Garaga was the first film directed by Hidemi Kubo, best known as an animator and character artist on Rankin-Bass and Topcraft's adaptations of The Hobbit, The Return of the King, and The Last Unicorn. Kubo's relative inexperience shows in the film's generic introduction, which tells us that by the year 2755, mankind will master space travel by developing warp gates that distort the fabric of reality. (Or something like that. The gates may as well use hamsters in wheels for all of their relevance to the plot.) One of these intergalactic portals malfunctions while processing the XeBeC, a cargo freighter that just happens to be transporting the cryogenically sleeping (why?) daughter of a military general. Tossed through space, the ship crashes on an uncharted planet known as Garaga.

After exiting their downed vessel, the XeBeC's hapless crew of bland stereotypes is attacked by what look like fanged rejects from Planet of the Apes, which, by the way, is actually named in the box copy of Garaga, lest viewers think the movie borrowed from some other film about a world populated by intelligent, semi-human chimps.

The simian soldiers of Garaga aren't as civilized as Dr. Zaius or Cornelius, however, and one kills some poor crewman before getting diced apart himself by the XeBeC's single competent passenger, Jay M. Jay. In flagrant disregard for common sense, the crew then elects to split up and explore the planet. During this ill-advised search, the general's daughter, Heran, quickly wanders off and gets snatched up by another group of monkey-men. Instead of eating or killing their captive as one might expect (or hope), the ape folk carry Heran back to a high-tech military fortress. She's greeted there by her father, who explains that he's controlling the man-monkeys as part of a Secret Military Project conducted with the help of an android named Alf Dolf. And then the man-monkeys drive tanks and march around with rifles. It's every bit as ridiculous as it sounds.

Meanwhile, Jay and his little robot sidekick, Onbu, encounter a mysterious, pink-clad psychic woman named Farla. She reveals to Jay that she represents an indigenous race of telepaths who are at war with the monkey-men, the other native species of planet Garaga. Before long, Jay's throwing in with a psychic aristocrat called Galliego and his blue-haired daughter, Kina, in an attempt to stop Alf Dolf from using the Secret Military Project to destroy the whole of human civilization.

As the preceding plot description implies, Garaga is an absolute mess. It meanders around like some free-association poem, cramming in as many story elements as possible while never spending the time to make any of them interesting or even understandable. It's not clear why the general is using the ape-folk in his insidious plot, or why Galliego tries to sacrifice Jay only to rescue him seconds later, or why Alf Dolf is so intent on wiping out all humanity. I have a theory about that last one, though.

If this doesn't explain Garaga in its entirety, nothing ever will.

Garaga's excess of plotlines and characters is actually quite funny, but like most lousy films, it shouldn't be. Jay's a dense, annoying, one-dimensional hero, Farla comes across as fake and simplistic, and the remaining characters get so little attention that they can barely be said to have personality, much less depth. And in case the Planet of the Apes reference wasn't obvious enough, Garaga also steals designs and elements out of every sci-fi film from Star Wars to Akira. Kina even looks like an underdressed female version of Tetsuo.

Although Garaga was apparently released in 1989 as a theatrical film, its dull animation is actually far worse than many television shows of the day. The character designs are simple and unattractive, and the animation direction is utterly terrible, with odd angles and confusing jumps between subplots. Battles have all the intensity of watching an eight-year-old play with a group of action figures, though a child would at least be able to manipulate more than one character at the same time. Garaga's animation rarely does so.

It's easy to fault Kubo for the script, or character designer Moriyasu Taniguchi for everyone's ugly appearance, but I can't imagine Satomi Mikuriya, who's credited with the original story, offering much to work with. Things aren't helped by the English dub, which suffers from banal dialogue that would almost be amusing if the actors didn't deliver it so poorly. Most of them sound as though they were recorded on the first take, and the guy playing Jay can't even carry the line “you damn dirty ape." In truth, the best performances come from Tom Wayland and Barry Banner, who are credited with “Countless Spectacular Death Scenes.”

Regardless of who you blame, Garaga is a dull, sloppy failure that I can only recommend as kitsch. (Perhaps it would work better as a musical, with Jay belting out “I hate every ape I seeee...”) It has the nonsensical story, over-grand scope, and inept production of something that's worth watching just to mock, but be warned: Garaga's too stupid to laugh at for very long.