ANI-MOVIES, *Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie

Being one of the first big anime films to be taken in by non-otaku during the mid-90s, the Street Fighter anime movie set itself apart from the American live-action counterpart, even though in a totally different manner. Night Of The Galactic Railroad director Gisaburo Sugii went on to helm this project in 1994, which incorporated elements from not only the original Street Fighter I and II video games, but all the subsequent bonus addition of the II video game, this includes the Super, Turbo, and Champion Edition which each included separate additional characters, who in the context of the movie are shown to be an additional distraction of fighters from the main game, meaning that the movie had to add multiple scenes showing these bonus characters, thus padding out the movie longer than necessary. Even Akuma makes a brief cameo considering he was a hidden fighter in the game. This distracts from the main flow of the story, that and some serious background pandering. However though, The Animated Movie has continued to be one of the more faithful adaptations of the Capcom game series over the last few decades.

Beginning where the original Street Fighter video game ended, powerful fighter Ryu defeats the muay thai champion Sagat, where his victory is monitored by the criminal organization known as Shadowlaw. Sagat is brought into the fold of their psychic leader, M. Bison, who recruits other high level fighters from around the globe to brainwash them into being assassins, and hopes to get Ryu to be part of their merry crew. Not able to find the wandering world warrior, Bison's forces locate Ryu's old sparring partner, the rich playboy Ken Masters. Bison captures Ken, and brainwashes him to have an overly dramatic final bout with Ryu. While being tracked down by Interpol agents Chun-Li and Guile, Bison unleashes Ken on Ryu, but the two buds shake Ken's mindfreak and put a double deuce down on Bison, even though he appears in a ghost truck during a mid-credits scene.

As one of the first anime adaptations of an arcade fighting game, this movie tries its best to incorporate all the given characters with their own moments to shine, even though it does it with stretching out the plot further than it really needed to. Its hard to bring a cast of fighters from points all over the globe into a singular narrative instead of just one bout after the other. The animation is above the norm for a mid-90s production, it is in the same league as Ghost In The Shell and Ninja Scroll. The strangest thing about the movie though is its numerous English releases. First dubbed by Animaze, the first VHS version featured with an altered soundtrack lined up with American musicians, then an uncut version was put out on DVD in 2006, but finally in 2016 on DVD and Blu-Ray by Discotek with the original Japanese score and all the original forbidden footage and dialogue(including Chun-Li's entire obligatory shower scene), which is also the version currently available for streaming. Even though its nearly three decades old, it still manages to be an entertaining and thrilling watch, at least during the parts in the movie where the fighters are actually "fighting".