Street Fighter II: The Movie

Street Fighter II-V

street fighter ii: the movie 1994. Movie. 98 min. Martial arts/adventure. org CAPCOM (video game). dir Gisaburo Sugii. scr Gisbaruo Sugii, others. des Shukou Murase.

street fighter ii-v 1995. TV series. (29 X 30 min.) dir Gisaburo Sugii. -bc

Street Fighter II: The Movie, adapted from the popular video game, boasts sophisticated movie-quality fight choreography and manages to incorporate most of the major game characters in clever and dramatic ways while keeping its focus on Ryu and his American buddy, Ken Masters. The TV series, Street Fighter II-V, also focused on Ryu and Ken, and offered an epic saga of their travels around the world in search of greater knowledge and advancement of their skills.

In the movie, young Ryu is a Japanese martial artist who travels the world in search of ways to improve his already considerable skills. Unbeknownst to him, his progress is being monitored by the criminal/terrorist organization, Shadowlaw, whose leader, General Bison, seeks to recruit street fighters and turn them into assassins. Meanwhile, Interpol agent Chun Li and Captain Guile of the U.S. Air Force are trying to reach other known street fighters before Shadowlaw can get to them, including Ryu and the American who trained with him, Ken Masters. Eventually Bison and his chief fighters converge on a mountaintop in Asia with a mind-controlled Ken to confront Guile, Ryu, and sumo wrestler E. Honda.

The TV series takes place some years earlier and features Ryu and Ken as teenaged martial artists who set off on a trip around the world to challenge the best fighters they can find and hone their skills. In Hong Kong, they meet the teenaged female kung fu expert Chun Li and the kung fu movie star, Fei Long. During a stint in a Bangkok jail on a drug frame-up, Ryu learns a few techniques from fellow inmate, Muay Thai boxer Sagat. Ryu and Ken then head into the heart of India to find the mystic Dhalsim, master of the technique of “hadou ken.” All the while, General Bison of Shadowlaw is tracking them and eventually captures Ken, Ryu, and Chun Li and locks them up in his island stronghold, where Ryu and Chun Li are subjected to mind control. As Ken breaks out and tries to free his friends, U.S. Air Force Sergeants Guile and Nash penetrate the stronghold and join the battle.

The movie boasts absolutely striking animation, particularly in the fight scenes where the characters’ fast and intricate movements, in a variety of styles, are fluidly animated to create some of the most entertaining fight action yet seen in martial arts anime. The fight choreography is modeled not on the video game, but on a cinematic model, as if martial arts fight directors were brought in to supervise the animation.

The character design for all the main characters is strong and expressive, faces and bodies alike. The background illustration is remarkably detailed and gives each sequence a vivid sense of place. There are many standout scenes, but one worth highlighting occurs in India where Ryu, visiting a rural village, comes upon a street fight between Dhalsim and E. Honda, aids a little girl trying to get milk for her sick mother, and encounters Shadowlaw operatives attacking an activist speaker at a rally. Through it all, viewers get a real action-movie experience, thanks to the deft cutting between the different parties in the scene, the careful buildup to the attack, and the effort to make the setting, atmosphere, and characters come alive.

The TV series also boasted spectacular fight choreography, with at least one major fight per episode. Overall, however, the lower budget stretched out over twenty-nine episodes meant simpler character design and backgrounds, although the sense of place is still strong as the characters travel through San Francisco, Hong Kong, Thailand, India, and Barcelona. There are sequences in the series that are nothing short of breathtaking as they create a character’s subjective viewpoint in the midst of a mystical experience, as in the scenes where Ryu and Ken absorb the soul-altering power of the “hadou ken.”

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The movie tells a simple, straightforward story incorporating key elements of the game in ways that make dramatic sense. While American film and cartoon versions of the game tended to focus on American military man Guile (whose rank was higher on one side of the Pacific than the other), the Japanese versions set their sights squarely on Ryu and Ken, the two young fighters, and followed them on their quest for greater skills and more difficult challenges. This tack provided young audience identification figures but also created a structure whereby the two protagonists could encounter the other video game characters in a way that was plausible and served the narrative.

There are several impressive set pieces in the movie, including the aforementioned India sequence, but also a suspenseful scene where Vega stalks Chun Li and attacks her in her New York apartment while Guile races through traffic to try to reach her. A clever gimmick in the movie is the use by Shadowlaw of cyborgs that follow and track the various street fighters and give the viewer a glimpse of the data they compile on each fighter. In one scene outside a nightclub in Los Angeles, Guile warns a club bouncer named Dee Jay (who’d just outfought some thugs) of Shadowlaw’s interest in him while Chun Li unmasks (and beheads) the cyborg in their midst.

The TV series was able to expand on certain elements in the movie story and give greater time and space to significant game characters who had little more than cameos in the movie, including Fei Long, Sagat, and Dhalsim. In fact, all three characters figure in the best parts of the series, as seen in the first half where the boys travel to Hong Kong, Thailand, and India. The second half is a bit of a letdown after the event-filled globe-trotting of the first fourteen episodes and takes place in Barcelona and then at Bison’s offshore island, offering little in the way of further plot development in the course of fifteen episodes, but at least delivering some great fights.

Still, there is a lot of impressive work in the series. There are sequences that stand out as both profound, in terms of character development, and artful in terms of the animation quality, sense of mood, and emotional state conveyed. The Dhalsim episode illustrates the ingenious way the series manages to intertwine character, atmosphere, and action, as in one spellbinding sequence where the boys enter a mystical temple to confront their own true natures and wind up separately battling an identical monster, little knowing they are actually fighting each other.

The music by is an important element in creating the underlying emotional mood that gives the TV series its power and propels viewers through some of the weaker moments. Tetsuya Komuro composed the music for the movie, although it’s not heard in the English dub, which replaced the original score with hard rock songs from Sony’s catalog that often didn’t match the mood of the onscreen action.

One of the high points of the entire series occurs in episode 22, when Ken uses “hadou” power (the art of summoning up one’s qi or inner energy) to break his chains and free himself from a cell in Bison’s fortress, in a sequence that takes us through each step of the process. The animation, music, facial expressions, body movements, and Japanese voice acting all combine to create a truly sensual moment during the first buildup of power, and an enor­mously liberating one when Ken finally breaks out in a burst of ecstatic physical and emotional release.

Director Gisaburo Sugii’s career as an animator dates back to Japan’s first color animated feature, Hakujaden (Panda and the Magic Serpent, 1958). He directed episodes of the original Astro Boy and went on to direct such other anime classics as The Tale of Genji and Night on the Galactic Railroad. His other TV directorial credits include the celebrated shojo (girls’) drama series, The Glass Mask (1984), and the hit sports-romance series, Touch (1985).

Street Fighter was first introduced as a video game in 1987, but didn’t achieve worldwide popularity until a revised version with many more characters, Street Fighter II, came out in 1991. The year 1994 saw two film versions of the Street Fighter II game. In addition to the Japanese animated movie, there was a live-action Hollywood version called Street Fighter, starring Belgian-born martial arts star Jean-Claude Van Damme as Colonel Guile, who works for a UN-like organization, and Raul Julia as General Bison, the head of “Shadaloo.”

In 1995, the same year as Street Fighter II-V, there was an American-produced cartoon series as well, Street Fighter, syndicated to television for a children’s audience. In it, Street Fighter is the code name for a secret American-based organization devoted to fighting international crime and terrorism. The main character was Colonel Guile and his sidekicks were usually Chun Li or Cammy White, although most of the characters got their moments to shine in one episode or another. All film and animated versions of the game were produced by Capcom, the Japanese manufacturer of the game, and all give a producer credit to the company’s president, Kenzo Tsujimoto.

violence Lots of hard-hitting martial arts violence in both movie and TV series. profanity Profanity in both movie and TV series. nudity Chun Li has a semi-nude shower scene in the movie.