The screening of the new Miike Takashi film was something of a now-legendary happening at Fantastic Fest. I'll get into exactly why in a bit. Yatterman is based on a 30-some-odd year old anime series about a guy, his girlfriend, and a giant robot dog fighting a team of three bad guys who keep coming up with hare-brained schemes. It's much-beloved in Japan, though the show itself was really vapid and repetitive and saw giant robots knocking each other to bits only to be repaired in time for the next episode. There's plenty of naughty humor on display that US parents would find just as objectionable as they do the idea that Astro Boy opens with the protagonist, a young boy, dying in an industrial accident.
The clips I've found of the original Yatterman show on YouTube and various streaming sites confirms that Miike did as faithful an adaptation as possible, even including songs sung in the show at random intervals. For the first time in many massively failed attempts like Dragonball, I feel confident in saying someone has nailed a live-action anime. The actors and directors knew they were signing on for a big-budget, effects-laden farce and they sold it.
The amount of nostalgic love for this series is similarly matched on this side of the ocean by fans of Transformers who have eagerly anticipated both live-action installments of that...thing. I grew up on The Transformers and even in my youth felt like it was just a half-hour toy commercial. The TF movies take the source material very seriously, and whereas I admire the writers for trying to make it as plausible and relatable as possible, I rather wish they had taken the tack Miike's Yatterman did and lampoon the life out of it, with nary a sequel in sight.
Really, the ending sold the movie for me more than anything, and I don't consider the following reasoning of why I liked it to be spoiler material.
One of the more obtuse subtitle translations was the very phrase I'm talking about here, which is along the lines of, "put your toys away and grow up." The infantilization of young adults over the last however many years has just stunned me, and I'm part of the generation most visibly exemplifying this. It's as if in fear of growing older, people retreat to the things they clutched on to in the good old days, when there was just good or evil, none of this grey in-between garbage.
Transformers, G.I Joe, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, My Little Pony (why the hell not?), and various other 80's and 90's cartoons that re-ran ad nauseum were the backbone of Reagan-era American ideology-building for my generation. We got closer and closer to the real world, and we much preferred our cartoon fantasy worlds to the one we were facing. What I'm getting at is that unlike the American revivals of franchises like this one, Yatterman is saying "okay, the reverie is over, go make something of yourself." That's a great deal deeper than I expected this thing to go.
There are anime series that could make for brilliant, thoughtful live-action narratives, but I smell things like Cowboy Bebop and Neon Genesis Evangelion being screwed up from a mile away. The studios that have the bankrolls to make movies out of them aren't going to be willing to go to the places those stories go. They'll take Bebop and try to stretch it out to Matrix 4 through 10 and Evangelion will become some kind of franchise launching mess that'll get lost in development hell. I've been a fan of a number of these series over the years, and I feel that at this point, Yatterman is the best we'll see until studios are ready to gamble with their money and slates a bit. I'd be shocked if a US home video distributor didn't pick this up due to the rabid anime fanbase market combined with Miike completists.
So, about that once-in-a-lifetime happening...
The screening seated late and started late. That happens at festivals all the time. It turns out the Japanese studio sent over an HDCAM master tape that looked gorgeous, but lacked subtitles. After a lengthy wait while, according to one theater manager, "our guys in the booth are trying to work some magic," we were let in.
Alamo Drafthouse & Fantastic Fest programmer Zack Carlson introduced the film by apologizing for the wait and explaining what they were going to try. He explained that the solution they'd worked out was to zoom the HDCAM to the top 80% or so of the screen. On the remaining bottom piece of the screen, they would project something using a second projector: the subtitle portion of the picture from the DVD screener they had on-hand. They masked the second projector just right and were pretty sure they had them synced up perfectly. The only thing that could go wrong would be if the two copies of the film were different cuts.
Suffice to say they were the same cut and they showed perfectly in sync to a very impressed audience. Zack's last-minute ingenuity in cases like this easily assures him a retirement as an on-call film festival problem solver. He'll be worth his high price tag just like Winston "The Wolf" Wolfe in Pulp Fiction.