Slayers Great is a 1997 fantasy anime movie directed by Hiroshi Watanabe and Kunihiko Yuyama. It was written by the creator of Slayers himself Hajime Kanzaka. The cast features the great Megumi Hayashibara, Maria Kawamura, Kikuko Inoue, Takehito Koyasu and Seizô Katô. Great was the third theatrical Slayers film and was released on august 2nd, 1997.
In this adventure, Lina and Naga meet and help a girl named Laia, who happens to be the daughter of a great golem maker. The sorceresses want a reward and go to the toymaker, Galia, who lacks inspiration. He wants to use Lina as a model as her appearance renews his inspiration. Huey, Galia's son, also makes golems and doesn't share his dad's vision of how to make them so he uses Naga as a model. The two golems then fight it out during a local event sponsored by feuding lords who want to control the town.
While a little smaller in scope and ambition when compared to the previous movies, this one is very polished in the animation department allowing for some very impactful and greatly animated golem-mecha battles between the overendowed Naga figure and the silly Lina doll, a hilarious contrast. This movie also shows us more intense and direct conflict between Lina and Naga, to the point where Naga becomes an antagonistic force for a lot of the runtime, this rivalry, which is never truly serious, is at the center of the storyline and even gives us a very awesome magic fight between Lina and Naga, something we haven't really seen before, at least in this level and taken this seriously (not really serious because ultimately it is cut-off comedically but for the most part it was played straight).
The short duration works to its advantage because of its good pacing and also because this is really a very long episode of the Slayers series, even more so than what we have seen before from the other films considering the fact that it's mostly restricted to a couple of settings, the lack of severity of its stakes and the overall lighthearted nature, filled to the brim jokes, all contribute to give this one a minor but more relaxed vibe that make it easily digestible.
I forgot to mention before but the soundtrack in these movies is a highlight, the music for almost all of the movies and OVAs was done by Takayuki Hattori and it's are quite sweet, with songs vocalized by the great Megumi Hayashibara as well. Listening to that alone should get you in the mood to watch this piece of classic anime cinema from the nineties along with the rest. As a whole, it's a perfect example, or time capsule, of this type of animated product due to its structure and manner of wacky but well done storytelling.
Totally recommended for any Slayers fan out there, even if you haven't delved deeper into the Slayers franchise you can still have a good time because of how simple and quick it is, it was definitely one of the first few Slayers movies I watched and it still holds up.
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