Yatterman
Yatterman
aka ヤッターマン aka Yattāman
2009
Screenplay by Masashi Sogo
Story by Tatsuo Yoshida
Directed by Takashi Miike
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It’s posin’ time!
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Yatterman is a big pile of dumb fun. Based on a cartoon show from back in the day (back in the Japan day) of 1977. Smart people (or people who know how to quickly Google things) will know that Yatterman was the second show in the Time Bokan Series, which is a group of cartoons from Tatsunoko Productions. The cartoons evolve and feature similar groups of heroes and villains. Yatterman was the longest running series, and has even sported a revival cartoon in 2008.
Yatterman is about two super-heroes who fight a variety of monsters/giant robots that are the work of the Doronbo Gang, baddies attempting to get the pieces of the Skull Stone together to awful things will happen…and also the Doronbo Gang gets rich. The hero is the teenage son of a toy store owner who has modified his dad’s toys into weapons to fight evil, and does so with his girlfriend. Yes, the concept is nuts, and that’s why we love it.
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Subtext? What’s that?
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Genre fans of Takashi Miike might be disappointed that there is no slicing of nipples, piano wire, or transexuals firing darts from their vaginas. But then, if that’s still all you expect from Miike by now, you really need to get out more. This isn’t 2001, people. Miike brings his usual over-the-top exuberance to Yatterman, this time translating it into the cartoony style that fits perfectly with the universe.
The Yatterman world is a ridiculous one, but also full of whimsy and wonder. Evil villains scheme and build giant robot machines, but are easily defeated. Characters are both stereotypical archetypes but also complex and developed personalities underneath.
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The extra Ds are for a double dose of Doronbo!
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Like all the best films, the villains are a thousand times more interesting than the heroes. Lady Doronjo is the hot girl who is evil, yet also hopelessly in love with her biggest nemesis. Tonzura aspires to be a wrestling champion and barely seems evil, while Boyacky is that guy who’s leering at you the entire bus ride. He’s also a mechanical genius and hopelessly in love with Lady Doronjo.
The entire film is packed with sexual innuendo. By innuendo, I mean totally blatant. Giant robots have breasts or what looks suspiciously like a giant wang (and all of these things fire things out of them) and there is a disturbing scene involving robot ants. Yatterman is one big pervert’s paradise.
Throughout the film, The Doronbo Gang embarks in a series of scams to acquire a large amount of money to build their mechanical creations in order to battle the Yatterman squad. Their methods are often genius, and all three of them could easily find legitimate employment and make buckets full of money, but they love the freedom of being able to do whatever they want, and also the dream of getting even richer and more powerful.
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This is the best movie ever.
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Because this film is weirdtacular and strange, it must be thoroughly examined and gets a full scale breakdown. Yatterman style!
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If you count all the skulls in this movie, you will unlock the secret number from the movie Pi!
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Categories: Bad, Movie Reviews Tags: cool robots, Japan, Katsuhisa Namase, Kendo Kobayashi, Kyoko Fukada, Masashi Sogo, Saki Fukuda, Sho Sakurai, Takashi Miike, Tatsuo Yoshida
Zebraman 2 (Review)
Zebraman 2: Attack on Zebra City
aka Zeburaman: Zebura Shiti no gyakushu aka ゼブラーマン ゼブラシティの逆襲
2010
Directed by Takashi Miike
Written by Kankuro Kudo
Zebraman 2: Attack on Zebra City is Miike’s followup to the 2004 film Zebraman, and like Zebraman before it, the sequel takes what could have been a straight story about a guy dressing up as a tokusatsu hero to find himself and takes it in unexpected directions. Zebraman 2 goes far beyond its predecessor, and has so many things going on it that you will be blown away by the result. Miike takes inspiration from the black and white stripes of the zebra and spins it into a yarn about the duality of man, good and evil, but sets it in a futuristic dystopia with fascist imagery and an MTV sensibility. The film is just frakking crazy. And brilliant. Brilliantly crazy.
Miike has a lot of fun inverting color schemes while still keeping up the black and white dichotomy. Governor Aihara Kouzo dresses in an all-black version of Alex the droog’s costume from A Clockwork Orange, his footsoldiers wear mostly black (with a stylized white zebra face on their masks – both showing their zebra origins and showing where George Lucas got the design for General Grievous!) as they stomp their way through town. In contrast, the hospital that serves the victims of the Zebra Police is the White Horse at white horse, all white, everyone dresses in white. Zebraman becomes whiter and whiter, beginning with his hair, while ZebraQueen becomes increasingly blacker in costume as the film commences, even commenting on how she wants more black. As their powers develop and they become more of a threat to each other, the characters are threatened with becoming more striped, a sign of weakness as they strive for their more purified forms.
The video direction is great, the pop star videos of ZebraQueen are indistinguishable from the stuff that should be playing on MTV (if garbage like Jersey Shore and Teen Mom wasn’t polluting the airwaves and forcing us to retreat to YouTube to watch actual videos!) Zebraman 2 is like a hyperactive music video at times. The songs aide you in throwing you right into the crazy world of the future, making you just as disoriented as Ichikawa as he wakes up in a world he doesn’t know. The violent imagery of the video matches the violence he encounters in the street.
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Categories: Bad, Movie Reviews Tags: Guadalcanal Taka, Japan, Kankuro Kudo, Masahiro Inoue, Mei Nagano, Naoki Tanaka, Riisa Naka, Show Aikawa, Takashi Miike, tokusatsu, Tsuyoshi Abe
Zebraman (Review)
Zebraman
aka Zeburaman aka ゼブラーマン
2004
Directed by Takashi Miike
Written by Kankuro Kudo
If you know anything about cult cinema, you know Takashi Miike is awesome. Miike is always firing with all cylinders, and even on his weaker efforts he never does a half-assed job or sleepwalks through a film. Miike hops genres like Q*bert down a pyramid, able to make the most disgustingly violent film you’ve ever seen and follow that up with a kiddie flick. Zebraman is a love letter to tokusatsu heroes, particularly those from the 70s and 80s on Japanese television. Miike takes a fictitious hero and series and turn it into much more than just a simple tokusatsu film. It becomes a tale of finding yourself, of destiny, of belief, and about doing what’s right because you’re a hero. And it also has a guy riding a flying zebra while battling a giant goo monster. Zebraman takes these conventions and has fun with them, turning some deadly serious and others into more ridiculous fare than they’re treated by the real tokusatsu shows.
The fun with Zebraman is how all these different conventions and story bits add up to create a good story, despite the difference in tone and style. It’s a testament to Miike’s talent that he can take so many differently shaped parts and put together the puzzle with no missing pieces. My biggest fault with Zebraman is that the sequel outshines it at every turn. But I’ll worry about that when the review of the sequel goes up. For now, let’s learn about the man, the myth, the hero, Zebraman!
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Categories: Movie Reviews, Ugly Tags: Akira Emoto, Atsuro Watabe, Japan, Kankuro Kudo, Koen Kondo, Kyoka Suzuki, Makiko Watanabe, Naoki Yasukochi, Show Aikawa, Takashi Miike, tokusatsu, Yoshimasa Mishima, Yui Ichikawa
13 Assassins (Review)
13 Assassins
aka Jusan-nin no shikaku aka 十三人の刺客
2010
Directed by Takashi Miike
Takashi Miike can make any type of film imaginable. He loves cinema, he loves to work, and his output is legendary. Miike crosses genres like they’re T’s, smearing the lines and creating unique works. His pattern of excesses give his films a tone that cannot be matched by other directors, even as the tones differ based on which excesses he is exercising for the film. From family-friendly fare to ultra-violent yakuza film, Miike puts his heart into everything he does. He pushes limits, test boundaries, and kicks butt.
Due to Miike’s initial popularity in cult movie circles in the West due to movies like Ichi The Killer, Audition, Fudoh, and Dead or Alive, people naturally assumed that he only made ridiculously violent films. I’m sure watching The Great Yokai War, Zebraman, or Yatterman blew their minds to smithereens. 13 Assassins has returned Miike to notice in the international scene, but again it is for a film that features a lot of violence. Most of the violence waits until the end of the film, and instead we go through samurai life, political drama, honor, and journey and preparation. I could say that I was one of those people who like to watch samurai films and am totally into the whole samurai code blah blah blah thing, but I actually don’t like samurai films (nor other period dramas known as jidaigeki.) Frankly, I don’t really care to watch stodgy guys sit around worrying about their honor for 90 minutes until a brief swordfight happens. This probably makes me a bad nerd and bad movie reviewer, but, whatever. I’ve avoided other recent samurai films, and only saw this one as Miike is attached to it. Miike manages to keep things interesting better than I hoped, preventing what could have been a dry and slow buildup with good characterization, planning, and the fallout when things don’t go according to plan and you end up wandering around the woods. There are even supernatural elements hinted throughout the film, the more you pay attention the more you realize where they are.
13 Assassins is a remake of 1963’s Jusan-nin no shikaku (The Thirteen Assassins), a film many (including myself) haven’t seen. In fact, my favorite part of the reviews for this is everyone bringing up Seven Samurai (including this review) while hardly anyone mentions the original version of 13 Assassins. It actually took a while to find a good site comparing the two films, and from what I can see Miike follows the original’s story fairly faithfully, but brings it down to a more human level.
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Categories: Good, Movie Reviews Tags: Arata Furuta, Goro Inagaki, Hiroki Matsukata, Iseya Yusuke, Japan, Koji Yakusho, Masachika Ichimura, samurai, Takashi Miike, Takayuki Yamada
Takashi Miike news – Ace Attorney and Ninja Kids
Another video game becomes a film as Takashi Miike has confirmed his statements about making Ace Attorney (Gyakuten Saiban) into a feature film. Narimiya Hiroki will play Naruhodo Ryuichi/Phoenix Wright, Kiritani Mirei is Ayasato Mayoi/Maya Fey, and Saito Takumi is Mitsurugi Reiji/Miles Edgeworth. Plot: The plot of the movie takes place in an alternate universe, where an increase in heinous crimes has forced Japanese attorneys and prosecutors to confront each other in a new court system that gives the accused only three days to prove their innocence. In this system, speed is favored over hard evidence and forensic science, forcing both the defense and the prosecution to do much of their own hurried investigation before time runs out.
I’ve not played these games, so I won’t have my childhood raped. Take that, NintendoDS havers!
Expect 90 minutes of this
In other Miike news, here is the trailer for Ninja Kids, a movie about Ninja Kids. Looks goofy.
via NipponCinema
Categories: Movie News Tags: Gyakuten Saiban, Japan, Kiritani Mirei, Narimiya Hiroki, Ninja Kids, Saito Takumi, Takashi Miike, video game movies
Trailer – Yatterman
Takashi Miike‘s Yatterman gets a new trailer. Sadao Abe is Yatterman, with Kyoko Fukada as Doronjo and Saki Fukuda as Ai-chan. I have never seen the cartoon this is based on, but it is like Indiana Jones with giant robots. The world premier will be at the New York Comic Convention (Feb. 6 – 8, 2009)
Here is an interesting article about Miike’s weird bondage thing in kids films.
2nd Trailer located here
Yatterman Official site
Categories: Movie News Tags: Kyoko Fukada, Sadao Abe, Saki Fukuda, Takashi Miike, Yatterman
