Mutafukaz

Do you know what the best anime movie of the last couple years is? I'll give you a hint: it's nothing by Makoto Shinkai, the Tyler Perry of anime. It's probably this one.

Let's talk about anime movies for a second. There are three kinds of original anime movies:

A. ghibli
B. Over-produced trashy teen romances for the lowest common denominator that could've been live action
C. The rare, totally stand-alone anime film that dares to take full advantage of the medium and delivers art, animation and story concepts that would've never been possible in a TV series format.

This movie, MFKZ, is solidly in group C. This ... is a Movie with a bold, capital M, and it's one of my biggest contenders for favorite movie of last year. Not just anime movie, not just animated movie, favorite Movie. It's bold, insane, beautiful, fun and encapsulates everything cool about anime and animation in general. It's fucking awesome. Of course, only like 10 people know it exists.

However, maybe that will change because it's ~ ~ NOW ON NETFLIX ~ ~, and this review is goin' up to tell you why you should watch it like two or eight times.

Let's dig in.

MFKZ is a Japanese movie that is based on a French comic, based heavily around American culture and mythos - There's really nothing else like it, it is a wholly unique experience in this dead-dry industry full of perpetual garbage that's spun off or mutated from other garbage.

The first thing you notice in this weird mishmash of a visual feast is, well, the visuals. If you've seen the trailer, or even any screenshots, you'll notice that this movie doesn't look like anything else out there, except for Tekkonkinkreet, which you likely also haven't seen (but should.) Character designs vary wildly from realistically proportioned to being complete caricatures or talking animals. These designs all do something only animation can do: directly reflect the characters' personalities or just be generally absurd. This is all played completely straight - the main character's best friend has a flaming skull for a head, and this is acknowledged and played up in certain scenes, but there's never any "explanation" - he's just like that. Born that way.

The show-stopper here though is the background artwork. Every scene in this movie is beautiful. Every single shot. Close up of dirty bathroom tile? Drawn by God damned Rembrandt. All the time. Every mundane thing is meticulously brought to life and depicted with personality in extreme detail.

And then when it's all combined together, you get one of the most fluidly animated, stylishly directed animated movies of all time. What Into the Spiderverse did for 3DCG movies, this film does for 2D. The ice cream truck chase (yes, correct) sequence alone redefined what I thought was possible in an animated sequence, featuring wild camera shifts, time slowdowns and speedups, and just all-around cooky action.

Next, I guess we can talk about the story. I've had friends and people on forums say to me that the story is confusing. This movie isn't that complicated: it's an action movie. The main kids beat up the bad guys and chase after the girl, it's very Hollywood Blockbuster Action. That summary is definitely a simplification, but MFKZ takes you through a pretty linear chain of events and explains everything to you as it happens. The insane visuals and the fact the movie doesn't spoonfeed this to you is where people are getting hung up. One of the cool things about this film is that the main characters are total losers - destitute, incompetent, weak everymen living in a bad apartment in a bad city. There are several other parties hunting them down and aiding them, and while our main boy is the catalyst for a lot of things, the bigger events that transpire barely involve him. He just gets hit by the dump truck from Sonic Adventure 2 and then dodges lunatics with bullets while fawning over a girl. That's him. Then you have the demons, the mafia hitmen, the scientist, the roaches, the Shakespearian gangman played by the RZA, and the fucking luchadores. They all sort of crash together to make the final act happen, and the main boy is just there, sorting out his literal personal demons, not there to save the world. It's refreshing and everything has a payoff, coming together seamlessly for a strong finale. I've seen much weirder, much worse in movies than this. MFKZ is very tight from start to finish, not a scene or shot is wasted and everything contributes to the narrative.

Last, let's have a look at the audio in this movie. The English voice cast, the only relevant voice cast, is just stellar. This movie was made to be in English, voiced by Americans. You have have a pretty strong who's who of famous TV actors filling out the cast, like villain dude from Breaking Bad and the guy from The Shield. Performances are stellar all around, delivering fun, witty dialogue that feels like real people are talking, rather than the usual Google Translated dub scripts. "Shinohara-san, will you go to the Obenkyo Dojaimazisu with me?" / "Nnn-hn! Y-yes, big brother, I will! It makes me so happy!" - no shit like that, you hear?

The soundtrack and general sound design are quite solid. Not a lot of memorable vocal BGM or anything, but sometimes you'll get an insane dubstep drop beat during an action sequence. Essentially, the sound in the movie is very much design to emphasize the action and mood, rather than be any kind of flashy distraction. It's a good, simple sauce on a complicated dish.

So yeah, go watch it. You probably have a couple months before it's arbitrarily rotated. And then go watch Promare, Lu Over the Wall, Night is Short Walk on Girl, Tekkonkinkreet, the works of Satoshi Kon, and all the other incredible original anime movies you slept on due to Director-san McSparkleskies hogging the spotlight.

This is my first review, so please don't kill me for any mistakes... ;)

Interesting that a quite niche-anime like Mutafukaz gets a two-days cinema screening in Germany thanks to Peppermint. There were just around 20 people in the movie when I was watching it, so financially it may not have been that good for the cinema. Still for me it was worth it.

Story (3/10):
For me, the only bad thing about the movie was the story. Without doing any spoilers, it's just senseless and hilarious, especially in the second half of the movie. It fits to the movie in general, but some things just happen randomly ... and you think "why the hell is this part of the movie?" or "what's going on here? that doesn't make sense". It's just hangling around from joke to joke without a proper point to reach at first, and everything is happening too fast to think about it some more. Well, the movie doesn't take itself too serious, so it's okay, but I didn't like it. The comical absurdity made me give it 3 points for story, otherwise a 2 or 1 would not have been far away...

Art (7/10):
The source material for the movie is a French comic strip, so don't expect an Asian art style here at all. Everyhing looks like a mixture between European and American culture (it plays in America somehow, so that's fine). It doesn't feel like an anime, more like a normal European animation movie. The animation is well-done and there are so much details in the pictures that you won't be able to get all at your first watch for sure.

Sound (9/10):
A cultural mixture of French hip-hop and house, and Latin music (for example Reggaeton). For me the best song was the Reggaeton song running during the credits. The songs perfectly fit to the background, but are completely different from most anime soundtracks. You may be disappointed if you like the pop/rock/metal-oriented soundtracks of Japanese anime movies.

Character (7/10):
Most characters in this movie didn't really make sense or were just hilariously exaggerated (clichès / stereotypes ahead!), which absolutely makes sense concerning the story. The two main characters are the only ones acting fairly normal. Sadly only one of the two gets a real characterization, while the second one acts more as a sidekick that stumbled into the whole thing by accident. Does he even have motives? We don't know...

In addition to that, it's not explained why some of the protagonists look as they look. This may be some reference, too, but I didn't get it then.

Enjoyment (9/10):
I was just laughing all the time (except for the parts where I was thinking "what the hell is going on here?"). The movie features lots and lots of Western cultural references. The humour of this movie is REALLY black. They don't fear to mock about anything: brand names, conspiracy theories, people, politics and many more. This is why the movie was so enjoyable for me, and I'm sure I didn't find all the hints and references at first watch. Some senseless stuff made me sigh because I didn't find it funny, but the rest was really worth it.

Overall: 6/10
Well, I'm sad that the story was not really fitting for me. The rest was very good and I would have given an 8/10, but this more or less patched story doesn't allow it. I gave a 6/10 because the movie overall is exactly what this number means: "nice".

I recommend tha movie to everybody from a Western audience who wants to laugh about cultural jokes. I fear many Asian viewers or people who like anime may be disappointed when watching it.

Out of 100 Nobles watching…
20 were impressed!
30 found no interest in the plot
30 couldn’t tell that there was a plot
10 thought the pacing was awful
10 didn’t really care for the quality of the animation

Mutafukaz is a Japanese-French collaboration project between Studio 4°C and Ankama. The former being responsible for projects such as the Berserk movie adaptations, a Batman miniseries, and a film adaptation of one of my favorite manga Kaijuu no Kodomo and the latter having made popular French cartoon series Wakfu. I had high hopes having enjoyed Wakfu a great deal, but those expectations fell woefully short. The production quality and pipeline of Studio ... 4°C seems to be something I just can’t acclimate too, but most importantly Mutafukaz is just not a cohesive film.

There’s some charm to be found in this movie. Interesting character designs and expressive artistic choices, but a decent art direction doesn’t get you anywhere if there’s no substance to back it up. That may be how I best describe this film. Formless. The movie is paced so absolutely terribly every scene change comes out of nowhere with no real explanation. As the viewer you should be guided from point A to point B when watching a film and it is up to the timing director to make that transition a smooth line. As far as I could tell Mutafukaz plot was a number of dots on a board with no lines connecting them.

I’ve done this film a bit of a disservice having watched it almost a month ago before reviewing it. Unfortunately, it’s just not memorable enough to recall much to complain about other than the overwhelming sense of wasted time felt after having watched it. Even in shows I more or less hated like Cannon Busters there were some elements I could cling to and complement. I can’t really do that here. The sound track was pretty good, I guess.