PSYCHIC WARS (1991) is a short (51 min.) made-for-video Japanese animated occult thriller about a modern Japanese doctor summoned by the spirits of a group of Buddhist nuns to fight demons in Japan's distant past. It's got some very nice artwork and design and includes some picturesque scenery of Kyoto and ancient ruins in the surrounding countryside, done in a style reminiscent of the charcoal paintings of traditional Japanese art. The storyline is pretty straightforward, focusing on the hero's travels into the past of 5000 years ago to protect the early Japanese people from being wiped out by a race of technically advanced demons. The demons don't go quietly and a handful wind up escaping into the future where the hero, Ukiyo, continues the battle, only to learn that his girlfriend has a secret link to the conflict, putting him in a serious moral and emotional dilemma.
The build-up to the climactic series of battles is quite suspenseful, but the final action doesn't deliver much of a payoff. Things turn out much too easy for the hero, a doctor with previously hidden powers that have been triggered by a dying patient who's a reincarnation of one of the Buddhist nuns. The demons themselves are huge, grotesque, scaly beasts, too much like comic book monsters to be taken seriously. The final segment, in which the doctor must confront his girlfriend, is quite compelling, but ends too quickly. Perhaps a bigger budget and a longer running time would have allowed the story to play out properly. But this is a problem with many Japanese OAV (Original Animated Video) productions. A story that requires feature-length or multi-part telling is often forcibly compressed to standard one-shot OAV length.
The build-up to the climactic series of battles is quite suspenseful, but the final action doesn't deliver much of a payoff. Things turn out much too easy for the hero, a doctor with previously hidden powers that have been triggered by a dying patient who's a reincarnation of one of the Buddhist nuns. The demons themselves are huge, grotesque, scaly beasts, too much like comic book monsters to be taken seriously. The final segment, in which the doctor must confront his girlfriend, is quite compelling, but ends too quickly. Perhaps a bigger budget and a longer running time would have allowed the story to play out properly. But this is a problem with many Japanese OAV (Original Animated Video) productions. A story that requires feature-length or multi-part telling is often forcibly compressed to standard one-shot OAV length.