Gandalla: The King of Burning Desert

Before I begin, it's worth noting that I am the first to review this title on MAL. It is my belief that every anime deserves at least one proper review, deserves to have its content engaged and reckoned with. No matter how obscure it is, and no matter how long ago it was made, an anime still represents the creative passion of its creators, the hopes and dreams of the team that made it, and as such, I will give this one a fair and honest accounting here. Gandalla: The King of Burning Desert, referred to from here on simply as Gandalla, is the definition ofobscure. A TV anime from 1998 with less than 3,000 members on MAL and no reviews is already enough of an oddity, so my interest was piqued and I went looking for where I might be able to find it for myself. This would prove to be far more difficult than I anticipated, and I had to delve deep into the dusty corners of the internet in an attempt to find any way that could possibly allow me to watch and engage with this title. Eventually, I found an English sub, tucked away in the form of a little, seldom-visited upload. The subtitles themselves were kind of amateurish and sloppy, messing up certain essentials of English grammar and missing the mark on metaphors, but even so it was more than enough for my purposes. In a way, the fact that someone out there bothered to go through the effort of giving this obscure title its own set of English subs, even if they were pretty rough, has a kind of heroic quality to it. Now, on to the actual anime itself, beginning with the story. Gandalla knows exactly what it wants to do from the very start, and wastes no time launching into an ambitious, complicated mess of a plot, which goes something like this- A band from LA calling itself Gold Dust is going through the trauma of having lost a couple members, while persevering in the face of tragedy in an attempt to hit it big. They soon find themselves caught up in a web of conspiracies related to a powerful desert being called Gandalla, which has power over sand, can manifest various kaiju, is related to the disappearances of talented musicians from around the world, and which various shadowy parties are seeking to control for their own ends, using the power of music. The key to it all seems to be a certain song belonging to Gold Dust, that LA band we're introduced to from the start. Other themes include magic, prophecy, body horror, and the politics of the music industry. This, mind you, is an extremely simplified version of the story at hand, which combines what feels like three entirely separate storylines and collides them into one another in a way that is simultaneously impressive and disorienting. I honestly don't know how the writers kept everything straight in their heads, or how they expected the viewer to do the same, but I managed. While it has some really cool concepts that it explores throughout, with a unique and creative world it builds for itself, there are still various things that make little sense. Gandalla seems to appear and disappear every time someone plays the right music, but nobody ever seems to be able to 'control' him in the way they all say the music does. Also, the rules for his appearances and disappearances seem almost totally random. Not to mention that the ending is a total wash, resolving very little and putting a distinctly unsatisfying cap on things. It's bizarre that, after all the effort they went through, they couldn't come up with any better way to end it. Put simply, the way I'd describe the story is how I'd describe the anime as a whole- kind of messy. Moving on, the art is interesting to talk about, because it has both the strongest and weakest aspects of this anime on full display. To begin with, it presents these colorful, vibrant visuals, that are more stylistically consistent with an 80s anime than a 90s one. Everything is extremely saturated, and has a kind of glow to it. This imparts a dreamlike quality to the title, bolstered by its weird story, and the fact it is almost totally unknown. Furthermore, the art direction in regards to Gandalla and the various giant monsters he is responsible for spawning is decidedly cool, with a high level of creative detail and otherworldly, almost lovecraftian aspects to them. Beyond these admittedly cool visual features, however, is a subpar production marred by cut corners and bizarre choices. The animation is stilted and unprofessional, with a loose grip on perspective, and does its best to obscure scenes of up-close motion because it is quite bad at smoothly animating them. The design style of the more mundane things, like the human characters, feels cheap and somewhat lazy, almost feeling more like an old American cartoon designed to sell toys or something. It's hard to describe it in any other way, and it is a feeling that absolutely saturates this anime, which hardly feels like an anime at all, per se. Maybe it's because of American stylistic influences on its creators, or simply because the main characters are American, but in truth it hardly feels Japanese at all, save for the crazy, otherworldly moments involving Gandalla. This is certainly an added layer of strangeness to what is already such a strange anime. The sound is solid, but not much to write home about, meeting all the basic standards of quality for the time. At the very least, it has a good command of music, with the main repeating leitmotif, which is a major plot point, firmly established across various iterations and versions of itself, including a rock version, classical version, acoustic version, whistle version, and more, which is a detail that I appreciated. The characters are alright, filling their necessary roles throughout the story, but failing to really impress in any particular way. Again, they felt more like American cartoon characters, with bold, easily-defined character traits and big, obvious flaws and motivations that feel poorly attributed and clumsy. Still, they aren't terrible, and once again fit their various roles well. Of them, my two favorite characters are my favorites for very different reasons- Rick and Cascade. Rick is the drummer of Gold Dust, and his honesty, bravery, and touch of emotional dysregulation made him feel like the most believable character of the main cast, and especially believable as a drummer. Meanwhile, Cascade basically doesn't have any lines, and I like him more as a concept than as a character. He fills the role of an Agent Smith type threat, working on behalf of one of the shadowy groups seeking to control Gandalla. He can shapeshift, hypnotize, and above all, turn into a pile of sentient sand. By far one of the most interesting villains in the show, I'm glad they made rather significant use of him in the second half. Overall, Gandalla: The King of Burning Desert is an obscure, bizarre title, with an ambitious idea and clearly a ton of effort dedicated to certain aspects of its production. However, even given these circumstances, most of the anime actually feels pretty mundane. When you stumble across titles like these, nearly lost to time, part of you expects something really crazy, and while Gandalla in many ways meets these expectations, I was still surprised at just how normal so much of it felt, even boring when it had stretches where everything was kind of mundane. Give it a watch if you like obscure anime or highly ambitious stories, or are looking for something that has a distinctly western flare. This anime is a lot of things, but it's not terrible. Even though it's got a ton of flaws, and almost nobody has watched it, I'm glad to say that at least I have.