n spring, the cliche says, a young man's fancy turns to love. If 1998's anime releases are any indication, spring is when a young woman's fancy turns to taking up a sword and battling an evil technological empire whose spaceships and killer robots clearly don't fit into her simple agrarian society.
Leda: The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko differs from other recent releases like Ellcia in that its heroine doesn't start out as a knight, even one in rusty armor. Yohko's an ordinary young girl nursing a crush on a boy who doesn't know she exists. Determined to confront her feelings, she writes him an impassioned piano melody and decides to use it as a form of introduction. But she backs down at the last minute. Seconds later, she's falling into another dimension, one featuring cute bug-eyed critters, a talking dog and an evil overlord whose minions are after her Walkman and its musical contents.
Faced with a situation out of Alice in Wonderland and opponents out of Wizards, Yohko spontaneously mutates into a sword-waving, bikini-wearing, mystical-power-wielding warrior-priestess of a mysterious goddess-figure named Leda. The gateway to her world is still open, and the local monstrous despot wants to travel through it in his floating sky fortress (Why do all the anime bad guys this year have floating sky fortresses? Was there a big sale on them?) and conquer Yohko's world. Naturally, the inexperienced, scrappy Yohko is determined to stop him, even if it means causing lots of big explosions.
Nothing new, done very well
Sarcasm aside, Leda is a surprisingly effective piece. Its plot conventions are trite and its most obvious cliches are irritating, but by the end it becomes a symbolic illustration of how much a few carefully shaped details can freshen up any aging story.
Yohko herself is most compelling because she's practical and intelligent, without the flightiness that seems necessary for even the most heroic anime females. She's a sweet, romantic type whose pained efforts at connection with her artfully faceless, abstracted paramour should strike a familiar chord in any viewer who's ever experienced puppy love. More to the point, she's capable of wonder and curiosity without terror, and her competent, questing nature makes this movie feel charmingly like something from anime master Hayao Miyazaki (Totoro, Nausicaa, Laputa, etc.).
Admittedly, this is more uneven than a Miyazaki work, with overly silly, cheesy moments flocking to unbalance the darker, more effective scenes. But the latter are worth the price of admission. The extended dream combat between Yohko and her nemesis Zell is particularly well-conceived, and Zell's robots are neat, creepy pieces of character design. Yohko's ally Yoni may look like C-Ko (Project A-ko) in armor, but she comes with a robot that easily breaks the anime mold. There are plenty of surprises to be found in Leda...simply starting with the fact that it's well worth watching.
