Gintama

My watching this movie was for a very strange reason - my public library has it and it is on BluRay, and there were zero requests. So I thought, "What the heck, I'll give it a try."

There is an audience for this type of movie but it definitely isn't me. In I suppose what is typical of Japanese movies of this sort we see lots of histrionics, very loud and animated characters speaking very rapidly and enthusiastically. For me I found it pretty much unwatchable.

Lets get this straight, 1. Live action anime adaptations are terrible and 2. foreign films don't score high on western rating sites. Now that is out of the way, The movie totally breaks statement 1 by not doing what most live actions tend to do, which is change the story and are able to summarize their cast by understanding the genre this movie is as well as the audience members that have come to watch. So if youre looking for a decent live action anime adaptation this movie exceeds it.

The Gintama movie could have been better. The story was okay and entertaining and the characters interesting and likable. However, the CGI were very poor and the execution overall was weak, following the anime premisses so closerly, to the point that it was idiotic. Also, some, (not all) costumes looked quite fake. Other than that, the plot was nice, with many action scenes and some solid fights. The performances were good as well. So, five and a half out of ten.

If you have any concerns with this adaptation, don't worry I originally was concerned too, until I watched the parfait scene at the beginning, then I realized Gintama was in good hands here. The movie is literally just the anime but live action. The characters could be accurately described as their animated counterparts. I think Gintama is the only manga series to be translated into real world this easily because of its fourth wall breaking and anime parodies. Truly an amazing movie.

I caught this movie on a flight from the UK to Hong Kong. I am not an anime fan at all but spent a majority of my life in Japan. This movie was initially a time filler for me but I soon started to realise just how well played out the story is. It is often difficult to capture the essence of Japanese humour when it is interpreted into English as the basis of our humour is different. The translators of this movie have done such an amazing job and to read how the Japanese is interpreted I felt myself was unable to stop laughing. It is a brilliant movie that captures all of the neat things that are Japanese but manages to preserve them in the translation. I recommend you watch it, its a great movie!