Tekken: The Motion Picture

Original Title: 鉄拳
Romanized: Tekken
Literal: Iron Fist

Plot Synopsis

The Mishima Conglomerate, one of the most powerful corporations in the world, has been hard at work buying up weapons companies left and right. They are well on their way to virtually controlling the world, but this hasn't gone unnoticed. The 3WC (no, not the folks who come up with HTML standards) has dispatched an agent, Jun Kazama, to investigate an island hideaway that is rumored to conceal a massive weapons manufacturing plant. How will she get in? Well, it just so happens that she's a skilled martial artist, and has been invited to an exclusive tournament held by Heihachi Mishima, the head of the Conglomerate; the victor will receive international renown along with a $1 billion prize. Not bad for a day's work, eh? But to get that prize, the top combatant will have to take on Heihachi himself, and that's if they even survive that long--you see, Lee Chaolan, Heihachi's adopted son and the heir to the conglomerate sees this as the perfect chance to secretly test some new weapons he's been working on.

Nevertheless, Jun, joined by Lei Wulong, the top Hong Kong International Police agent (who was also invited to the tournament), sets off for the island. But she is haunted by dreams of an incident that occurred 16 years ago in which a boy was thrown off a cliff by his own father as a test of strength. This boy--Kazuya Mishima, son of Heihachi--is still alive, and is entering the tournament on his own. Driven by rage, his only goal is to make it to the final challenge and kill his own father. But before the prodigal son returns, he'll have to deal with his adopted brother (and the two lethal assassins in his sway, Mina and Anna Williams), who has no intentions of letting his long lost kin return to the fold. Along their journey to the island, the two agents meet the tormented Kazuya, the rash and vengeful Michelle Chang, and a most unlikely pair, the hulking Jack and a young girl that is his companion. Everybody has a different reason for entering the Tournament (none of which are the billion bucks), but only one will get a shot at Heihachi...

Quick Review

Rating: 1.5 / 5
Reviewer: Marc
Review Date: 2003-06-25

Tekken: The Motion Picture wasn't downright bad, but it had a lot of smaller strikes against it that added up. The art was generally good, but some of the creatures were between hokey and downright laughable. The fights were generally good looking, but a bit sparse. They focused on a few characters, but the central hero doesn't seem interesting enough to carry his angst. And there was a surprising amount of story, but it felt forced at times and dropped the ball in several areas. Even the languages are a mixed bag; the dub, though decent, replaces the more dramatically appropriate music with rather upbeat English rock and rap, making it more fun but also cheapening the drama.

When you put it all together, Tekken isn't likely worth much attention from the average viewer. If you're a fan of the game, you may be put off by the lack of emphasis on fighting, and you're likely to miss some of your favorite characters, but it's worth at least a look by action fans.

US DVD Review

This was AD Vision's first DVD effort, and although all the features for a seriously cool disc are there, this one was a real disappointment in my eyes. The menu section is great, setting the standard for future ADV DVDs; the menus look cool, are heavily animated, include sound, and they provide access to a wealth of features: English (Dolby 5.1), Japanese, and even French soundtracks; English and Spanish subtitles (that's 4 languages total); a scene selector with animated preview boxes; two different ADV Tekken trailers; the English cast list; a few slides of some choice shots from the movie; and illustrated character bios. The disc even includes 15 of AD Vision's music video-style trailers, accessed through more animated preview menus (a really cool feature--having that many extended musical trailers really is a feature, not just advertising).

But the down sides are pretty bad; for one, in the unfortunate tradition of older US Manga Corps DVDs, there is no Japanese (or French, for that matter) cast to be found on the disc. For another thing, the English subtitle track is just a transcription of the English dialogue; this would be fine if there was a direct translation too, but since the dialogue didn't necessarily line up right and wasn't translated very directly in many parts, this felt odd to be used as subtitles (the situation may be the same with the subtitled VHS version, but I haven't seen it and would suspect otherwise). But the real problem with this disc is the video transfer; for the most part, the video looks extremely sharp. Until there's a quick pan, that is. It's obviously due to some kind of sloppy encoding, but most of the quick pans (and some other active parts) produce this kind of streaking effect on the moving object that, although not horrible, was definitely distracting, and really marred the otherwise beautiful video. This and the dubtitles were thankfully a one time fluke, as ADVs later DVDs are quite good.

(By the way, if anyone is really interested, I fiddled with freeze frames for a while, and the problem seems to be that when they encoded the interlaced fields where there were parts of two separate animation frames appearing at the same time, they either encoded them both as the same full-screen frame or just did a sloppy job of it; the end result is that in much of the fast motion--though not everywhere, since some of it coincidentally lined up right--you had two unaligned frames onscreen simultaneously for long enough to see the jitter between them.)

Content Guide

Probably 13-up, though it could be 16-up; the only objectionable material is a short shower scene and a few bits of overly bloody violence. There's also a slightly edited version.

Violence: 3 - Not extremely graphic, but gets pretty bloody a few times.

Nudity: 2 - One shower scene.

Sex/Mature Themes: 1 - A very short scene with more implied.

Language: 1 - Generally mild language.

Notes and Trivia

None, other than this is a relatively early example of anime produced with computer compositing and background art; this technique makes for far cheaper production, and has rapidly replaced camera-only animation in most productions.

Availability

Available in the US from ADV on bilingual DVD (buy from RightStuf). Was previously availabe on dubbed VHS in edited and uncut versions.

Looking to buy? Try these stores: RightStuf (search) | AnimeNation | Akemi's a(nime)Store