Healing can come from the strangest places, but all the legions of button bashing fanatics who walked away from the disastrous 1994 attempt to realise Street Fighter II on the big screen must have felt a large amount of kismet when the legendary video game got a cinematic extra life thanks to the Japanese art known as anime.
With a colourful array of impossibly muscular characters, each one impeccably designed to the near iconic perfection, we all should have realised that animation was the correct thing way to go rather than watch the painfully Belgian Jean Claude Van Damme play an all American soldier and Raul Julia slowly and tragically succumb to stomach cancer. For a start, trying to pull off the array of varied moves exclusive to each character becomes far less awkward for a genre that thrives on a sense of unreality and, more importantly, a cartoon doesn’t have to waste time explaining why these assorted oddballs are walking around in martial arts gear 24/7 or why a decorated Interpol agent dresses like Chung-Li. Anyway, it’s time to wipe away the stink of the live action movie with a well timed “SONIC BOOM” and choose your fighter, because this is Street Fighter II.
Hulking despot and all round bad egg M. Bison rules the global criminal organisation known as Shadowlaw and he is casting his resources far and wide in order to swell his ranks of lethal fighters by either recruiting them or employing mind control to build his army. However, when one of his assassins is revealed to be brainwashed MI6 agent Cammy White, both Interpol and the United States Military unite to try and take this maniac down once and for all. While Captain Guile and Agent Chung-Li initially get off to a shake start (which might have something to do with the fact that they’ve shown up to work dressed as professional wrestlers), they soon get on the same page and start traversing the globe, meeting up with a diverse group of international fighters each more garish than the last in order to warn them about Bison’s questionable recruitment process.
However, the guy that the super villain most has his eye on is the solitary, Japanese martial artist Ryu, who seems to also be crisscrossing the world in order to find himself. The reason that Bison wants to recruit the dude is because one of his three henchmen, the immense Thai fighter Sagat, got righteously fucked up by Ryu in an earlier bout which has made his boss positively wet at the idea of snagging such a powerful ally.
However, because Ryu is pulling his littlest hobo shit, it proves to be rather tough to pin him down, so instead Shadowland targets his best friend Ken Masters, whom he trained with as a child in order to smoke him out.
With Chung-Li having to fend off a particularly vicious house call from Bison’s pet sadist, Vega, it’s down to Guile and Ryu to fend of a brainwashed Ken before they can lock up with the villain with the extravagant shoulder pads.
I’m not going to sit here and try and tell you that Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie is an animated motion picture that comes with a beautifully perfect script that impossibly balances sixteen different characters that allows them to all breath and show off their fighting skills equally – especially when it can barely do it with eight – but that’s not what makes this adaption of one of the greatest video games of all time so damn near important. No, this is a film that understands something that the American live action movie simply couldn’t wrap its head around – get these beloved characters right and give them to us ripped right off the fighter selection screen, then you’ve pretty much done 70% of all the hard work. While that means that the central plot of an evil secret crime empire kidnapping fighters has about as much depth and nuance as a Saturday morning cartoon, it’s also only the ricketiest of frames to hang a series of kick ass fights and a whole lot of globe trotting on.
However, when seen through the prism of Anime, the movie doesn’t have to twist itself in knots in order to explain why some of these arch brawlers look so fucking weird and anyone who still has reoccurring nightmares about the ungodly backstories the live action forced down our throats for the more outlandish characters like Dhalsim and Blanka can rest easy that the animated version come fully formed without any unnecessary explanations whatsoever.
It also helps that the medium won’t have you questioning why a lot of these lunatics feel the need to dress so bizarrely all the time (put a shirt on, Vega, for God’s sake!) or how Guile manages to fit his epic flattop inside his car with a minimum of fuss – why would you when you are anticipating some god-tier level, hand-animated fights? However, before we get onto the fisticuffs, the film manages to prioritise the vast cast list down into what’s truly important for the story, which may be initially disappointing if you’re a Zangief fan or you’ve been waiting patiently to see Fei Long on the big screen; but it smartly puts the relationship between Ryu and Ken at the forefront with Guile and Chung-Li’s mission coming in a close second. Everyone else is firmly on cameo duty and while not all of them scan as well as the others (Sagat is immediately sidelined after getting spectacularly spanked by a shoryuken/hadouken combo), it’s a necessary evil that cuts back the clutter.
Unsurprisingly, the film works best when it lets it’s fists do the talking and while a lot of martial arts in anime usually involve exploding heads or people casually leaping fifty feet in the air and while the Street Fighter II gang have more than their fair share of visually stunning abilities, director Gisaburō Sugii also crams the set pieces with a lot of close combat, grounded, traditional trading of limbs and leaves the big, sparkly stuff for special occasions. In fact, while the majority of the face/offs are high in quality, the truly brutal grudge match between Chung-Li and Vega in her hotel room may be one of the best choreographed fights in Anime history as they literally rip lumps out of each other for our entertainment.
However, in a weird quirk of fate, while I would usually insist you watch the original, Japanese language version of the film, the fact that the American cut throws in a bunch of songs by 90s artists such as Korn, Silverchair and KMFDM actually gives the film a more coin-op game feel that accurately recreates the feel of a endearingly grotty arcade far better than a more contemporary score. Also, in a truly bizarre example of before-they-were-famous gold, you get to hear none other than Bryan fucking Cranston voice Bruce Lee-a-like, Fei Long.
It may not be perfect – the final shot is a bit of a head scratcher, Bison’s plan makes a dangerous lack of sense and there’s a suspicious lack of Guile’s flash kick – but it’s still the best thing to carry the official Street Fighter II logo that isn’t the groundbreaking game itself.
Doing everything right that the American movie got wrong, this cinematic version proves to be the knockout blow the franchise desperately needed.
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