It's really becoming a privilege to see more Japanese animated movies come to Arkansas theaters. Imagine two decades ago when anime fans had to live in Los Angeles or New York to catch subtitled anime from Japan.
And now, Arkansans can watch these movies dubbed mere months after their Japanese release. That's certainly the case starting tonight for fans of My Hero Academia who want to see it on the big screen in.
My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising releases tonight, and I was given a review copy in advance from Funimation, who handled the dub of this movie. I went into this film never having watched an episode of the show or read a single volume of the manga. Talk about going in cold. My temperature was lower than Todoroki's.
I'll say straight off the bat, I tend to frown on most anime movies that already have a television series. It always seems like there's a 50/50 shot of the movie suffering from lazy writing or not utilizing its characters properly.
Perhaps I'm jaded, having grown up with terrible Dragon Ball Z movies like Dead Zone and Tree of Might. And Inuyasha certainly had a stinker with Fire on the Mystic Island (is it asking too much to put Koga in a movie? Give Sesshomaru a break).
With that said, the flip side is some anime movies that have television series turn out awesome. The third Inuyasha movie, Swords of an Honorable Ruler is the best of the franchise. And Full Metal Alchemist: Conqueror of Shamballa remains a favorite of mine. So I was curious to see where My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising would rank.
I'm happy to report this is a solid and entertaining movie. It's the second My Hero Academia movie, after My Hero Academia: Two Heroes in 2018.
My Hero Academia is in an interesting place right now, as far as anime is concerned, especially mainstream anime. It's definitely on the shōnen (aimed at young males) side of anime and is quickly working to wind up as one of the big names, like Dragon Ball, Bleach, One Piece and Naruto.
The narrative for anime movies with ongoing television series is always tricky because of timelines. Fans are always wondering where the story goes. It's the same situation fans were in with The X-Files: Fight the Future in 1998. They wanted to know where in the series the movie would fit in. Or in the case of many terrible Dragon Ball Z movies, if it would even be canon or just some cash-grabbing side story.
Having never seen an episode of My Hero Academia before, I was in the unique position not to care about timelines for this movie. It's hard to know about plot holes when you're not aware of the main plot. For the fans of the series, I can't really tell you much in this regard.
The overall story for the series follows a group of students with superpowers in a hero high school, training to be professional heroes in a world where most of the population is born with some kind of superpower.
This new movie finds our heroes sent to a small island south of Japan to work for a while. And it's fun to watch these heroes deal with mundane things around the island, which doesn't really have much crime for heroes to fight. It's a nice change of pace to see a character who can move at super speeds carry a grandmother with back issues to the hospital or a character who can use lightning to help charge the battery of an old tractor for a farmer.
Scenes like these definitely illustrate a refreshing theme in a world of superheroes and supervillains. Helping the little guy find his missing backpack can be just as important as stopping an alien from destroying the planet. Or as Gandalf said in the first Hobbit movie, "I found it is the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keeps the darkness at bay, simple acts of kindness and love."
It's that theme embodied in main character Izuku Midoriya (also called Deku) that really endeared him to me. He's just this little guy with more power than his body can actually use. It's a power that literally breaks his bones when he activates it, but that doesn't stop him from using it to protect the little people.
Justin Briner voices Deku, and I just love the tension and strain he's able to put into the little guy struggling to use these powers without killing his body, usually to protect a defenseless child.
Perhaps the most remarkable feat of this movie is having more than a dozen heroes and giving them all roles somehow relevant to the plot. I've seen anime movies with half that number of characters just not know what to do with them and kill any momentum in the story.
To have all these heroes with different abilities and giving them relevant portions of screen time is impressive.
Getting down to brass tacks, though, the movie's best feature is its lightning-paced action. Sometimes the obvious answer is the correct one. And go figure in a series about heroes and villains, the real strength of its newest movie comes down to the fights.
This movie has some awesome team-ups between Deku and his childhood friend, Katsuki Bakugo, who essentially has the ability to make explosions. Whereas Deku is an eternal optimist, Bakugo is grouchier and brasher. He doesn't see the value in helping the little people so much as working to take down the villains.
But when he and Deku team up to take down the bad guys, man did the movie get me excited. It's impressive that I came into the movie cold and left on fire. And the animation kept pace with that heart-pounding action so I felt the impact of every punch and explosion. I shouldn't have expected anything less from Bones, one of the best studios in the anime business.
Where this movie falls flat is its villain, Nine. The character is voiced by the always-impressive Johnny Yong Bosch. But he's given no real backstory. His goal? You've heard it 1,000 times in anime movies. He wants to remake the world in his image where only the strong survive and, blah blah blah. If you're going to have that be a villain's primary motivation, then writers have to pair it with an interesting character, see: Makoto Shishio.
Nine had a random grab bag of henchmen with him, each with their own unique powers. They weren't really developed at all. "These are my henchmen." "What do they want?" "They just want to be evil." "Oh, OK." Rinse and repeat.
While the henchmen gave us some impressive battles, I like my villains to have a little more depth, or any depth really. A muscular bird wolf thing that can breathe fire?! That's so cool! What's his deal? He's just evil? Eh. OK, then.
The other problem with this movie is a lack of consequences at the end. One of the heroes gives up their power at the end, and that blew my mind. I thought about how cool it was to take such a big story risk like that, opening up new room for development and then -- no, wait. False alarm. I know that's how these anime side stories in movies often end up, but dang it, folks. Give me some real consequences. Take some risks.
If you can give both of those things a pass (and I did), then this movie is worth seeing, even if you aren't already a fan of My Hero Academia. If nothing else, the movie made me want to watch the main series. Mission accomplished?
MovieStyle on 02/26/2020