Ultraman: Rising Anime Movie Review – Review

So some full disclosure here: I’m not exactly what one would call a tokusatsu expert. In general, my experience doesn’t extend too far beyond watching early seasons of Power Rangers as a kid and watching the animated versions of the Garo franchise that MAPPA put out a few years back. This also means I’m unfamiliar with Ultraman. While I did check out the first season of the 3DCG Ultraman anime on Netflix when it debuted and enjoyed what I saw of it, I’ve been told by friends who know a lot more about the genre than I do that it’s not exactly a great representation of what the Ultraman franchise is generally like. All that to say, I honestly couldn’t tell you how well this movie represents Ultraman when it comes to the lore or its themes, but as a standalone movie, I had a pretty good time with it.

One important thing to establish right off the bat is that if, like me, you don’t have a ton of familiarity with Ultraman, this isn’t exactly a perfect introduction. While the story isn’t too complicated, and kids who don’t know what an “Ultraman” is could probably follow the movie just fine, there is at least a bit of presumed familiarity with the franchise. The film doesn’t give a whole lot of context as to who Ultraman is or his abilities beyond his legacy as a superhero. Rather than following the original Ultraman, the story instead centers around a young man named Ken who inherits the role from his father and has already started his hero career by the time the movie’s main plot begins. It’s a bit of a strange approach, especially considering that this being a Western-led animated production means that the presumed target audience is kids and families who aren’t that familiar with the franchise rather than dedicated Ultraman fans but it does largely work for what the film is trying to do.

The film centers around Ken Sato, the new Ultraman on the block who has returned from America to live in Japan and take on the mantle after his father, Professor Sato, suffered a serious injury during a battle with a kaiju. However, Ken is much more interested in furthering his career as a professional baseball player than defending people from kaiju. He largely resents the idea of having to serve as Ultraman, as he resents his father for ultimately prioritizing his duties as Ultraman over Ken and his mother, who had gone missing sometime over the last few years. All that changes when Ken happens to rescue a kaiju egg from the Kaiju Defense Force, and the kaiju that hatches from the egg imprints on Ken as her parent, forcing him into raising her.

To call this movie “How To Train Your Baby Kaiju” is probably a little too on the nose. Still, if you’ve seen the first How To Train Your Dragon, there are at least a few similarities in using monster raising to explore a fractured father-son relationship. How much mileage you get out of this movie depends on whether you find the baby kaiju cute rather than annoying. While the constant baby jokes did start to wear thin on me after a bit, I did find that aspect of the movie to be charming more often than not, and it’s used pretty effectively for furthering Ken’s growth from being largely arrogant and self-centered to learning how to better put others before himself. I also found the dynamic between Ken and his father pretty interesting as they are forced to confront the gulf between them. Ken gradually starts to see exactly how much responsibility the elder Ultraman had to grapple with. While the emotional resolution is a little more straightforward than I would have personally liked, it does lead to an action-packed climax that feels incredibly rad, even with my minimal familiarity with the franchise, so on the whole, I can’t complain too much, even if I feel a little mixed there.

Speaking of mixed feelings, if there’s any aspect of this film that I feel torn on, it’s with its primary antagonist, Dr. Onda. His primary motivation throughout the film is the extermination of kaiju through the Kaiju Defense Force, having lost his family during a kaiju attack, and resenting both Ultraman and himself for failing to protect them. He feels surprisingly nuanced for the villain of what is largely a family-friendly film, and there are various points where he hardly even feels like one at all, as he comes off as largely sympathetic, if misguided, and is shown to genuinely value the lives of the people working under him. This makes him a lot more interesting than I would have expected. However, since the bulk of the film is centered around the baby kaiju stuff and Ken repairing his relationship with his father, Dr. Onda never directly interacts with our heroes, and all the sympathy he’s given makes the ambiguity of his fate at the end of the movie feel more than a little strange. I’m also not too keen on the mystery concerning the fate of Ken’s mother being used as sequel bait when her absence is one of the biggest sources of strain between Ken and his father. Still, the film is pretty stuffed as it is, so I can’t fault the choice too much. To its credit, I probably would watch a sequel, so I guess it works pretty well as a hook.

Visually, the movie looks pretty solid as it takes some strong cues from the Spiderverse films regarding blending 2D artwork over 3D CG models for some cool visual effects. While it’s certainly not as strong as those movies when it comes to the visual presentation, it still has some neat stylistic flourishes, and the film’s final battle, in particular, looks impressive. I can also say that while there isn’t much about Ultraman I would recognize at first glance, the handful of visual elements and poses I know are sprinkled here and there throughout the film, with the iconic transformation sequence being one of the coolest shots of the whole film. The film also features at least one usage of the Japanese Ultraman theme and what I assume is a remix of the American one in the ending credits so I feel confident that a few actual tokusatsu nerds were working on this thing.

I wasn’t sure what to expect here, given that Western adaptations of Japanese properties often have mixed results, but I had a decent time with this. I can’t say how well this actively represents what Ultraman is as a franchise, but it is a pretty entertaining family film, and given that seems to have been the goal here, I’d say it more or less succeeds in that area. If nothing else, it has certainly increased my interest in Ultraman, and since that’s the thing pretty much any adaptation should ultimately strive for, I’d say it’s at least worth checking out.