TEKKEN: The Motion Picture
All of your favorite Tekken characters are here as they battle their way through each other to win the Iron Fist tournament, where fighters of unequaled strength from around the world gather to test their strength in the gladitorial arena. Of course, intrigue and danger abound, with professional assassins, champions of justice, and those whose prowess earns them fear and respect facing off.
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- Cast:
- Kazuhiro Yamaji , Yumi Touma , Akio Nakamura , Daisuke Gori , Shin-ichiro Miki , Minami Takayama , Kaori Yamagata
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Reviews
Fresh and Exciting
As Good As It Gets
It is not deep, but it is fun to watch. It does have a bit more of an edge to it than other similar films.
There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.
I've played the Tekken games. They are fun, visually stimulating, in places madly complicated, but always worth playing.This movie, on the other hand, is a waste of time and effort, on both the creator's part and the viewers.To begin with, there are many characters in the Tekken game which a 60-minute movie cannot hope to address appropriately. We are given glimpses of some characters who are key to the game's storyline, but in the movie? You get the oh-so-terrible 2-second "Hey look! There's (insert name)!" shot, but never once get to see them in action, which is just a waste. An extra half an hour would have done well just to see these guys in action.The drawing style and choices of shots are clichéd and average at best. No atmosphere is brought across by the visuals. The English dubbing borders on awful, the dialogue repetitive and prone to spoon-feeding the viewer the bleeding obvious, and the soundtrack in places misplaced.There were some nice ideas in the storyline, but it's so badly executed that you can't enjoy it, even as a fan of the game series.3/10. Don't bother with it.
This was a bad idea from the get go. Tekken is not a game that would translate to the screen very well. First of all Tekken has 20+ characters, most of which have little connection to one another so in order to get everyone on screen for a remotely decent length of time it would be a giant montage of fight scenes (because no one is about to sit through the slow development of all 20 characters out of which only 5 are worth talking about). There are too many characters to work with so it's inevitable that they focus in on a select few. But which few? Most have nothing to do with each other. Adding insult to injury, this anime also tries to morph the plotlines of Tekken 1 and Tekken 2 together. Yay, more characters. If they stuck with the Tekken 1 premise a simple tournament and a simple father/son rivalry, this would have worked much better. They should have focused in on Kazuya's past, his rise throughout the tournament, the very beginnings of his dealing with Devil, and his confrontation with Heihachi. The narrative could stick with Kazuya as he faces off with different people and occasionally jump to other fights by the main characters thereby incorporating them into the overall story as well - then it might be worth watching.That would leave the door open for a Tekken anime sequel, it would keep the non-Tekken literate viewers informed as to the whole mythology around Tekken, and it would have been an overall better film. Also that approach would give them plenty of time to either kill off or incapacity and/or address certain characters so they don't have to deal with as many in a sequel. But nope, they tried to pack everything into one film even Tekken 2's joke characters which had no place in the game, much less the movie. So we get lots of characters on screen who ramble and add nothing to anything and hardly ever fight despite being based on a fighting game.Another point for one I did not like for the quality of this anime's drawing. It wasn't very inspiring. Add to that the fact all of Tekken's characters previously have been strictly CG-rendered which makes a drawn interpretation feel like a fish out of water; looking across the characters I found myself saying, `That's not Lei Wu Long; that can't be Kazuya . . .' and I couldn't buy into much of it from then on out. Final thoughts: Tekken isn't a game that lends itself too terribly well to anything other than its own medium. It's shallow as a fighting game, so it's no surprising that the anime adaptation reflects this so well.
Few people in anime's massive fanbase seem to be willing to accept the fact that most anime is pretty awful. Most anime has terrible pacing, incredibly awkward dialogue, cliched plots and characters, and poor animation in the case of most non-feature anime. Tekken has all of these faults and more to the point where it's so bad you shouldn't miss it. Most notably, for a movie based on a fighting game, there doesn't seem to be very much fighting. Most of what little combat there is is of the Dragonball variety, which involves people standing about ten feet apart and speaking in run-on sentences about their hastily put-together back stories. When the characters aren't 'fighting' they're yammering on about the hilariously lame plot which involves some kind of devil and an island and the end of the world or something. I was too busy laughing through most of it to catch any of major story points. Speaking of laughing, one of the major action sequences involves the characters fighting freaking INVISIBLE DINOSAURS. I'm not kidding. They also managed to work the stupid boxing kangaroo into the story. I caught this movie on cable with the terrible English dub, which gives it another point on the Hilariously Bad scale. There's just so much wrong with this movie that it's great. If you consider yourself an anime fan, do yourself a favor and watch this so you know where the bottom of the barrel is.
This movie is about a rich man, Heihachi Mishima, who is obsessed with destroying the devil in order to create a better new world. He intentionally throws his son Kazuya from a cliff creating a devil within Kazuya. However, nobody has ever seen Kazuya ever since. Certain that Kazuya will go for it, Heihachi announces a martial arts competition. The one who get to Heihachi first and the manages to defeat him, wins the prize-money and the title of "King of Iron Fist". Kazuya shows up indeed but as he attempts to kill his father he is consistently stopped by Jun, a girl from his childhood, who was there when Heihachi threw him off the cliff. Now is there at the tournament and she won't stop at nothing to release Kazuya from the devil within him.Although this Anime is not the exactly best, I think they did a very good job with the story. Considering the amount of Tekken characters in existence (52, including the ones that are not in the game)they managed to get many of the characters in it without harming the continuity of the story. On the other hand I thought there was too little of Devil in it and Jun just doesn't stop talking. 6/10