Greetings, and welcome to academia hell, anime style. Now you may be used to such a concept to a degree after watching one of the many high school teen dramas that have dominated the anime industry in recent years, but I guarantee it’s never been played out the way it is in the OAV film They Were 11. Based on the manga by Moto Hagio, They Were 11 focuses on young Tada, a teenage boy in the distant future who joins 10 other people from various races aboard a derelict spaceship. Their objective is to get the ship’s systems working and survive the duration of the testing session, thus securing their entrance into the galactic academy and a chance to have a better life. If the hardship becomes too strenuous, they have a scramble button which calls for assistance. However, pushing it means they can’t apply to the academy. To make matters worse, everyone figures out there are only supposed to be 10 participants total, which means the 11th one aboard the ship is an impostor who may be there for sabotage, espionage, or whatever else he (or she) has in mind.
Everyone instantly becomes suspicious of each other, so one of the entrants, Maya Baceska who is King of his planet, assumes de facto leadership of the group. They find out Tada has a telepathic ability which is limited, but it’s strong enough to at least determine who is telling the truth. The problem is that according to his probe, everyone is telling the truth. Even more problems arise when Tada keeps demonstrating knowledge of the ship’s systems and design, even though none of the applicants are to have prior knowledge about them, leading everyone to suspect him as the impostor. Tada doesn’t understand this knowledge himself since he doesn’t remember ever being on the ship before…
Other hardships pop up for the group to handle, but much of the time they take less priority to the building intrigue and suspicion within the group. The importance of this test in the film’s script seems to reflect the life decisions and consequences of Japanese youth who’re just beginning with their lives. For example, the young man who would be king will lose incredible amounts of face in front of his people if he doesn’t pass. He would still be a leader, but without much respect from his subjects. Then there’s Frol, an applicant who’s seen her sisters married off into harem styled lives on her world. If she can pass, she can choose her gender to be a man, and gain strength and the ability to choose her own destiny instead of life as a servant and baby machine, which sounds a bit like the way Japanese women might want to have a chance to be equal to men in their society.
I first saw They Were 11 many years back when a friend who knew I liked Osamu Dezaki’s work said I should watch it. I did and noticed a Tetsu Dezaki had co-directed it along with Tsuneo Tominaga. I tried researching Tetsu and Osamu, and learned they are siblings. Tetsu is the elder sibling and has worked under the name Satoshi at times. If this is true though, the style is somewhat different than what I’ve seen him do in other anime like Space Adventure Cobra and Tomorrows Joe. The art style is a bit more conventional of mid-80’s anime with vibrant cel colors and semi-detailed backgrounds. The animation is more reminiscent of Crusher Joe, Gall Force and other works of that era. This is probably due to animation director Keizo Shimizu’s influence.
The screenplay by Katsumi Koide and Toshiaki Imaizumi keeps the pace at a nice balance between sci-fi elements, the fear of like failure and the horror of being trapped in a closed, progressively inhospitable environment surrounded by airless death. We get tons of tension and paranoia mixed in with moments of genuine character development as we learn what it means for these characters to have to admit defeat and the need for help. Space operas / sci-fi features aren’t really made much these days but they were rather prevalent in 80s and 70s anime.
The prospect of not having the freedom to determine your own life without passing the biggest of tests though is something that many students past and present relate to (which is probably just one of the reasons so much high school anime is so popular these days). This brings us to one of the most interesting aspects of the story: the examination of gender issues for one of the characters that’s quite ahead of its time, at least when it comes to anime. I don’t know if the creators of Revolutionary Girl Utena or of some of the more recent progressive minded anime shows had They Were 11 or perhaps even Rose of Versailles in mind when doing their works, but it’s definitely a possibility.
In 1987, a company called Gaga Communications attempted to package several OAVs and movies and bring them to the U.S. in their original form to see if such videos could be profitable. Up to this point, there was very little Japanese animation that came here unedited outside of several tapes from Celebrity Home Film, and the anime industry you see today didn’t exist back then. Gaga planned to bring titles with altered names including Project A-ko, M.D. Geist, Bubblegum Crisis and Madox-01 among others. For whatever reason the project didn’t work out and the titles were eventually imported by other American distributors. In the case of They Were 11, it was brought here by Central Park Media in the mid-90s via VHS tape, and then later on DVD when that became the dominant home video format.
The DVD had both Japanese and English language tracks on it. The video quality was decent for the time. As for the English dub, it’s decent, nothing too great, though a couple things stood out. I did enjoy Curtis Jones’s portrayal of Tada. He wasn’t as annoying as most teenage anime voices. David Lucas is also decent as King Bresca, though some of the lines written for him such as “I’m sorry for acting like a butthead jerk” sound a bit coarse for a person of royal stature. My most mixed reaction came from listening to Wendee Lee’s performance as Frol. The character is said to have a strange sounding accent, so Lee gives her a southern drawl, which sounds as out of place as Billy Bob Thornton did in Princess Mononoke. I could understand the rationale most likely thought up by voice director Quint Lancaster, but it’s still odd to listen to. Maybe I was expecting a heavy European accent or something, I don’t know…
In the years since this OAV was released in Japan, some of its creators had rather distinguished careers. Satoshi Dezaki also released another video entitled Grey: Digital Target that same year, and went to work on Mad Bull 34, Riki-Oh, Cobra The Animation and the 5th (and final) Urusei Yatsura movie among other titles. Akio Sugino already had a distinguished career as a character designer and animation director on Aim For The Ace, Tomorrows Joe and Cat’s Eye before this. He continued to bring his talents to Black Jack, Phoenix and the Jungle Emperor Leo movie. He also entertained American audiences with the cartoons Galaxy High School and Mighty Orbots.
Personally, I found They Were 11 to be an intelligent and entertaining anime film, the likes of which I haven’t seen in quite some time. I understand why so many college students I’ve met rave about it considering the high amounts of tension there is to relate to. It’s a well-written mystery with commentary on life decisions and gender roles in society. Central Park Media went out of business in the 2000s so the license to this movie has since lapsed. In our current era of companies claiming classics for remastering and re-release, here’s hoping They Were 11 gets a new path to American shelves.