Site Index | Blog What's New? Review List Stuff Review Outline Why Hate Anime? Wheat RoD: The TV Haibane Renmei Teen Titans Chaff Akira Legend of the Overfiend Black Heaven There's no question that anime and video games have a pretty hefty overlap. The two art forms (if you could call them that) essentially go around in circles, feeding off each other like a starving lamprey sucking on its own tail. If Random Anime [x] doesn't get its video game soon, you can bet some game is going to cook up something similar. And vice-versa. I can't really vouch for the quality of most game-spawned anime, having only seen a very small few myself. The problem with such ventures is that there seems to be a small installed fanbase; only fans of the game are likely to pick up the anime, and of those a certain percentage are going to dislike it Hey, who ordered the maniacal British chick? for whatever reason or another. Usually they'll try to avoid this by having one of the main female characters show off their goodies in a gratuitous fanservice shower scene, but that kind of stunt will only carry a movie so far. All that is kind of moot, really. I'm scared of anime fans, and I'm scared of fighting game fans, so where Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie (hereafter SF2) is concerned I didn't really want to approach either group to find out what to expect. I kind of wanted to see this one ever since I realized it exists, but since there was a double-good chance it was crap I didn't want to put out the money to obtain it. But then Street Fighter Anniversary Collection came out for PS2, and good ole' Capcom threw the movie in for free. So here we are. Characters: C'mon... these are guys you know and love. Anybody who runs in the circles necessary to even consider watching anime who can't name all sixteen fighters from Super Street Fighter 2: Turbo needs to go back to school. We've all got our favorites (mine are Ken, Cammy, Balrog and Dee Jay) and, come hell or high water, they're all here. Therein lies the problem. SF2 is eighty minutes and change. That's five minutes and change for each character before allowing for that pesky thing called "plot"... which we'll get to later. Now, if this movie were called "Street Fighter 2: Sixteen Animated Shorts" it'd be all good. Heck, even if the major players each just lined up for a single-elimination tournament, there'd be no problem. But sadly this is not the case. We have a very definate plot that concerns about five of the characters, and so the other eleven Ken and Ryu take a brief break from sparring to stand around and look dumb. are relegated to background scenery at best. Ryu, Ken, Guile and M. Bison are the four characters in the foreground. Chun-Li gets written out about halfway through. E. Honda, Balrog, Vega, Sagat, Cammy and Dhalsim each get a few lines and a decent fight scene, and everyone else is shoehorned in wherever they'll fit. Zangief and Blanka get the shortest part of the shaft; they're literally chucked into a 30-second fight scene that serves no purpose whatsoever except to say "See? We really got them all in here." This isn't a problem if you've got wood for Ryu, Ken, Guile or M. Bison. But if your main man is any of the other World Warriors you're going to feel short-changed. And if, like me, you were just hoping to see some of the lesser known quirky characters get fleshed out a bit, you're just downright bankrupt. Story: Capcom really went overboard with the plot in the Street Fighter series. Seriously, there's way more plot than there needs to be behind all the lifebars and super combos. For example, did you know Cammy was a clone of M. Bison? And also, that Zangief is gay? Oh, and there really is an official name for each and every cheering background character in all of the stages. So when it comes to putting some story together for the movie it's not like anyone had to grasp at straws. This is the hottest scene in the movie. There are really two plots here. The first concerns Ryu, the wandering fireball-throwing street fighter, who is being persued by the criminal organization Shadowloo. The leader of Shadowloo wants to take Ryu and harness his seemingly superhuman fighting abilities for his own evil ends... world domination and what-have-you. Of course, it's impossible to track down a carefree wandering street fighter, so Bison and his cronies settle for the great-taste less-filling version: Ken Masters. Thus Ryu and Ken, old rivals and friends, are pitted against each other after *Ken is brainwashed by Bison* in a magnificent battle full of fireballs and hurricane kicks. The second plot concerns Chun-Li and Guile, who both have a personal vendetta against Bison and Shadowloo. They get off to a rocky start but eventually team up to investigate the army of cyborg scan-bots Bison has dispatched to find Ryu. Of course, Bison catches wise to this and sends his underling Vega to dispatch Chun-Li in a magnificent battle full of flashing claws and panty shots. To be fair there is a little more to the whole thing than that - but not much more. The story comes screeching to a halt every few minutes so it can make room for another random character from the game. My personal favorite is where Ken and T. Hawk are fighting in an abandoned warehouse for some reason. Why is Ken there? Who knows? Ken apparently doesn't. But he beats up T. Hawk anyway, and then goes off to ask for directions to get back to his plotline. Animation: The Animation category is really two things: the quality of the artwork involved in the piece, and how fluid that artwork moves. Usually this works out well because the quality of one often raises the quality of the other. This is exactly what makes SF2 is a special case; it's one of those rare items that nails one but fails on the other. Every SF2 review on the planet mentions how great the fight scenes are, and with good reason: the This is the second hottest scene in the movie. animation during the fight sequences is really, really great. Since the movie is essentially just a string of fight scenes (both relevant and irrelevant to the plot) linked together by bad dialogue, you only have to wait a few minutes at any given time to get back to the core of the movie's appeal. The artwork, on the other hand, is dumpy. Everyone in the Street Fighter series has pretty ridiculous muscles, for example, but in SF2 all those bulbous bulging biceps look more like massive mountains of malignant tumors. Balrog in particular looks hilariously bad; I was going to include a screenshot of him along with the review but looking at him just makes me depressed. I want to take a spit on the quality of the video while I'm at it, but I think that's Capcom's fault for shoehorning an entire animated film onto a PS2 disc along with two games instead of just including a DVD in the box. Still, since the PS2 copy is the only one I have access to (and likely the only one anyone can find around the time this review was written) it is worth at least a mention. Graininess, over-saturated colors and poorly drawn characters do not a pleasant-looking anime make. Or something. Culture Shock: Dude, it's like, totally Street Fighter. One of the things that has kind of always baffled me about Street Fighter is that with the exception of E. Honda and Blanka (because everyone knows that all Brazilians are hairy monsters with electricity for blood) none of the characters are really representative of their nationalities. I mean, Chun-Li looks vaguely Chinese in Street Fighter 3, and being big and hairy is kind of the trademark of a brawny Ruskie... but when all is said and done what you really have is a group of Americans in costumes hitting each other. Dear Capcom, Cajun != Jamaican Love, Dee Jay SF2 takes that a step further by not even bothering to keep the illusion of nationality where voice acting is concerned. The only two characters who even make a reference to their country are E. Honda and Dee Jay, and so naturally they were both given accents so outrageously wrong it's less likely that they are Japanese and Jamaican (respectively) than it is that they are just both big liars. The cool thing is that SF2 already has its own little subculture. For example, if Jimmy and Tommy watch this movie, where Jimmy is a Street Fighter champ and Tommy has never played before, then Tommy will see some cool fight scenes and bad voice acting. Jimmy, on the other hand, will delight at picking out exactly when Chun-Li executes her spinning bird kick, and be able to spot Zangief's piledriver a mile away. Jimmy will see all his favorite Sonic Booms and Psycho Crushers and Ha-do-kens come to life in a fairly boring cartoon. And really, isn't that what culture is all about? I'm certainly not going to complain about SF2... it is what it is and it doesn't try to be anything it's not. It's true Capcom creates stupid overly-elaborate plots for every infintisemal speck of their game, but when it's go time and the gloves come off it's really all about Player One beating the hell out of Player Two. It's easy to play Street Fighter and not give two figs about the plot, or even know there is a plot at all. Links IMDB Listing Animenation Listing SFAC @ Capcom.com Chun-Li's Shower Scene (Warning: boobies) In essence, that's exactly how the movie is. True you're going to see a parade of nonsense characters and a hackneyed story and Balrog looks like a turd... and yes, they even went and cut out all the good parts of the gratuitous fanservice shower scene. But before you know what's happened suddenly Ryu and Fei Long are whipping the daylights out of one another. The whole movie has a "hang tight, there's another fight coming up I promise" subtext to it. SF2 is twenty minutes of fairly cool fight scenes buried inside several layers of lame. And as far as the Anniversary Collection is concerned, SF2 is also a mediocre anime buried in between two of the greatest fighting games ever created. Let's be honest though... if you're going to buy the Anniversary Collection you won't be buying it for the movie anyway. Watch it once, then forget about it. Overall Rating:

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