Mask of Zeguy – 1993 – Japan
I’ve had an irrational desire to watch Mask of Zeguy for years. There is no good reason for this. I knew it would be crappy and not make any sense, and I was right. But sometimes, a person gets an idea in their head and can’t get it out. To me, Mask of Zeguy seemed like the quintessential dumb anime OVA, and I had to know how true that was.
In short, it was completely true. Mask of Zeguy is such a pastiche of other anime that it could almost pass as a parody. A high-school girl gets warped into a magical world. She is searching for her lost friend, and she might also be an immortal priestess of an ancient religion. Isn’t this also the plot of Fushigi Yugi (1995)?
Mask of Zeguy takes a kitchen-sink approach to world-building. The fantasy realm, known as the Cloud World, is a rocky ruin populated by mute telepaths. There are wolf-men and cyborgs driving futuristic tanks and motorcycles. One of the villains is a mad scientist with a little puppet of himself on his shoulder that mimics his every action. One of the heroes is a samurai. There is a hovercraft with a metal pill bug instead of an engine, and apparently, that pill bug is also pregnant (this is mentioned several times). Time travel happens.
All of these details are revealed through info-dumping dialogue which is full of meaningless proper nouns. None of it matters, but I admire how weird the creators were trying to be. The whole thing has a lot of energy.
The animation in Mask of Zeguy is decent, and the design of the world and characters is pretty imaginative. It combines motifs from medieval fantasy, Japanese folklore, and Mad Max in a way that never quite gels but at least feels original. There is a sapient cat.
Rating: 4/10 Shrunken Heads
Video Vodou 