Zebraman

Tokyo Shock/Media Blasters

R1 DVD

Takashi Miike is well known for his unusual approach to cinema, many of his films are marked by violence, sex and extremes of behaviour. At the same time he also produces unusual films which are hard to categorize such as The Great Yokai War and Zebraman. Zebraman is a quirky and eccentric sort of film, which has lots of humour and comedy and a very unusual storyline. The violence is fairly artificial and reminds me more of “Ghost Busters” than of the violence normally associated with Miike, however, there are certainly some darker moments.

The story is the tale of Ichikawa Shin´ichi, he is a supervisor at a local school and doesn't seem to have much of a career trajectory. He is routinely degraded by staff and students alike and his home life is no better. His son is regularly bullied and beaten due to his ineffectiveness as a father and his daughter, who has recently come of age, has become very sexually active with a penchant for the criminal class. His wife seems to play no role in his life whatever and is having an affair.

His way of dealing with the world is to retreat into his favourite superhero series, Zebraman. It was a second rate series which was ridiculed by most, but Ichikawa loved it and cherished the seven episodes which were shown on TV. He makes himself a Zebraman outfit and even fantasizes about being a superhero.

The city in which they live is plagued with reports of strange events, rapes and murders. At first these seem to be simply local crimes, but soon a defence department investigation is underway as they bear the hallmarks of being extra terrestrial in origin. As the killings become more extreme, the bodies which are discovered seem to be oozing a green substance.

Ichikawa wishes to fight against crime but lacks the confidence to do so until he finds out that a disabled child who has transferred to his school also shares his love of Zebraman. Somehow a strange bond is formed and through their combined belief Ichikawa is transformed into Zebraman. He now takes to fighting the accelerating crime rate which is caused by these alien life forms taking over human bodies. In a rather amusing scene a bus of children become "possessed" by these forms and run amok and use baseball bats to demolish a local market stall.

This is a quirky, eccentric and at times sentimental film filled with humour, comedy and super hero crime fighting. The transformation of Ichikawa from the Zebraman of dreams to the real Zebraman by the power of belief, of course, offers the simple message that we can achieve what we dream of. At times I felt the film became a little too mawkish and lost track of its central premise, at nearly two hours I think better editing may have fixed this.

The acting is solid; the plot seems to be influenced by every possible science fiction and superhero story; it is a lot of fun, not taking itself too seriously and is a very entertaining work of cinema.

This review will appear in Volume 2:1 (2009) of the digital and print edition of Synergy Magazine.

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