Sengoku Majin Goushougun: Toki no Etranger

Alright, take the director of the Pokemon movies and have him do a sequel movie to a fighting force mecha show from the early 80's. It sounds like a recipe for unadulterated mediocrity, yet somehow it manages to be one of the most bizarre, surreal, and personal animes ever created. In a way, I would liken this to Watchmen, even though it came out over a year before that famous comic. Both weave tales of heroes who had their moment in the sun, but when the war was over, they faded into obscurity. They're all older now and one has turned his one-time fame into a successful commercial enterprise. Another is the Surgeon General. They haven't seen each other in years, but they quickly rally when one of their own is threatened. While Time Stranger does have several action scenes, action is not the focus. Rather it focuses on Remy's internal struggle and how she deals with almost insurmountable odds. She realizes that her death is almost a certainty, but she never gives up. But let's get one thing out of the way: Time Strange is 14 years old and it looks it. The animation gets the job done, and there are some moments where a lot is done with a little, but it's not going to blow anyone away. More than anything else, that's the main gripe with the show. However, it should, in no way, take away from enjoyment one gets from viewing this movie. The music is a mix of haunting and surreal, with a pure 80's power ballad at the end. Again, nothing truly exceptional here, but it holds up better than the animation The main draw here is the characters, or, specifically, Remy. She is one of the strongest and most unique female characters I've seen in an anime. She can fight when she needs to, but it's her strong will and never-say-die attitude that make her truly standout. This is one that's not to be missed.

The historical significance of this work is likely something that can only be fully grasped by those who were anime fans in Japan at the time of its production. Even viewed from the perspective of 2026, this work possesses a highly unusual structure. It is based on the robot anime *Sengoku Majin GoShogun*, which aired in 1981. A spin-off film—featuring neither the original protagonist nor the titular robot—was released in 1985 and became a hit. For context, *The Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love?* and *Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer* were released the previous year, while *Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam* began airing just two months before this film's release. Ashi Productions, the studio behind this film, had produced *Magical Princess Minky Momo* the year before and *Dancouga* that same year. Studio Ghibli was established the month after this film's release. In short, this film emerged during a period when monumental works of 1980s Japanese anime were appearing one after another; yet, it achieved high acclaim by focusing solely on the supporting characters of a "Super Robot" anime that had been cancelled after just two cours (six months) four years earlier. How was such a thing possible? As you may know, the screenplay was written by Takeshi Shudo—the lead writer for *Pokémon*. The six supporting characters he had crafted were so compelling that Toshio Suzuki—who would later become producer at Studio Ghibli—commissioned Shudo to write a series of novels featuring these six characters as protagonists while Suzuki was an editor at Tokuma Shoten’s *Animage* magazine. This film was born as a result of Suzuki’s production efforts. Another crucial point is that, with this work, Suzuki and Shudo demonstrated for the first time that "if the characters' personalities are strong enough, one can create a work—and even make it commercially viable—by removing the robots from a robot anime." Suzuki had Shudo working on official spin-off material for a staggering eight years. Unfortunately, the *GoShogun* novel series remained unfinished after Toshio Suzuki moved over to Studio Ghibli full-time. For this reason, the work holds immense significance in the history of Japanese animation. Its content was also deeply compelling and beloved—at least among the fans of that era who had watched *GoShogun*.