Keep On Callin' (for help)

You know, I had planned to write something positive in here soon. I have a half-finished write-up of Valkyrie Profile sitting on my hard drive (both at work and at home). I've been thinking all week, "I need to finish that and post it." So far, I haven't touched it.

I also plan to talk about more than anime here at some point, but there's a reason I haven't followed through with that, either. It's easier to bitch about things than praise them. And when it comes to anime, there is a lot - and I do mean a lot - to bitch about.

The first anime I ever watched - not including shows like Ronin Warriors which were broadcast on afternoon television - was Ninja Scroll, when I was about fourteen or fifteen years old. The first anime I ever owned, however, was Fatal Fury: the Motion Picture.

Now, I didn't really own it in the strictest sense of the word. What I did was record it off of the Sci-Fi Channel back in the summer of (I think) 1998. They did an Anime Week which lasted four days, so I also recorded Galaxy Express 999, Adieu Galaxy Express 999 and Urusei Yatsura Lum the Movie 2: Beautiful Dreamer.

Fatal Fury: the Motion Picture is based on SNK's like-titled series of fighting games, and is the third of three movies. The previous two, Legend of the Hungry Wolf and The New Battle, were made-for-TV movies, while the third was actually released in theaters.

I used to love this movie. I watched it so often when I was younger that I pretty much burned myself out on it. I bought it on DVD less for any liking I still had for it, and more from a sense of obligation. I don't quite have the movie memorized, but it got to the point where watching the DVD was actually a jarring experience. I kept expecting it to occasionally lapse into the two-second, not-quick-enough-to-pause-recording commercial break fragments that lurk on my original VHS.

I watched it because it was (at the time) relatively new, flashy and, well...comfortably mindless. It was a ride, basically, and if it wasn't exactly a great one, it was the only one I had at the time.

The story follows Terry and Andy Bogard, Joe Higashi and Mai Shiranui, all signature characters from the Fatal Fury games. It involves their attempts to stop a man named Laocorn Gaudeamus from collecting the six pieces of the Armor of Mars, which will turn him into some kind of all-powerful battle-god. His reason for doing this is sort of hazy. It seems to have something to do with getting revenge for his ancestors being conquered - never mind that this happened in the time of Alexander the Great. My own personal theory is that it's his revenge for the no-doubt plentiful childhood abuse he received at the hands of his peers for being saddled with the name Laocorn. That does things to a kid, you know?

Masami Obari directed the movie, which also sports his character designs. He hasn't really directed anything that's been of much interest to me, and strikes me as pretty strictly a B-grade director. I'm not a big fan of his artwork, either. His men straddle an uncomfortable line between "bishounen" and "macho" that looks about as awkward as it sounds. He also has a serious fixation on scantily clad women with bustlines that cannot naturally be achieved without silicone. I can never decide if he does it because he likes it, for the sake of fanservice, or because he just needs to distract the audience from how mediocre everything else is. It doesn't help that his characters never look quite the same way twice, but maybe that's just the animation studio.

This isn't so much a martial arts movie as it is a fighting game movie. The distinction is important.

The only "real" martial arts battle occurs toward the beginning, when Muay Thai master Joe Higashi has a tournament bout with another fighter of the same style. It's actually a pretty good fight, too: well-animated, properly tense. It's all about an exchange of physical blows. It's the only fight like this in the movie.

The rest of the battles are mostly about the characters flinging blasts of energy at each other in various ways. Presumably, Joe doesn't indulge any of his ring-destroying "special moves" during the tournament bout because they would be against the rules. I'm pretty sure destroying the ring is an automatic disqualifier.

Fanservice abounds, and I don't just mean Mai. There are all sorts of shout-outs and call-backs to events of the previous movies, and characters from both the other movies and the games. Some of it is relevant, and most of it is harmless - fun for the fans, not terribly mystifying for the newcomers. This comes mostly in the form of the characters' moves. Terry, I think, manages to showcase all of his. But at a certain point, it stops being pointless and starts being a burden on the plot. There's a brief scene featuring Geese Howard - the games' recurring villain and the ultimte foe of the first movie - which literally serves no purpose at all. He doesn't do anything, except spout some pointless and generic villain dialogue. Maybe he's plotting somcthing for a later movie. Maybe it's just bad storytelling.

There is a sort of tradition with the Fatal Fury movies. Each of them features one fight scene in which the animation quality inexplicably takes a sharp nosedive. We're talking Saturday-morning-cartoon quality here. Both Legend of the Hungry Wolf and The New Battle do this in the climactic final battle, for reasons that have always mystified me. You would think that they would save their budget specifically to dump it into the ultimate fight scene of the movie, right? I mean, these are movies based on fighting games. You're not here for the intricate plot or the deep characterization (which is good, because they lack both). You're here to watch Terry, Andy and Joe knock the crap out of a bunch of goons.

Well, and also maybe to watch Mai jiggle, if that's your thing.

The Motion Picture at least manages to get its single low-budget fight scene out of the way early on, during Terry's fight in the arcade (a Neo-Geo land, of course), and it's not quite as bad as the similar scenes of the previous movies. It's still pretty puzzling, though, and I'd really like to know why there's a scene of this sort in every one of these movies.

Fatal Fury: the Motion Picture maybe isn't quite as bad as I'm making it sound, though. My opinions on the character designs aside, the artwork is well-executed, fairly well-animated for the time, and some of the visual effects are pretty nice for their day. And the music isn't half-bad, either. But this is all presentation. There are a lot of movies which are less technically impressive that I would consider better movies overall.

To me, presentation is really a pretty minor thing. Style over substance is fine, but the underlying substance still has to be something better than mediocre. And in the end, as hard as it tries, it's all Fatal Fury: the Motion Picture can do to manage even mediocrity.