My reaction to Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie

I bought the DVD ages ago, but the other night I got round to watching Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie. This one is different to the live-action Street Fighter film released in the same year (1994), which I haven't seen, but I'm informed the animated film is much better. I was actually hoping for the film to be viewable in Japanese for a bit of language practice, but there was no option for that, so I watched it in English.

The movie centres around the characters of Ken and Ryu, but more so Ryu, who is wandering the globe in search of worthy opponents to spar with. However, Ryu is being trailed by the Shadowlaw, a crime organisation run by Bison, who wants to capture Ryu and turn him into a Shadowlaw henchman. The storyline's pretty predictable overall, but all the other main characters from the games make an appearance, leading to some interesting fight scenes. Some characters play larger roles than others though - I was disappointed to see that my childhood character of choice, Dhalsim was hardly involved in the film at all.

The animation quality varied throughout, but the film looked fairly good for the most part. And the soundtrack was interesting, composed mainly of hard rock/grunge type stuff, some of the tracks being supplied by bands such as Korn and Alice in Chains - I guess that's what was in fashion at the time. I was also surprised to hear the DVD menu audio was all songs by The Mad Capsule Markets.

I get the impression this was a pretty big film when it was originally released, probably more so in Japan than in the West. In fact, some of the new characters and storylines from the film eventually made their way into the Street Fighter games, and I'd recommend this film for anyone who's a fan of the games. It's nothing amazing, and a lot like most other anime action films, but it's still enjoyable to see all the characters from the games duking it out and stuff.

I really wanna play some Street Fighter II now actually - hado-ken!