Netflix’s Bastard!! reboot shows how fantasy anime has changed over the years
The recently-released Bastard!!! Heavy Metal, Dark Fantasy anime is like if someone distilled the 1980s into one awesome, sword-and-sorcery fantasy series. Bastard!! tells the story of the antihero wizard Dark Schneider, who once almost wrecked the world by trying to awaken the God of Destruction, Anthrasax, but is now fighting to stop it.
The Netflix series is a reboot/remake of a 1992 straight-to-video anime based on the 1988 manga by Kazushi Hagiwara, and it’s essentially a time capsule of the ’80s, containing within it a lot of what was popular during that decade — including the building blocks of “old-school fantasy anime.” To be clear, “old-school fantasy anime” isn’t simply animated Japanese fantasy that came out before a specific, arbitrary date. It’s more of a distinct approach to fantasy and a specific way of doing things that just so happens to have been perfected around the 1980s. So, taking Bastard!!! as an example, what was the subgenre all about? Borrowing, for one; old-school fantasy anime tended to borrow heavily from other, mostly Western sources, like how Bastard!!! uses heavy metal and D&D.
The name “Dark Schneider” actually comes from Udo Dirkschneider, formerly of the metal band Accept, with “Accept” also being the spell that awakens his powers. Other musical references in Hagiwara’s work include Dark Schneider’s signature spell, Venom (like the English metal band), or the existence of the kingdom of Metallicana within its universe. The series also takes more than a few cues from Dungeons & Dragons, another ’80s mainstay, like the demon Suzuki Dogezaemon that’s clearly based on the famous Beholder from D&D.
The trend does go back a little further, though. During the late Edo period (1603–1868), one
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