I often feel sorry for the directors and writers who had to create self-contained '90s anime OVAs less than an hour long. Granted, some made the most of it, Battle Angel and Yasuomi Umetsu's Kite among them, but most brief direct-to-video anime of the decade fell victim to small budgets and lowered ambitions. Bounty Dog is one of them. It's not sharply plotted or beautifully animated or enduringly watchable. It's just yellow.
Though an exact year is never given, our tale evidently takes places far enough the future for humanity to have developed not only very, very yellow-hued cities on the moon, but also the technology needed for fully functional cybernetic arms like the one belonging to Yoshiyuki Otomo. After a mysterious accident that killed his wife and cost him his right arm, Yoshiyuki awoke with a robotic limb inexplicably grafted to his body. Stranger still, he's haunted by the dying words of his wife, who claimed that she'd wait for him on the moon. The pensive Yoshiyuki has another reason for his lunar voyage, though, as he's a member of the freelance Bounty Dog Special Investigations Unit. Along with the bland, unassuming Kei and the team's tersely efficient female leader Shoko, Yoshiyuki's been hired to spy on a new weapon under development by the influential Constance Corporation.
Shortly after touching down on the company-controlled lunar colony, Yoshiyuki meets a woman who somehow resembles his deceased wife (except with an inconvenient length of blond hair). The woman announces that she's been awaiting his arrival and then abruptly runs off, pursued by armed thugs from Constance. While Yoshiyuki rescues her, he only manages to learn that her name is Inez before she starts shouting at some unseen presence. And then she vanishes before his eyes. Things grow even more perplexing when Yoshiyuki encounters Inez during an undercover foray into Constance. It seems that she and Yoshiyuki's wife are somehow connected to an alien woman known only as “the Sleeper,” who just so happens to be the subject of Constance's suspicious project. This Sleeper has apparently birthed a host of Inez's clones, all of whom are out to kill both their original and Yoshiyuki.
I'll grant that Bounty Dog has a unique aura about it, simply because it's so yellow. Nearly every scene is suffused with a heavily shadowed shade of...well, piss, though a few later sequences show equally strict uses of white, blue, and red. While this may have been a cost-saving measure (or perhaps Zero G Room got an unquestionably good deal on primary-color cel paint), it lends a striking noir-like effect to the desolate lunarscapes and sterile cyber-cities that frame Bounty Dog's story.
And like the pulp it so clearly is, Bounty Dog tosses out some strange concepts. But if Bounty Dog's mysteries are interesting at first, they're unsatisfying once explained. While the truth about Yoshiyuki's wife is a half-creative variation on the fallen-angel aesthetic, it's never given enough time to be convincing, and Yoshiyuki's cybernetic arm (supposedly “the key to his destiny”) has an ultimate purpose that's so odd and inefficient that it's almost comical.
The hour-long running time has a similar effect on the under-realized characters. Yoshiyuki never switches out of Determined Hero Mode, while Inez doesn't show enough personality to be anything but a basic goody-goody. Shoko is spirited, but she's always on the periphery of things, and Kei is so dull that he seems to be in the story just so the Bounty Dog team wouldn't seem unrealistically small.
As awkward as the story can get, Bounty Dog at least yields something to look at. Overseen by Hirotoshi Sano (Escaflowne, Gundam 0083), the animation meshes well with the reserved colors and several excellent mechanical designs from Ghost in the Shell's Atsushi Takeuchi and none other than Masamune Shirow, who pretty much distanced himself from this. I can certainly see why, as the visuals never got a satisfying plotline from screenwriter Mayori Sekijima (Tenchi Muyo!, The SoulTaker) or director Hiroshi Negishi, who's better known for lighter fare such as Burn Up! W, Saber Marionette J, and the horrendous Amazing Nurse Nanako.
An average English dub hasn't done Bounty Dog any favors. I can't give names, due to the lack of translated credits (thanks, Manga), though the voices resemble those from Manga UK's body of sloppy voice acting. Yoshiyuki's actor broods well enough, but he sounds forced and uninterested when the script requires him to get angry. At least the actress playing Inez uses a fragile, chirpy tone that fits the character, and the Sleeper's few lines get an aptly sensuous delivery from someone who sounds an awful lot like Jocelyn Cunningham (Miranda in The Venus Wars). Still, it's hard to praise the dub at all once you've heard Kei's actor. Not only does he have the voice of a mildly sarcastic computer, but someone saw fit to give him the worst line in the script.
