Yatterman (2009)

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

This is a long form sentai (Power Rangers etc) episode, with the premise being good versus evil. The story revolves around obtaining the four pieces of the Skull Stone which, when possessed, will make dreams come true (one character wants to be with every high school girl in Japan. Its not bad). An archaeologist found one piece in Norway and was abducted, prompting his daughter Shoko to enlist the help of the two heroes in this film (one is Saki Fumada, so evil in the drama "Life" but good here). They have to beat three others with the help of Yatterman, a giant dog like creature straight out of sentai scripts. The film is good, a bit over the top, but fun. The special effects are great and the colors are vivid. Not for children, but teens and adults will like it.

So the challenge is to make a full length live action movie from an anime series which did not stray too far from "Dudly Do-Right" in scope.One way, and this is what director Miike chooses, is to keep the visuals and story at the original "Loony-Tunes" level, but make the characters and subtext more adult. This will either work for you, or leave you aghast, depending on if you expected a kids movie or not.It's obvious from the opening shot of Doronjo where Miike is headed with this movie. It's a kids movie for adults, not to be confused with a kids movie with jokes thrown in for adults. I enjoyed it.Kyoko Fukada as Doronjo is hot enough to burn celluloid; the rest of the Dorombo gang is well cast, too. The Yatterman side is weaker, but probably deliberately so. The running gag of the movie is that the Dorombo gang must always lose, this is funnier if the good guys don't really seem to be worthy opponents.There is a lot of CG animation in this movie, and while it's well done for the most part, the extended CG fight scenes get less and less interesting as the film rolls on into the second half.

Gan and Ai (who together are Yatterman) battle Mistress Donjuro and her fiendish assistants Tonzra and Boyacki for pieces of an ancient skull. In the hands of someone other than Takashi Miike this would be a conventional adventure thriller with car chases,snappy one-liners, explosions and a love interest. However this is Takashi Miike. He pokes a finger in the eye of your pre-conceived ideas, flicks v-signs at the standard film conventions while dancing on the seat of a unicycle. Naked.On Fire. And upside-down.If Luis Bunel and Dali dropped acid and spent the weekend drinking Absinthe and eating crayons this is the kind of madness that would ensue. This is huge spoiler for the opening, just to give you a flavour for what the film is like:***Spoiler***We open to a scene of devastation, a huge teddy-bear robot is rampaging though Tokoyoko armed with a frying pan and cleaver. They are confronted by Yattaman and a fight ensues, which has people climbing out of what appears to be deep-fat fryers, fighting with giant spoons and forks versus someone armed with a a ball and cup, throwing cars at each other, kung-fu moves, more robots, a cute Japanese woman dressed as a leather- clad dominatrix, electrocutions, slapstick, a soundtrack that sounds like a mixture of bad 80s pop and German power metal guitar, then followed by a battle between a robo-dog and the original teddy-bear kitchen utensils robot, the losers make their escape on a bicycle that talks to them and throws them off by exploding the saddles as punishment... and that is just the the first 10 minutes.I've no idea if this is true to the original cartoon series and to be honest I don't care - it is well done, funny, appeals to both the adult and 5-year-old in me and very entertaining.

I finally get to see this film which premiered earlier this year at the New York Comicon. I was upset at not being able to secure a seat, however in retrospect that may have been a good thing.This is a great looking musical comedy action children's film based upon the anime series of the same name. I'm at a loss to say more than that. Its pretty much an over extended children's program pumped up (with adult references) to almost two hours where Yatterman (Number one Number two and a couple of robots) taking on a bad guy team all over the world. I'm guessing you need to know something about the series since it starts in mid action and just goes. Its a frenetic mess. Its great eye candy but anything having to do with the plot kind of was lost to me. I'm a huge fan of Miike's films and of the directors ability to confound expectations, the latter of which the director does here in spades, but out side of the motion and the visuals there isn't much here. I'm guessing that Miike enjoyed his work on one of the recent Ultraman series and wanted to continue on something similar. While this is better than Ultraman series (which was a mess) its still all form over content to the point that you really don't care about the plot. On the other hand the visuals and the sense of anything can happen is so strong the film is worth seeing at least as a rental.