. It would also seem that this song has the potential to open a dimensional gateway between Earth (called 'Noah' by the locals) and Ashanti wide enough for a conquering force to invade and take over. This is exactly what someone wants to do. And, it's exactly why it was forbidden eons ago by the legendary warrior Leda who saw this coming.

It falls to Yohko and a few of her newfound friends to stop the onslaught and return the two worlds to balance. There are three on the side of order and an impressive army on the other(who fully understand the power of this discovery)...and the army's scared.

Maybe Yohko isn't so ordinary after all.

Did I miss something? >>> by Status

Okay... so Yohko is a regular (if wearing clothes that call to mind an old Madonna video) high school girl. She has a huge crush on a boy she met not too long ago. She composed a song for him. So far, so good. Oh, wait, it turns out that the song she wrote is the key to opening a rift in space time, sucking Yohko in to the world of Ashanti, where she meets a talking dog and a priestess of Leda (natch), who pilots a mech that looks like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz. Now all of a sudden Yohko's a well-appointed warrioress (if wearing clothes that call to mind a recent Madonna video) out to defeat an evil force who she hadn't heard of until that very morning.

Insert sweatdrop here.

I watched through this whole thing expecting some sort of revelation that would explain just what the devil was going on. Instead, the film would dance and sing (you wouldn't believe me if I told you) around every chance at a serious - or even half serious - plot. Excellent artwork
(for the 80's) and decent action made the movie tolerable, but the level of weirdness here defies belief. An okay rental, maybe, but LEDA is far from revolutionary.

One note: The audio on the VHS version is apparently problematic. The sound on my copy was severely garbled, and I've heard of it being very bad for other people as well. I was watching the subbed version though, so at least I could still follow the dialogue.

Individual Rating: Art/Animation 8; Story 5; Characters 6; Sounds 4

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