ike so many fantasy adventures, Amon Saga begins in an unsavory bar, a wretched hive of scum and villainy where a lot of hostile-looking stock characters are itching for confrontation. When Amon, a sad-eyed, white-haired pretty-boy swordsman, walks in, he's immediately recognizable as a hero because he's the only attractive man in the building. He's also the only noticeably silent, self-controlled character in a room full of snarling mutants and swaggering outsized monster-men. Until one of the latter picks a fight with him and the entire bar disintegrates into random combat, Amon only speaks twice--once to order a drink toxic enough to surprise the bartender, and once to utter the word "Valhiss."
Valhiss, it turns out, is a traveling city riding the back of a gigantic, turtle-like creature and ruled by a despotic, masked entity called the Emperor. "Valhiss" is just Amon's laconic way of saying "I have an old score to settle with the Emperor, so I want to find his city, join his militia and work from the inside to bring his evil rule to an end." Before he actually has to spell this out to anyone, Valhiss finds him, as the turtle-creature arrives and the captain of the Emperor's army rides into town to announce that Valhiss is recruiting soldiers. Nine rope ladders will be lowered, and one man will be allowed to climb up each one before it's cut from above. Contestants can use any means necessary to be the first up a ladder.
Meanwhile, King Darai Sem of the Vindorana is trying to decide whether he'd rather have his secret map to the Valley of Gold or his buxom green-haired daughter, who's been kidnapped and held for ransom by the gold-greedy Emperor. Princess Lichia is actually being held in pretty fine style, with her own suite of rooms and her own aggressively protective nursemaid, who slaps around any errant guards who get too familiar. But Lichia's clearly in some nebulous danger from the Emperor, who seems to be the tallest, widest humanoid on the planet, and who can't be trusted not to try to have his gold and the Princess too.
Hero, sorta, vs. villain, kinda
Amon Saga not only doesn't cover any new ground in its genre, it barely slaps a threadbare rug over the ground that usually gets covered. The story (which could be roughly described as "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy clumsily saves girl from random manifestations of evil ick by stabbing everything he sees with his sword") more or less has a good guy, a bad guy, a world to save and a princess to win, but only marginally. The bad guy is mostly guilty of being vaguely spooky to Lichia, trying to steal some
gold, and not paying much attention to whose village his giant turtle steps on. Somewhere along the line, his evil supposedly caused the death of Amon's mother, but it's never clear whether she was targeted for murder or was just collateral damage during the random-town-razing phase every young
evil overlord goes through. Amon and Lichia, meanwhile, are as bland and bloodless as a pair of doe-eyed Beanie Babies.
About the only thing Amon Saga has going for it is the much-touted character design by Vampire Hunter D designer Yoshitaka Amano, who also contributed to the flaccid story. This certainly explains why the mountainous Emperor is so reminiscent of Hunter's massive Count
Lee, why Lichia looks like a toned-down retake on Lee's daughter, why Amon's swordmaster looks almost exactly like D himself, and why the whole movie is filled with random fights with big clumsy monsters bristling with teeth and dripping with saliva. It seems improbable that a movie could be more iconic, simple and fight-heavy than Hunter itself, but Amon Saga manages.
But it still doesn't manage to do justice to Amano's designs. Amano's delicate, ethereal work (as seen in books like Sandman: The Dream Hunters) still doesn't translate well into TV-simple animation. Apart from a few early shots, where Amon's wandering is portrayed in Amano's usual limited color palette and stark simplicity, Amano's influence makes very little difference. But even far better animation wouldn't do much to flesh out this shambling, dry skeleton of a story.
