Gyo: Tokyo Fish Attack (2012)

The Worst Film Ever

Sorry, this movie sucks

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

I'm surprised many reviewers are even positive about this movie. This has got to be one of the worst movies I've seen. It's incompetent but fails to even relish in its awfulness. In the end, this movie has left me with the question, "Why?"Let me preface this by mentioning that I have read the manga and am a big fan of Junji Ito's work.The story: The introduction is short and lacking. Introducing the main character, Kaori, and her two friends takes about two minutes. A few more minutes in we're already headfirst into the action. Considering a total running time of 70 minutes, I would overlook this if it weren't for my next point. The movie makes terrible use of its time. Many scenes drag on unnecessarily and there are many scenes that simply aren't relevant to the movie at all, while some interesting scenes from the manga are omitted in their favour and many others that are supposed to be key points are cut short. As a result, much of the original detail is lost and certain scenes feel disconnected from the story. In the same vein, the movie makes changes to the original story that just don't add anything to it.The movie has an overall even pace and is neither slow nor fast, I'll give it that. It does a pretty decent job of switching between calm and action scenes, never really giving too much or too little of either. That didn't stop me from pausing about halfway in to watch The Voice out of sheer boredom, though.Unnecessary motivational speeches and monologues. I'm pretty sure there's like five of them, if not more, and the movie is only 70 minutes long. We get it, you can't wanna give up. One monologue would have sufficed.Awful, awkward and unnecessary sexualisation. I'm not even gonna explain this one, just look at the octopus scene. The lacking visuals and characters and the watered down story cause it to completely fail as a horror. If anything, it's just gross. But whereas many seriously intended bad movies result in unintended comedy, Gyo, sadly, fails in this as well. It's too badly written to be taken seriously, but it's still too sensical to be funny.The characters: All the characters are underdeveloped. They're boring and flat. None of them have a real personality, most can be summarised in one personality trait. None of the characters are really likeable. I couldn't get myself to care for any of them.All the characters except for Kaori have vague, nonsensical or seemingly no motivation to do anything. They assume unlogical things and say things in awkward ways.Characters are added and introduced unnecessarily and either fade out or are killed off without even serving a plot point. The biggest let-down was the fact that Tadashi's scientist uncle, who serves a major purpose in the original, was stripped of most of his relevance, but they added him to the movie anyway.The main character is swapped for no reason. In the manga, Tadashi is the main character and Kaori a side character with basically the same story arc as Tadashi in the movie has. In the movie it's swapped.The visual and sound design: The visual style is bland and flat, sometimes even bad, and generally inconsistent. The line-art is often awkward or crudely drawn, resulting in unintended hilarity. The colour palette is boring and matter-of-factly, and doesn't add anything to the story. There is hardly any detail. The animation is incredibly inconsistent, sporadically jumping from mediocre to bad and lazy to completely excessive. The animation of subtle body language is downright awful. The quality level is about the same as you'd expect from a short-running low-budget anime series, which shouldn't be the case for a movie.The CGI is just bad and looks completely out of place in a 2D animated movie. I get that they used it because it's a lot easier and cheaper to animate than regular 2D animation, especially with the quantity of all the fish, but the end result just looks awful.The movie completely fails to capture Junji Ito's iconic style, the atmosphere hardly holds up to the creepy and disgusting atmosphere from the manga.The sound design is mediocre. The voice acting is generally okay. The sound effects are tolerable at best, albeit sparse. The music is what you'd expect from a low-budget drama anime and fails to capture the creepiness that the movie intends, often even ruining the atmosphere of a scene; I feel it would have done better even without the music. Going in my expectations were low but Gyo still managed to shatter them. The movie barely even tries and fails to live up to a cult classic.If you're looking for a creepy, absurd story, just skip this movie and read the manga, or do yourself a favour and watch Sharknado.

Gyo: Tokyo Fish AttackThe reason why fish don't speak is they would drown every time they tried.Although verbal evolution is far-off, this anime confirms upward mobility is not.Graduates Aki, Erika and Kaori head to the seashore to celebrate their recent liberation from the classroom only to discover a freakish fish on the beach that has grown a pair of motorized legs.More ambulatory vertebrates soon appear on land, including a Great White Shark that stalks the sidewalks for its next meal.Time reveals the military's involvement in creating a self-perpetuating mechanism propelled by the death stench of its victims. The most bizarre aquatic tale to ever surface, this acutely drawn anime inspired by the multi- volume horror manga fails to deliver the unnerving scares of its muse, but it does feature the key moments that comprise its greatness.Incidentally, once they can ride a bike, these biped fish will dominate the Ironman Triathlon.Yellow Lightvidiotreviews.blogspot.ca

Giant fish on mechanical legs invade land and... well, that's more or less about it really. Apart from the farting green multi-corpse cyborgs, of course. And intelligent gas. And zombie circus clown musicians. And...I've not seen the source manga that this is based on (if indeed there is any such thing), but i'd hazard a guess a lot of it has been lost in the translation to anime.With a name like "Gyo: Tokyo Fish Attack" i didn't sit down to watch expecting a highbrow classic, but still felt distinctly underwhelmed after the 70-odd minutes were up.The animation was in places pretty good, more often somewhat average, and somewhat let down by some cheap-looking CGI, and the story was decidedly offbeat, to say the least - which is normally a good thing with me. However, it's all just a bit too random and tenuous, even for a film i'd expect to have all the depth of a puddle to start with.If you are hoping for a coherent plot, or the occasional credible explanation as to what the hell is going on, then i would say this maybe isn't the film for you. On the other hand, if just watching a man fight a giant mechanical spider-squid that just unexpectedly fell out of a tree on him is your thing, then fire in.Pros: This is the only film i've ever seen have a leading character savaged by an angry mob containing zombies, a cow and a shark at the same time.Cons: The rest of the film makes as much sense as the above.

I just don't get movies like this. Why make a movie based on a certain thing and then have such utter disrespect for that certain thing. Junji Ito is by far one of my favorite authors, and while Gyo is far from his best work it still was pretty good. It was Ito doing what he does best. Evoke an otherworldly feeling of terror and mixing that up with bizarre imagery. While this movie has some elements from the manga it completely lacks the essence. The world wide chaos is somewhat there and some of the imagery really lives up to the manga. But for the most part I just get the feeling this is based on a badly told resume rather than the manga itself. Characthers that where not even in the manga are added. Now that wouldn't be a problem if they actually did something useful to flesh out the story, but no. They are a complete waste of space. Only there to fill out key elements of the manga where they didn't belong in the first place. The characters that was in the manga are completely altered beyond recognition. Kaori and Tadashi even switch places in the chain of events that took place in the manga. Important pieces of the story are breezed over or just omitted. The sheer incompetence at work here just astounds me. As an adaption this fails miserably. Maybe you can enjoy it if you haven't read the manga. But as one who have I must say this one was just painful to watch. Some credit must be given to the animation witch at times is really great, apart from the cgi. I never was a fan of 3d animation. The sense of total despair and hopelessness as the army of fish is slowly taking over human territory is there. I just wish they could have at least tried to follow the manga better. A total waste of time if you have read the source material. I give it 2/10 and that's being generous.