You have to hand it to the Japanese film industry; there is nothing quite so likely to be bat-shit insane as a well made animé and they brought us the rubber-suited glory that was the Toho era Godzilla. While I don't claim to be an expert on such matters; I never got into series like Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh, based solely on my inability to pay attention to 14 seasons of a million episodes where the same thing happens over again against a slightly different background and the hero wins his epic duel by producing the exact right card at the exact right time every single week. Except Kinnikuman, which I stuck with through 60 episodes purely due to how absolutely nutzoid it was. Some of those Manga movies from the 90s are just pure gold though; what person in their right mind wouldn't want to watch demon cocks destroying Tokyo? Vampire slayer with a talking hand? Teenage deliquant metamorphosised into all powerful psychic pile of goo following a fairly innocuous road traffic accident? All in a day's work my friends, they have you covered. Just don't ask what it is you're covered in.
I will be the first to admit that I know very little about French animation, 'very little' here having the meaning of exactly zero. A brief skim through the trusty Google confirms that I have never seen a French animated movie, although I have heard of a couple and I read some Asterix and Obelix books when I was a kid so that's the extent of it. "What bearing does this have on anything?" I hear you ask; it's the slightly odd sounding collaboration between the two geographical extremes that caught my eye and flung me into the comfy seats and sticky floors of my local Showcase for a one-off screening of a weird but thoroughly enjoyable animé called MFKZ.
First things first: the pre-amble for this movie sounds like the fevered dream of a hallucinating, drug fuelled mad man. Promises of alien invasions, lucha libre, superpowers and gangsters sound like a bunch of hyperactive kids got together to play Madlibs without a single clue as to the rules, regurgitated sugar-induced word vomit everywhere and the director just ran with it. The main character, Lino, is a fairly worthless lump who looks like a ping pong ball grew features and limbs before falling into a vat of ink, can't keep a job, has an army of cockroaches for pets and a room mate whose head happens to be a flaming skull. No one offers an explanation why this is the case when the rest of the characters (except their annoying cat friend Willy) are fully human but it's probably best to just get your head down and crack on. Turns out Lino is being tracked down by the Men in Black (not Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones though) because his Dad was an alien and getting run over by a truck somehow magically unlocks his tentacle-based super badassery. And that's all in the first act.
There is a laundry list of weird and wonderful characters aside from our heroes; the masked Lucha Libre wrestlers who have some sort of mystical destiny to complete, the Shakespeare-quoting gangsters who appear to be immune to bullets in their eye sockets, a mad scientist who appears from nowhere and of course the villainous shape shifting tentacle beasts. Throw a car chase in an ice cream truck and some over the top violence and there's just enough going on to stop you paying attention to the fact that there isn't really much sense being made. Certain plot threads appear from nowhere and trail off just as abruptly; nobody is here to wrap things up in a neat little bow. The pacing is a little off in places, particularly in the action set pieces where you just feel like everything could be snappier and the plot itself unfolds to a bit of an anti climax, leaving you wanting a bit more of a satisfying pay off; it feels more like the opening two episodes of a Netflix original series than a standalone movie. I guess they were angling for a sequel, but honestly this is way too niche for that to be a safe bet. They'd probably have been better off piling on the carnage and opting for a bit more of an Arnie style explosion-fest, with bullets, cars and limbs launching themselves through the air, but they clearly wanted to be a bit more subtle than that. Animé does have a tendency to do that though: even Akira, arguably one of the greatest feature length animations ever, let alone to come out of Japan has a slightly odd, very trippy and almost anticlimactic ending. Hey, it's their movie and their world to build; I expect if we get a second, it might fill some of those gaps.
All that being said, it is really nice to look at. The design of everything is gorgeous, from the CGI rendered cityscapes to the high tech Samurai-esque Police stormtroopers and the animation is slick. It isn't your typical animé in a lot of different ways and I feel like that might be the French influence showing its face; they've not opted to head down either the polished Ghibli look nor the overly cute Chibi style and it makes for something that stands out as being firmly in its own little world. The soundtrack is great, even if it doesn't quite match the on screen action, there's no denying there are some proper bangers on there, to use the parlance of the youth of today. Innit fam. Ahem.
I wasn't sure what to expect going into this and I came out not 100% sure what I'd just got, other than the fact I really enjoyed it. For all its flaws, it was above all unique and I can't help feel like that's a good thing nowadays. I can see why they had it on for one night only mind you; this isn't Moana and it's not Enter the Spiderverse either so it was never going to set the box office on fire. I'd say it's definitely worth chasing down on your home entertainment format of choice; hearing the RZA recite The Bard before murdering everyone in the face is worth the entrance fee/cost of the dvd alone.
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