Something else to cut down the politics

now some thoughts on crackime

which is good cause it is a gateway anime

TODAY'S MOVIE REVIEW: Player-hatin' "Yu-Gi-Oh": The Director's Cut



Editor's Note: Hey, a news hole's a news hole -- and thus my Oregonian review of "Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie" had to be massively truncated for space. It happens.

In the interests of public service -- i.e., in the interests of making sure the gang of cynical chimps responsible for "Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie" scald as few retinas as possible with their ADD-afflicted, sub-infomercial pablum -- I present the "Director's Cut" of my review below. -- Warmest, MER, CulturePulp.com





At last: The lamest, most cynically product-driven children's entertainment of the year has arrived!

"Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie" is a shabby, joyless, 90-minute slab of "advertainment" designed to sell booster packs for a popular trading-card game. It's certainly not designed to bring joy to moviegoers of all ages; in fact, it barely manages to masquerade as narrative. The "story" -- and I use that word with world-swallowing looseness -- is badly animated and nonsensically plotted. Also, it runs the risk of flash-hypnotizing your children, transmogrifying them into consumerist mini-beggars who tug your pants-leg, imploring you to buy tree-killing junk they don't need.

So. Where to begin? For those unfamiliar with the television cartoon that buttresses this heaping cinematic mound, here's a primer: Our hero, Yugi, is a champion card-gamer and international star. (The show takes place in an alternate universe where people who excel at card games are accorded Michael Jordan-esque levels of fame and prestige.) But Yugi isn't exactly a champion card-gamer; he's apparently possessed by the spirit of an ancient Egyptian Pharaoh while he plays. Turns out the card game is actually the modern-day continuation of the mystical "Shadow Games," which involved spooky dueling monsters, or something; nowadays, these games are confined to virtual dueling arenas, where Yugi/Pharaoh often squares off against Seto Kaiba, a billionaire who squanders his vast fortune trying to beat our hero, who can always pull some magical "God Cards" to win the game.

Now, this isn't any sillier, one supposes, than the plot of any children's cartoon. But what lowers "Yu-Gi-Oh!" to the murkiest depths of cartoon dreck is the way it blatantly exists to sell the real-life card game that kids have salivated over for the past few years. The big climax of every cartoon is a card battle where our combatants square off against one another and say stuff like, "First I summon my Familiar Knight in Defense mode!" and "Now my Obelisk of Tormentor is the strongest monster in play!" and use combination "card attacks" to deduct points from each other. And while the animation is stunningly cheap, the cards that Yugi plays looked to be high-rez scans right off the booster packs that miraculously find their way into stores.

(Also, if I may trot the preview audience into the critical frame: Kids at a recent screening gasped with covetous glee whenever they saw Yugi holding a powerful new card; the tittering suggested that they'd be scrambling out to try and find those cards the second the movie ended.)

Putting it another way: Imagine if Parker Brothers produced a cartoon called "Stra-Te-GO!" that featured a couple of badly animated kids yelling at each other across a Stratego board, and yowling every time they accidentally hit a bomb. It's like that. And it's exactly that shameless.

"Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie" is nothing more than a TV episode writ large -- with the stakes slightly raised to include the Egyptian god Anubis, who will be summoned to Earth to blast everything in sight with easily animated bolts of light if Seto wins a particularly brutal match. To an outsider, the card game itself makes nary a whit of sense, sounding like nothing so much as those imaginary one-upsmanship games that 7-year-olds play with each other. And like "Pokemon," "Yu-Gi-Oh!" takes cockfighting as its central metaphor, with kids unleashing animals to fight with little consequence for their owners. Honestly: It's a wonder Yugi and Seto don't have bookies.

We live in an era where advertising and entertainment have merged -- to the point where John Frankenheimer directs Clive Owen in a groovy BMW commercial. Fair enough. But when advertising and entertainment merge and entertainment gets beaten to a bloody pulp, then left at the side of the road to sputter and die, someone has to draw the line. Shield your children from this pop-junk at all costs.

Posted: Fri - August 13, 2004 at 01:51 PM CulturePulp: Writings and Comics by M.E. Russell Today's Movie Reviews Previous Next Feedback