Review of Street Fighter II - The Animated Movie: Special Edition

Introduction

If one Jitendar Canth hadn`t already alluded to the pangs of nostalgia that come with revisiting Manga Entertainment`s popular anime features of the 1990s in his write-up of `Golgo 13`, this review would begin very differently. There`d be tales of raiding older brothers` video shelves when they were out feeling up their girlfriends, the hush-hush black market of playground VHS swapping, not to mention hitting your local indie rental shop and being enchanted by row upon row of top-shelf tapes with their shiny, sexy and markedly ribald covers lined up to assault the attention of teenagers with their big guns, bigger boobs and 18 certificates - the promise of sex, gore and so much more. But he did, so it doesn`t. Instead it begins with some super awesome, not to mention thoroughly interesting Street Fighter II trivia!

* Did you know that the Street Fighter series of videogames has sold in excess of 25 million units worldwide?

* Did you know that Street Fighter II is regarded as the most groundbreaking beat-em-up game ever, eclipsing the almost unheard of original in every way and setting a precedent for the genre?

* Did you know that once completing the game with Russian manbeast Zangief, you were treated to a cameo appearance from former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev? Did you know he dances? How many Nobel Peace Prize winners can boast to partygoers at high falutin` intellectual shindigs about appearing in a videogame? Not that many, my friends.

In 1991, Street Fighter II: The World Warrior (to give it its full title) bopped its way into arcades and later, a version of the game appeared on virtually every home console or computer system on the market. Such was its popularity in wearing away young fingertips the world over, it was made into an anime feature in 1994, back when the ubiquitously dreaded games-to-movies phenomenon was still in its infancy. The paper-thin plot from the game, in which a young fighter travels the world kicking the stuffing out of a variety of colourful opponents for no reason in particular, is transposed and beefed up slightly for the film. Slightly: Shadowlaw, an unsurprisingly shadowy crime syndicate headed by the dastardly Bison, is using cyborg scouts to seek out the world`s most talented fighters to use in some secret project or other. They`ve also got their fingers in a few mind-manipulated assassination pies with goals of world domination. But bad-ass agent for the comically misnamed Interpole Chun-Li and the US Air Force`s surly bad-ass Captain Guile are on the case. Both sides are in a quest to find the legendary Ryu, a powerful Japanese warrior who seemingly dropped off the face of the earth and turned nomad. Oh yeah, he is a real bad-ass mofo dude, too. But both sides quickly discover Ryu`s old training partner, American tournament champion Ken Masters, is equally as powerful as Ryu, and a lot easier to find.

Manga have seen fit to re-release the feature on DVD in the UK as a 2-disc set, and for the first time complete with the original Japanese version of the movie.

Video

One word sums up the visuals here: disappointing. Letterboxed 1.78:1 or thereabouts, `Street Fighter II` isn`t treated to a clear and sharp anamorphic transfer like the new `Golgo 13`. Instead we have a probable quick sourcing from VHS, including occasional print flaws telecined over. A severely unsaturated, dull colour palette leads to an unsightly lack of definition in darker scenes, and there`s an overall sense of soft fuzziness, particularly along the lines. There`s a fair bit of noise, occasional blots of digital artefacting - mostly limited to fast moving action scenes - and a little colour rainbowing. Gah!

Audio

The DVDs` soundtracks are fairly choppy waters. The first disc houses the Western version, essentially a complete reworking for the US video market, replete with stock American voice acting and licenced music. This was 1994, and the US was caught in the throws of `grunge fever` (which wasn`t nearly as nasty as it sounds) so the soundtrack is filled with a variety of grunge tracks and instrumental rawk music. The original Japanese version on disc two features much more chilled incidental scoring, and synth-led music. However, unlike most Japanese anime, the film isn`t set in Japan and features predominantly English-speaking characters among its international cast, therefore the native language track on offer here is an ill-fit. Watching American characters conversing in Japanese on American soil just feels wrong, therefore the English dub is actually the better option, no matter how bad it is. And it is pretty bad.

Both discs feature Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0 options. There isn`t a whole lot of difference between the two. Both 5.1 tracks are fairly robust, but make stock use of the six-channel set-up. Center-centric with little directional usage bar score filtering to the rears, they`re clear and free from defects.

Features

`Player Cards` - essentially mini bios on several of the key characters - is exactly what you`d expect to find in the game`s instruction manual, and is accompanied by a plethora of Manga trailers - `Perfect Blue`, `GITS`, `Ninja Scroll` et al.

Conclusion

`Street Fighter II` is the same two-dimensional anime it always was; light on story, heavy on action, as the full cast from the game (including the extra characters added to the `Super Street Fighter II` revision) make an appearance to dish out their unique brand of chop-socky with their fireballs, hundred-hand slaps, spinning piledrivers, spinning bird kicks and sonic booms, or rather, "sonic BOOMS". It builds upon what teeny little narrative groundwork there was in the game and remains very faithful, probably still the most faithful game-to-movie adaptation yet. However, it`s still some way off being a great film, a true ambassador for anime, and it certainly can`t lie back on the old, "well, it`s shallow and flashy, so it was never going to be great" excuse, as `Ninja Scroll`, basically the same exercise in red-blooded sex and violence fuelled intensity, was a genuinely great film, certainly a pinnacle of action anime at the time. Something lets `Street Fighter II` down, and it doesn`t take much delving to work out what.

Action-packed fighting anime doesn`t need a world changing story with morals, lessons, sub-plots and twists. It does however need a story that`s somewhat structured, somewhat convincing and somewhat interesting. This isn`t. It`s uneven, littered with amateurish loose ends and hamstrung by a distinctly rushed sensation, as if the creators felt what propels a character from A to B to fight C doesn`t matter a fig in this instance. Which it doesn`t, really. Built from the ground up for fans of the video game back before the games industry had yet reached the level of maturity and cultural significance to allow them to wheel out the phrase "the average gamer is 30-years old", `Street Fighter II` was obviously designed as a fanservice vehicle for an audience still busy hiding the soggy bedsheets following wet dreams about Jet from `Gladiators`. As a result, it`s gratuitously crude in places, particularly when it comes to Chun-Li. If she`s not having her shirt ripped for extra effective booby bounceage or feeding the voyeuristic appetite of panty-cam, she`s full on bloody starkers having a shower, creating a million-and-one w*** fantasies. It`s a film for teenage boys quite possibly made by teenage boys. Or at least teenage boys at heart. `Street Fighter II` is of its time, but by God we`ve moved on. If it was released for the first time today, it would be heralded as inane, shallow nonsense designed to work teenage boys into a frenzy. Actually, it was probably heralded as inane shallow nonsense when it was released, only there was a largely uneducated and, bluntly, uninterested audience with a salacious appetite for the new carnage candy it offered.

The more enlightened anime fan of 2007 is likely to chuff pretentiously at what `Street Fighter II` offers and write it off as a load of old hoo-hah, something that brings the medium`s old `nerdy` label back to the forefront. But admittedly, somewhere amongst the immaturity, the boobs, the geysers of blood and gore and the oddly out of place swearing, there`s a lot of fun to be had with `Street Fighter II`. Fans of the game will have a rip-snorting good time waiting for the familiar cast of characters to make their entrance, despite most of them having fleeting roles bearing little relation to the main story. The animation, that fairly of-its-time character design - predominantly caricaturly muscular, steroid scoffing action figure-alike hulk-men - is nicely detailed and vivid, and the film cracks on at a fair pace despite running in at over 100-minutes. So yes, it`s nonsense, yes it`s overtly adolescent, but nonsense can be fun sometimes. And never discount the effects of nostalgia, friends.