[Review: Yattaman!] ... What the heck did I just watch?!
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To be honest, I am not totally certain yet what I just watched. It was... unbelievable. Utterly unbelievable. It was at Hollywood level.
Which only goes to show, Japan can make some really bloody awful movies too.
OK, OK, Hollywood isn't all bad stuff. They turn out a lot of great films. And Japan, I'm sure, turns out a lot of really bad ones. I had heard before watching "Yatterman" that it was... um... a specially acquired taste, I suppose, might be the best term... but I honestly didn't think that with a good cast and a decent budget the film could be that bad.
I was obviously deluded.
After watching this film, I can honestly say that I understand now when people on some of my drama sites complain about Sakurai Sho's acting abilities. I think they're wrong--but, unfortunately, "Yatterman" is a very well watched movie all over the world. It's even been released in America, I think with a dub, but I could be wrong. Since these people are likely to have seen this, Kisarazu Cat's Eye (which is very similar in style, though, admittedly, better even in my eyes, which is saying something as I disliked it), Nazotoki (which I personally love, but understand complains on), and Honey and Clover (which I've not seen and cannot comment on), I can understand the misunderstanding of his talent. He gets a lot of "character" roles--you know, the ones that require very little subtle acting skill--which is a real pity, because he's a perfectly good actor. I think he's funny, can do subtle brilliantly, and has a good presence on screen... and I'm not just saying this because he's Sakurai Sho. Any doubts I could have had from his acting were totally wiped out by "Blackboard", merely because its not character acting. I loved his acting in "THE QUIZ SHOW II" and "Family Game" as well, but both of those could be construed as "character acting" whereas "Blackboard" cannot. I haven't gotten to see "Kobe Shinbun no Nanokakan" yet, but since its a similar genre (historical drama) I am going to guess that the skills will be a similar set. (About his acting in "THE QUIZ SHOW" and "Family Game"--they both required a ton of subtlety, but because the characters were meant to create an atmosphere where you weren't certain if you were amused or incredibly disturbed, the acting needed to be a little more extreme. He does these roles really well, which sometimes worries me. Perhaps he's a closet sociopath??)
So... why?! Why?! Why?!
Let's talk about "Yatterman" now.
The live action "Yatterman" film is an adaption of a rather old (1977-1979) anime of the same name, which was recreated in 2008. The story revolves around a 13 year old son of a toy manufacturer, Gan, his girlfriend (the daughter of an electronics stone manager) Ai, and their secret superhero lives as Yatterman (who, by the way, is a team name, not a hero name. While in costume, they are "1" and "2" respectively.) They are assisted by a robotic die created by Gan named Omotchama (which is a bastardized version of the word "omoccha" meaning toy in Japanese) and a massive robotic dog created by Gan's father as a prototype rescue machine named Yatterwan (or "Yatterdog"). They fight against a trio of not-so-dastardly thieves called the "Dorombo". This group is made up of the vain lady leader, Doronjo, and her two henchmen Boyacky, a lecherous mechanic, and Tonzura, the dimwitted rural strongman. They are under the control of a masked villain who claims to be a god, Dokurobei, whose name spells out his insignia, which is a skull. They are battling for control over an illusive "Skull Stone" which is supposed to have incredible power. As a result, they travel around their parody world and meet various different figures and fight with various different creatures called "Mechas". The live action film came into theaters in Japan in early 2009, and did relatively well at the box office. Why, I don't know. However, since "Yatterman" was an enormously popular franchise for literally decades, I suppose this can be understood.
First, let's discuss the positive things about this film. Yes, I found positives.
1) The world was creative, coherent, and interesting.
The world in "Yatterman" all fit together. It didn't seem weird that the world had giant robotic dogs and squids fighting each other. The characters seemed in place. I enjoyed the "fake" names real geographical locations (Narway, Ogypt, and The Halps). It was all very cartoony (which I will talk about more in the next bullet point). The background felt very coherent and matter-of-fact, which is probably because Yatterman was a previously established franchise, and has been very well developed outside of the film making it easier to replace. Also, since the world is an obvious parody of our own, a lot of time is saved on developing locations and put into reorganizing the world's structures, which always has to be done to an extent when dealing with superhero characters.
2) The cheesiness was even all over.
One of my biggest complaints with watching live-action superhero programs is that the superhero stuff tends to stick out and seem cheesy in relation to the rest of the film. Masked heros, weird costumes--especially the ones which are based heavily from stylized cartoons or comics--just end up looking cheesy when put into live action. Especially if there are cheesy side bits, like special attacks, signature phrases, songs, etc. However, Yatterman was cheesy all over. There was no interuption to the flow. Everything from the random songs and dances, the giant robots, transformation into superhero mode, to the special attacks and "day-to-day" clothing, was all evenly cheesy. You didn't have to make a special attempt to suspend disbelief. It was suspended. The special effects, make up choices, and sound effects were all also chosen to match the general feel that was created in this film, and none of it seemed to take itself seriously. Which was good, because none of the audience could either.
3) The music was good.
Even the strange little character songs randomly sung in the middle of scenes were cute. I'm sure they were from the original anime. The closing theme, while I fail to see how it relates to the film at all, was awesome, and remains one of my favorite Arashi songs ever which I have absurd emotional attachment to. I'm happy this film didn't ruin it for me, haha. The background music was good as well, and fit the scenes comfortably.
4) I loved the fact that the film knew not everyone who watched it knew what was going on from the beginning.
As I pointed out earlier, this film is based from a popular old franchise. However, even though the franchise had been reopened as an anime, the film did not presuppose that its audience was familiar with it (as the film live-action adaption of "Casshern" seemed to). They had a comical little side character who would, at opportune breaks in the storyline, come in and narrate some of the background information which the world was working off of which non-fans may not know--for instance, what a "Meccha-bone" is, how it works, and what exactly it does when fed to Yatterwan. They were not overdone to the point that it was boring, but did help to keep me from being confused as I haven't seen the original source material.
Now... onto the bad.
1) I'm not sure what genre this was supposed to be.
Its obviously a sci-fi adventure comedy, but the intended audience was kind of lost on me. I originally though from the goofiness and general idea of the world it might have been aimed at children, but it was absurdly and obviously dirty--so, definitely not a child-friendly film. But, I personally don't know why adults would watch it either, because the plot was wretchedly underdeveloped and frankly uninteresting.
2) The plot was wretchedly underdevleoped
This is probably the most annoying thing about this film to me over all. The main reason being that a good film that is well put together can make you forgive other things in the film which you otherwise dislike. However, at the end of this film I felt no benefit to have watched it. Was there a plot? Very much so. In fact, there were two subplots with two possible "learning curves" to them--one about romantic love, the other about family love and courage--in addition to the action of the film hunting for the skull. But neither of the character development plots felt as though they developed at all. In fact, the second subplot seemed to mostly have been thrown in at the very end of the film to give some vague meaning to using a character who wasn't one of the main characters to really fuel the ending of the film. But really, there is no way around it--nothing about the writing in this film was good. It wasn't clever. It wasn't developed. It didn't have any meaning but acted like there may have been some in a manner which isn't clear whether it was meant to be satirical or not. It wasn't clear cut, which made a lot of possibly satirical or parodic material really sort of fall flat. While the action of the plot felt as though it moved at a decent pace (considering how much they were trying to squeeze into a two hour film), the secondary plots had awful pacing. Just really, nothing about the writing was good.
3) They relied on (often incredibly vulgar) innuendo too much
Its one thing to have innuendo. Its another thing to utterly rely on it for your source of humor. "Yatterman" completely relies on innuendo, which got to be immensely vulgar in a few scenes (mostly in the second fight scene), and frankly was just over the top. Very little of it was funny to begin with, and by overdosing it, it just kind of made the film... disagreeable. I have complained about the amount of innuendo in "Kisarazu Cat's Eye" and "Kimi wa Petto", but at least they had other sources of humor, better character and plot development, and a plot which actually made having that much innuendo make sense. From what I can tell, most of the innuendo was meant to come from one character in "Yatterman"... which makes sense in television--however, it also just got thrown in a lot of other aspects of the film in such a way that rather than making one character come across as lecherous, to made the whole film come across as really vulgar. Ironically, I found that the female villain's clothes were not as racy as I had expected them to be, so it actually made things feel even more lopsided. And that whole second fight scene... was totally and completely unnecesary, I'm sorry. It went beyond innuendo to just plain gross. It felt a little like I was watching robotic porn for a moment there. Bleaugh. And to make it more obnoxious, the innuendo wasn't even great innuendo. It felt cheap and dime-storish. Seriously, if you can't even make your vulgarities clever, what can you hope for in the humor? I reminds me of a quote from "Murder Must Advertise" by Dorothy L Sayers for some reason, “Some people can be funny without being vulgar, and some can be both funny and vulgar. I should recommend you to be either the one or the other.” (Such a wonderful quote... :) )
4) I'm not totally sure who the main characters were
The only reason I say this is because while technically Gan and Ai should be the main characters (the film is called "Yatterman" after all) I seriously felt like I spent more time watching the development of the villains. By the end of the film, I am pretty certain they had more screen time, development, and lines. This could be wrong, but certainly they seemed to have the most memorable parts of the film if nothing else.
In the end, this film wasn't clever, wasn't developed, and wasn't interesting to me at all. I feel like a film with Sakurai Sho, Fukuda Saki, and Fukuda Kyoko should have been better. The music was good, the concept of the film was good and felt coherent--but the writing really just killed it. This film is proof that a poor script will destroy a film even with great actors, decent special effects, a decent budget, great technical staff, and a great soundtrack. Even as a way to pass time, I felt like it was lacking.
This being said, its all opinion. Obviously the film was well liked enough do well in the box office. But this might be because it was, as one reviewer I read put it, "Johnny-ized", which, frankly, makes a lot of sense, though as I mentioned above, I felt like you actually saw Sakurai Sho very little in this film compared to the amount you would usually see a main character. They may very well have used him to sell the film to fans--he certainly advertised it--but within the actual film itself he just kind of disappears into the background.
Overall, disappointing. I give it a 6/10 because I really think that the technical aspects to the movie deserve some credit, and because I don't want to fault the actors too much for it. I've seen all three of the big leads do roles significantly better, so I know its not their fault I didn't enjoy this film.
Anyway, rant over. :)
On an unrelated note, I really need to start finding more Kinki Kids music. This is the millionth time I think I've thought this, but I still haven't done it yet. I really have been enjoying their most recent single.
...
..
.
To be honest, I am not totally certain yet what I just watched. It was... unbelievable. Utterly unbelievable. It was at Hollywood level.
Which only goes to show, Japan can make some really bloody awful movies too.
OK, OK, Hollywood isn't all bad stuff. They turn out a lot of great films. And Japan, I'm sure, turns out a lot of really bad ones. I had heard before watching "Yatterman" that it was... um... a specially acquired taste, I suppose, might be the best term... but I honestly didn't think that with a good cast and a decent budget the film could be that bad.
I was obviously deluded.
After watching this film, I can honestly say that I understand now when people on some of my drama sites complain about Sakurai Sho's acting abilities. I think they're wrong--but, unfortunately, "Yatterman" is a very well watched movie all over the world. It's even been released in America, I think with a dub, but I could be wrong. Since these people are likely to have seen this, Kisarazu Cat's Eye (which is very similar in style, though, admittedly, better even in my eyes, which is saying something as I disliked it), Nazotoki (which I personally love, but understand complains on), and Honey and Clover (which I've not seen and cannot comment on), I can understand the misunderstanding of his talent. He gets a lot of "character" roles--you know, the ones that require very little subtle acting skill--which is a real pity, because he's a perfectly good actor. I think he's funny, can do subtle brilliantly, and has a good presence on screen... and I'm not just saying this because he's Sakurai Sho. Any doubts I could have had from his acting were totally wiped out by "Blackboard", merely because its not character acting. I loved his acting in "THE QUIZ SHOW II" and "Family Game" as well, but both of those could be construed as "character acting" whereas "Blackboard" cannot. I haven't gotten to see "Kobe Shinbun no Nanokakan" yet, but since its a similar genre (historical drama) I am going to guess that the skills will be a similar set. (About his acting in "THE QUIZ SHOW" and "Family Game"--they both required a ton of subtlety, but because the characters were meant to create an atmosphere where you weren't certain if you were amused or incredibly disturbed, the acting needed to be a little more extreme. He does these roles really well, which sometimes worries me. Perhaps he's a closet sociopath??)
So... why?! Why?! Why?!
Let's talk about "Yatterman" now.
The live action "Yatterman" film is an adaption of a rather old (1977-1979) anime of the same name, which was recreated in 2008. The story revolves around a 13 year old son of a toy manufacturer, Gan, his girlfriend (the daughter of an electronics stone manager) Ai, and their secret superhero lives as Yatterman (who, by the way, is a team name, not a hero name. While in costume, they are "1" and "2" respectively.) They are assisted by a robotic die created by Gan named Omotchama (which is a bastardized version of the word "omoccha" meaning toy in Japanese) and a massive robotic dog created by Gan's father as a prototype rescue machine named Yatterwan (or "Yatterdog"). They fight against a trio of not-so-dastardly thieves called the "Dorombo". This group is made up of the vain lady leader, Doronjo, and her two henchmen Boyacky, a lecherous mechanic, and Tonzura, the dimwitted rural strongman. They are under the control of a masked villain who claims to be a god, Dokurobei, whose name spells out his insignia, which is a skull. They are battling for control over an illusive "Skull Stone" which is supposed to have incredible power. As a result, they travel around their parody world and meet various different figures and fight with various different creatures called "Mechas". The live action film came into theaters in Japan in early 2009, and did relatively well at the box office. Why, I don't know. However, since "Yatterman" was an enormously popular franchise for literally decades, I suppose this can be understood.
First, let's discuss the positive things about this film. Yes, I found positives.
1) The world was creative, coherent, and interesting.
The world in "Yatterman" all fit together. It didn't seem weird that the world had giant robotic dogs and squids fighting each other. The characters seemed in place. I enjoyed the "fake" names real geographical locations (Narway, Ogypt, and The Halps). It was all very cartoony (which I will talk about more in the next bullet point). The background felt very coherent and matter-of-fact, which is probably because Yatterman was a previously established franchise, and has been very well developed outside of the film making it easier to replace. Also, since the world is an obvious parody of our own, a lot of time is saved on developing locations and put into reorganizing the world's structures, which always has to be done to an extent when dealing with superhero characters.
2) The cheesiness was even all over.
One of my biggest complaints with watching live-action superhero programs is that the superhero stuff tends to stick out and seem cheesy in relation to the rest of the film. Masked heros, weird costumes--especially the ones which are based heavily from stylized cartoons or comics--just end up looking cheesy when put into live action. Especially if there are cheesy side bits, like special attacks, signature phrases, songs, etc. However, Yatterman was cheesy all over. There was no interuption to the flow. Everything from the random songs and dances, the giant robots, transformation into superhero mode, to the special attacks and "day-to-day" clothing, was all evenly cheesy. You didn't have to make a special attempt to suspend disbelief. It was suspended. The special effects, make up choices, and sound effects were all also chosen to match the general feel that was created in this film, and none of it seemed to take itself seriously. Which was good, because none of the audience could either.
3) The music was good.
Even the strange little character songs randomly sung in the middle of scenes were cute. I'm sure they were from the original anime. The closing theme, while I fail to see how it relates to the film at all, was awesome, and remains one of my favorite Arashi songs ever which I have absurd emotional attachment to. I'm happy this film didn't ruin it for me, haha. The background music was good as well, and fit the scenes comfortably.
4) I loved the fact that the film knew not everyone who watched it knew what was going on from the beginning.
As I pointed out earlier, this film is based from a popular old franchise. However, even though the franchise had been reopened as an anime, the film did not presuppose that its audience was familiar with it (as the film live-action adaption of "Casshern" seemed to). They had a comical little side character who would, at opportune breaks in the storyline, come in and narrate some of the background information which the world was working off of which non-fans may not know--for instance, what a "Meccha-bone" is, how it works, and what exactly it does when fed to Yatterwan. They were not overdone to the point that it was boring, but did help to keep me from being confused as I haven't seen the original source material.
Now... onto the bad.
1) I'm not sure what genre this was supposed to be.
Its obviously a sci-fi adventure comedy, but the intended audience was kind of lost on me. I originally though from the goofiness and general idea of the world it might have been aimed at children, but it was absurdly and obviously dirty--so, definitely not a child-friendly film. But, I personally don't know why adults would watch it either, because the plot was wretchedly underdeveloped and frankly uninteresting.
2) The plot was wretchedly underdevleoped
This is probably the most annoying thing about this film to me over all. The main reason being that a good film that is well put together can make you forgive other things in the film which you otherwise dislike. However, at the end of this film I felt no benefit to have watched it. Was there a plot? Very much so. In fact, there were two subplots with two possible "learning curves" to them--one about romantic love, the other about family love and courage--in addition to the action of the film hunting for the skull. But neither of the character development plots felt as though they developed at all. In fact, the second subplot seemed to mostly have been thrown in at the very end of the film to give some vague meaning to using a character who wasn't one of the main characters to really fuel the ending of the film. But really, there is no way around it--nothing about the writing in this film was good. It wasn't clever. It wasn't developed. It didn't have any meaning but acted like there may have been some in a manner which isn't clear whether it was meant to be satirical or not. It wasn't clear cut, which made a lot of possibly satirical or parodic material really sort of fall flat. While the action of the plot felt as though it moved at a decent pace (considering how much they were trying to squeeze into a two hour film), the secondary plots had awful pacing. Just really, nothing about the writing was good.
3) They relied on (often incredibly vulgar) innuendo too much
Its one thing to have innuendo. Its another thing to utterly rely on it for your source of humor. "Yatterman" completely relies on innuendo, which got to be immensely vulgar in a few scenes (mostly in the second fight scene), and frankly was just over the top. Very little of it was funny to begin with, and by overdosing it, it just kind of made the film... disagreeable. I have complained about the amount of innuendo in "Kisarazu Cat's Eye" and "Kimi wa Petto", but at least they had other sources of humor, better character and plot development, and a plot which actually made having that much innuendo make sense. From what I can tell, most of the innuendo was meant to come from one character in "Yatterman"... which makes sense in television--however, it also just got thrown in a lot of other aspects of the film in such a way that rather than making one character come across as lecherous, to made the whole film come across as really vulgar. Ironically, I found that the female villain's clothes were not as racy as I had expected them to be, so it actually made things feel even more lopsided. And that whole second fight scene... was totally and completely unnecesary, I'm sorry. It went beyond innuendo to just plain gross. It felt a little like I was watching robotic porn for a moment there. Bleaugh. And to make it more obnoxious, the innuendo wasn't even great innuendo. It felt cheap and dime-storish. Seriously, if you can't even make your vulgarities clever, what can you hope for in the humor? I reminds me of a quote from "Murder Must Advertise" by Dorothy L Sayers for some reason, “Some people can be funny without being vulgar, and some can be both funny and vulgar. I should recommend you to be either the one or the other.” (Such a wonderful quote... :) )
4) I'm not totally sure who the main characters were
The only reason I say this is because while technically Gan and Ai should be the main characters (the film is called "Yatterman" after all) I seriously felt like I spent more time watching the development of the villains. By the end of the film, I am pretty certain they had more screen time, development, and lines. This could be wrong, but certainly they seemed to have the most memorable parts of the film if nothing else.
In the end, this film wasn't clever, wasn't developed, and wasn't interesting to me at all. I feel like a film with Sakurai Sho, Fukuda Saki, and Fukuda Kyoko should have been better. The music was good, the concept of the film was good and felt coherent--but the writing really just killed it. This film is proof that a poor script will destroy a film even with great actors, decent special effects, a decent budget, great technical staff, and a great soundtrack. Even as a way to pass time, I felt like it was lacking.
This being said, its all opinion. Obviously the film was well liked enough do well in the box office. But this might be because it was, as one reviewer I read put it, "Johnny-ized", which, frankly, makes a lot of sense, though as I mentioned above, I felt like you actually saw Sakurai Sho very little in this film compared to the amount you would usually see a main character. They may very well have used him to sell the film to fans--he certainly advertised it--but within the actual film itself he just kind of disappears into the background.
Overall, disappointing. I give it a 6/10 because I really think that the technical aspects to the movie deserve some credit, and because I don't want to fault the actors too much for it. I've seen all three of the big leads do roles significantly better, so I know its not their fault I didn't enjoy this film.
Anyway, rant over. :)
On an unrelated note, I really need to start finding more Kinki Kids music. This is the millionth time I think I've thought this, but I still haven't done it yet. I really have been enjoying their most recent single.