Anime Review: "Kaiju Girls Black"
15 minutes later, after taking down some notes on a nearby
post-it, I had a rough idea of things. But in all honesty, still was pretty fucking lost.
Kaiju Girls Black is a feature film anime sequel to the
Kaiju Girls anime series, which I had not watched prior to screening this film while I played Minecraft; now I understood, at least in part, why I was so
confused. This is the kind of movie that it helps to have gone into with some
base level of connection to the franchise. Basically a movie made for the fans.
In short, Kaiju Girls is a Gijinka (think anthropomorphic or furry, if you will)
series in which various Kaiju (from Ultraman? I think, based off reading some
wiki articles and watching a YouTube explanation vid, but don't @ me if that's wrong) take the form of cute, kawaii,
moe anime girls (most likely in an effort to sell merch).
Now, lots of anime is only made to promote LN’s or Blu-Rays,
or sell merch, so I’m not one to really judge things out of the gate.
Transformers, a series made to sell action figures, has now had 6 feature films, (all of which were bad, again, don't @ me), which
have, according to a quick google search, about $4.8 billion in total box
office. Plus, they probably did also sell a lot of toys too, but I’ll not get
into that. What I’m saying is this, I’m not going to wholly discount this movie
because it may or may not have been just a toy commercial.
With that being said… I bet you expect me to now say the
movie was an absolute dumpster fire, and for me to light that shit on fire, but you’d be surprised, because this
wasn’t a bad film. It lacked much substance, and so will this review. It
certainly wasn’t ground breaking entertainment; but I got a few giggles, and occasional chortle, out
of it, the animation was clean, it was delightfully self-aware, the voice
acting was well done, and the characters were pretty decent to look at in terms
of originality (and cuteness). Given that this was probably being marketed at
middle - high school kids (and all the rotten anime-girl figure buying otaku as well), I think it says
a lot considering that I enjoyed it, considering I'm well out of those age demographics (though I suppose I am a rotten otaku).
So I guess what I’m trying to say is that this movie succeeded
in making me curious enough about the franchise that I’m now putting the
original anime into my ptw list with all the other stuff… there’s quite a bit
in there now, but I’m gradually getting through it.
You can watch it now, streaming on Hidive. Unfortunately, the original anime television series (which turns out to be done very different stylistically, and in short format), is licensed by Crunchyroll. So hopefully you have subs to both of them.
