Relax, it’s just a little cosmic joke.
CONTENT WARNING: Psychedelics use, bathroom humor.
Tag Archives: 2025
CAPSULE: BATMAN NINJA VS. YAKUZA LEAGUE (2025)
ニンジャバットマン対ヤクザリーグ
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DIRECTED BY: Junpei Mizusaki, Shinji Takagi
FEATURING: Voices of Kôichi Yamadera, Romi Park, Yûki Kaji, Takaya Kamikawa, Rie Kugimiya, Kazuhiro Yamaji; Joe Daniels, Molly Searcy, Bryson Baugus, Aaron Campbell, Karlii Hoch, John Swasey (English dub)
PLOT: The morning after returning to contemporary Gotham from feudal Japan, Batman finds an ominous landmass floating in the stratosphere and an entire nation wiped from the globe.
COMMENTS: It is another normal day in Gotham. Batman, Robin, Red Robin, and Red Hood are assembled in Wayne Manor. Yakuza are falling from the sky. This unlikely weather has been plaguing Gotham for the past month, claims Commissioner Gordon, who at least is spared the sight of the islands of Japan floating ominously above the city. Batman, as befits a Detective Comics hero, suspects that something isn’t quite right.
Junpei Mizusaki and Shinji Takagi pick up where Batman Ninja left off. Gorilla Grod, it appears, was not the mastermind behind the diabolical doings which grafted DC’s rogues gallery to feudal Japan. Grod’s space-time disrupter has apparently switched gears to plant the Justice League into a facsimile of contemporary Japan: one ruled over by warring yakuza clans, which are in turn lorded over by the erstwhile crime fighters. As Batman comes to terms with this development, his family team of good-doers square off in grand comics-cinematic style against the West-meets-East imaginings of impossibly powerful villains.
The filmmakers pull off this stunt with aplomb and plenty of explosions. There is never a dull moment as the plot twists along its appropriately circuitous path. Exotic delights abound, be they Green Lantern’s “death dice” tumbling their luminescent emerald destruction down upon one of the heroes, Robin being trapped inside a claw machine filled with California rolls, origami folds of space and time shifting disastrously in the arch villain’s lair, or more prosaically when evil-Aquaman tumbles to the ground after sparring with time-shifted—but thankfully, still Justice-League-y—Wonder Woman. (The subtitle options obliged me to watch the Japanese-dialogue version with “English for the Hard of Hearing”. This kept me informed of explosions and music, but regrettably did not provide the written explanation, “Massive Thud of a 20-Foot Silver Catfish Crashing to the Ground.”) Whoever may have had the power to restrain the creative team her obviously had no inclination so to do, which reminds me that never before have I seen an orbital yakuza launcher powered through a cycling gyre manifested by the world’s fastest man.
It’s all pretty nuts and a whole lot of fun. The surprises found in the interpretations of this solidly American franchise throughout the two parts (Batman Ninja / vs. the Yakuza League) are plentiful enough that I’ll go out on a limb here and suggest that both films together would fit nicely in our Apocrypha: their voracious vim, endless excesses, and infinite ingenuity make this epic adventure a mighty Boff! Bonk! and Pow! right to the brainpan in manner you don’t see over here on the boring side of the Pacific.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
SATURDAY SHORT: ADHD (2025)
The Agency for Defense against Hallucinatory Disruptions claims to be on the case, but we’re not so sure.
APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: MYTH OF MAN (2025)
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DIRECTED BY: Jamin Winans
FEATURING: Laura Rauch, Anthony Nuccio, Ian Hinton, Martin Angerbauer, Sidney Edwards
PLOT: Ella desperately seeks information which might lead her to god before she succumbs to death from a brush with an incendiary fog.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Winans’ world, characters, score, and all that work so well together as a unit that the Myth of Man feels completely natural. But—this is a dialogue-free adventure quest set in a cotton-candy dystopia featuring neat gizmos and unconventional physics whose heroine is a deaf and mute messiah seeking an interstellar artist-creator-god. This strangeness cannot be overlooked merely because it is so credibly conveyed by the filmmakers.
COMMENTS: The first thing which catches your eye is the glowing rectangle on Ella’s shoulder. It pulses a soft green color as she looks about her train car. An unkempt youth enters the carriage, his indicator flickering red. Shunned by the others—all of whom feature blinking green—Ella is struck by the tragedy, and goes over to the sickly boy. He dies soon thereafter, but not before Ella hands him an odd, humanoid figurine of wire; on his passing she clasps his hand, and feels something, nearly seeing it.
Our first brush with Myth of Man lays out much of the groundwork. Not only do we understand the odd “HUD” system in place, but plenty of other things: this is a visual world, as necessitated by the protagonist’s circumstances. Ella’s eyes wander constantly (typically accompanied by a subtle smile), as she takes in the ambient wonders of her day-to-day existence. Great machines whir in the background and foreground; cybernetic telepathy enhancements summon a dazzling animation of a Creator; black-market medicine extracts the incipient humors of death; and warning systems blare scarlet at the approach of the frequent death clouds that descend upon the metropolis.
Jamin Winans’ latest film continues his tradition of low-cost, high-impact marvels. With nods to City of Lost Children‘s technological elements, as well as the defiant triumph of humanity lurking under the surface in Brazil, he paints us a picture of a futuristic society existing under the omnipresence of cindering doom (the effects of the gas are unlike anything I’d seen before) in a society which manifests as something of a reluctant police state. Eye-popping visuals abound, and Ella’s cryptic forays into the afterlife astound with their windswept vistas of photographs and assembled flip-book recollections. The enchantment worms its way quickly into the viewer, so once the inevitable tragedy falls, the whole exercise feels not only satisfying, but rational; even though we’ve just undergone a strange and fabulous dream.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
SATURDAY SHORT: CUCO – A LOVE LETTER TO LA (2025)
A young Los Angelino buys a miniature version of himself from a vending machine and experiences Chicano-flavored hallucinations.