Street Fighter II - The Animated Movie

 

Picture: C+     Sound: C+     Extras: C     Film: B

 

 

Summary - Based on the popular video game the story is brought to an anime movie. Shadowlaw the secret underworld rule by the sinister Bison is brainwashing top fighters of the world to become killers in order to take over the world. While all the fighters fight for their own reasons, Bison sets his eyes on the 2 most powerful fighters Ken and Ryu. It is a fight not only for who is the strongest but good against evil. Will the fighters be able to stand up to Bison and his dark legions?

 

Review - This is an action pumped movie with amazingly drawn anime and does a well job in making the Street Fighter into an anime movie. The characters are drawn with a more realistic style than the typical anime of big eyes and small mouth, but still anime never the less. What is interesting is if you played the games to see how they animated patterned moves of each character. With heart thumping music and background stories surrounding the main characters the movie leads to a climactic show down at the end.

 

The only one complaint is that the music gets changed in the dubbed version and ends up sounding more like a badly done heavy metal *shutters* and made it felt like a cheesy knock off karate movie.  Trailers from the U.K. release are the only extra, while the anamorphically enhanced 1.85 x 1 image is on the light side and so is the Dolby Digital 5.1 mix.

 

 

-   Ricky Chiang