Animated `Fist' Knuckles Under, Drowns In Its Blood And Guts

----------------------------------------------------------- X "Fist of the North Star," feature-length Japanese animated feature directed by Toyoo Ashida. Neptune, today through Sunday. No rating; includes cartoon nudity, violence, rough language. ----------------------------------------------------------- An indigestible mixture of sappy and brutal imagery, accompanied by a pompous narrator who talks about yin and yang maintaining the balance of the universe, this two-hour Japanese cartoon is being promoted as "the world's first Splatter-Toon."

It's a nonstop gore festival in which animated blood spurts like red ribbons, arms are severed for comic effect, heads are sliced off or explode, the hero's fiancee is literally crucified, and the killers talk dirty.

Based on a Japanese television series and a popular series of graphic novels, the storyline revolves around a top martial-arts student named Ken who is master of the "North Star" technique. Chosen to become a world leader, he instantly earns the enmity of a couple of fellow students, who combine forces with a student from a rival martial-arts school who wants to bed Ken's fiancee.

All of this is set in a post-nuclear wasteland that suggests the setting for an American Western (or a "Road Warrior" remake), and there's even a Western-style showdown with fists instead of guns.

Despite occasionally striking images - an ocean liner impaling a skyscraper, burning masses of people that suggest the devastation of Hiroshima - "Fist of the North Star" is the kind of cheap-looking cartoon in which characterization (not to mention audience involvement) is kept to a minimum.

The characters' mouths move, but their eyes are dead and it's difficult to tell the heroes and villains apart. The coarse English-language dubbing makes the movie sound like an ancient Steve Reeves epic.

Glitches in the soundtrack make the music and sound effects seem an afterthought. Although most of the picture was done on celluloid, it's interrupted by weird video-like inserts that blur the animation and make it look even cheaper.

"When opposites become as one, a savior will emerge," we're told at one point. But when you can't tell the opposites apart, it's hard to feel much investment in the outcome.

Almost the only character who makes an impression is a pathetic mute child, a Pollyanna with gooey Keane eyes "whose innocence and purity symbolize the hope for a better future" (that's what it says in the press kit). Meanwhile, the blood feud between Ken and the lookalike bad guys just gets bloodier.