Review: "Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie" is barely Yu-Gi-Oh!, and barely a movie

Movie of the Week #18 was a bad idea

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Sigh.

I thought this was going to be fun.

I thought this was going to be an enjoyably goofy change of pace. You all know I love Yu-Gi-Oh! I’m the guy who wrote that absolutely insane 12-part Yu-Gi-Oh! Kill Count series going page-by-page through Kazuki Takahashi’s original manga to see exactly how many people are murdered over the course of this series about teenagers playing card games (at least 326, by my rigorous calculations). I think the manga is genuinely fantastic, and in its original Japanese, the Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters anime is pretty great too (at least when it isn’t deep in the throes of increasingly ridiculous filler arcs). Heck, my online avatar is a creature I affectionately call ‘Pride Kuriboh,’ taken from an episode in one of those desperate filler stretches, the one where Battle City is interrupted so everyone can get sucked into a video game. I am, it is safe to say, a fan.

2024 is the 20^th anniversary of Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie, the series’ first theatrical feature.¹ I was so excited for this movie back then, at 11 years old when it released in August of 2004. I saw it multiple times theatrically, because I was that kind of kid, and I have a lot of nostalgia for it, though unlike other parts of the Yu-Gi-Oh! experience, I’ve never revisited the movie as an adult. But I got this very cool steelbook re-release of the Blu-ray a few weeks ago, so I threw it on the Movie of the Week schedule, thinking to myself ‘yeah, that’ll be a fun one.’

I am an idiot.

Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie is barely Yu-Gi-Oh!, it’s barely a movie, and it is irredeemably and holistically awful on every dimension. It maybe has a small amount of value as point-and-laugh diversion to enjoy with a friend and cringe at together – my brother and I enjoyed making fun of it as we watched it for this review – though even then, if your heart contains any love for Yu-Gi-Oh!, you will feel it break a little bit at the overwhelming lack of care and effort on display here.

I guess the nostalgic in me forgot that this movie was a breathtakingly cynical cash-grab, ordered – and even written! – by American licensors 4Kids, nominally produced in Japan by Studio Gallop, the creators of the TV anime, but in actuality almost entirely outsourced to South Korean subcontractors. Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie was an attempt to capitalize on the theatrical success of the early Pokémon movies, though by the time the film made it to theaters in 2004, that success had entirely waned. While the first three Pokémon films got wide theatrical runs in the US by Warner Bros., the next two (Pokémon 4Ever and Pokémon Heroes) received very limited releases from Miramax; by 2004, they were out of theaters altogether, with that year’s movie (Jirachi Wish Maker) receiving a direct-to-VHS release. Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie wound up being one of the last franchise anime films to get a wide theatrical release in the United States for many years, until the more recent streaming-era boom led to films from series like Dragon Ball, My Hero Academia, and Kimetsu no Yaiba becoming big hits once again. At the time, 4Kids had simply mis-read the environment; of course, 2004 was also the year they debuted their infamously horrible dub/hatchet-job of One Piece, which set the American popularity of that series back by a decade or more and, combined with the financial losses of Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie, rapidly accelerated 4Kids’ push towards irrelevancy and insolvency (so at least something good came out of it, I guess).

All of which is to say Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie was fighting an uphill battle even if it had been good, which it very much wasn’t. The film is, essentially, an Americanized attempt at what was already a creatively dicey genre – the anime-only spin-off movie – cynically reverse-engineered from the success of other films, primarily those early Pokémon movies. The problem is that A) those first few Pokémon films are actually pretty darn good, and harder to replicate than you might think (I did a deep dive on Mewtwo Strikes Back for my dissertation, and was surprised by just how genuinely smart and well-made it is, especially when viewed in its original Japanese), and B) Pokémon is a primarily episodic series where it’s fairly easy to come up with one-off stories for Ash and his friends. Episodes of Yu-Gi-Oh! tend to center around individual duels, but the stories are long-form and serialized, and you can’t just drop Yugi and his buddies into any given scenario the way you can for Pokémon. The Yu-Gi-Oh! movie explicitly takes place after the “Battle City” arc, which ends with Yugi’s rival/frenemy Seto Kaiba finally getting over his insecurity and inadequacies and setting aside his obsession with beating Yugi at card games; yet the film is all about Seto Kaiba being monomaniacally obsessed with defeating Yugi, as though that arc – which is referenced continuously throughout the film – never actually happened. The characters are thus completely static (and, in fact, regressive compared to their manga/TV counterparts), but unlike other anime spin-off films that work around this problem by introducing major new characters who can have meaningful development (like, for example, Mewtwo in the first Pokémon movie, or, more recently, Uta in One Piece Film Red), Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie just has the existing cast going through the motions.

Maybe that wouldn’t matter so much if the central duel between Yugi and Kaiba, which takes up most of the film’s run-time, were compelling. I am a simple man, and if the game they played was half as compelling as the 6-episode, already feature-length duel they engaged in at the end of Battle City, I would probably be satisfied; the 90s Dragon Ball Z movies certainly have no character development to speak of, but when the fights are exciting enough, they can still be plenty fun to watch. But there is a joylessness and rote, mechanical quality to the card games here: Kaiba summons his Blue Eyes, and Yugi uses his God cards, and there are a few traps and reversals, but there is no creativity or strategy to it. The best Yu-Gi-Oh! duels, like the best matches in any kind of sports anime, feel like the characters are actually playing a game, are both deeply skilled and throwing everything they have at each other; the big duel here is entirely reverse-engineered around the cards Kaiba stole from Pegasus, which are themselves reverse-engineered to directly counteract Yugi’s deck, which means Kaiba is essentially cheating, a quandary the film has no interest in engaging with.

The film also has no idea what to do with the extended cast – including ‘lil Yugi himself – so they all get tossed in the Millennium Puzzle to run around aimlessly whenever the film finds itself needing to pad for time. It all climaxes in a scene where Yugi limply tosses a knife at a gemstone to help defeat the big bad, which is, admittedly, one of the most hilariously pathetic moments of triumph I’ve ever seen in an anime. Speaking of said big bad, Anubis is the only original character the film does introduce; he doesn’t actually show up until the last 20 minutes, has no characterization whatsoever apart from ‘wanting to destroy the world,’ and is, as noted, dispatched with amusingly clumsy ease. It’s an additional let-down for a series that usually has highly motivated and complex antagonists (Pegasus, Marik, Bakura, Kaiba himself depending on his mood, etc.).

So the story and characters don’t work at all, and provide none of the pleasure Yu-Gi-Oh! usually offers in its manga or anime forms; that just leaves us with the animation itself, which you would at least expect to be a decent step-up considering the theatrical pedigree. That’s the usual saving grace of anime-only spin-off movies, after all; even when they have little else to offer, the Pokémon or Dragon Ball or One Piece films usually look quite nice, and give the animators more room to spread their wings.

Alas, those hopes are dashed as well, like so many Kuribohs standing valiantly in the path of a Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon’s terrifying attack. This film looks like actual garbage.

Does Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie feature the worst Japanese animation I’ve ever seen? Yes, probably – although it is so wholly outsourced that I wonder if it even qualifies (as the end credits reveal, most of the work was done in South Korea). Some amount of outsourcing is expected in anime productions, of course, but when it’s the entire movie, and the end result looks this spectacularly awful, it’s just another sign of how little anyone involved cared. One can simply feel, watching these terribly off-model representations of the characters barely emote, that the film was not animated by artists with real experience drawing these figures; and the storyboarding is unforgivably lazy, often having characters plant on a mark and move their lips otherwise expressionlessly, something you can maybe get away with on a weekly TV show, but which feels insultingly dull on a theatrical canvas. The Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters anime is no visual masterpiece, and certainly exhibits many of the limitations of its era of standard-definition digital anime. But it rarely looked this bad, this soulless, and for something literally called Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie – “movie” implying it’s going to show you things that couldn’t be achieved on television – that’s the final nail in the coffin.

Well, almost final – there are a lot of nails to work with here.

I think something the delightful (if, in some respects, dated) Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series obscured for us, with its intentionally comical, ridiculous dialogue, is just how much the actual dialogue in the real, non-parodic 4Kids dub sounds like a bad joke. Try as Little Kuriboh might, it’s not actually possible to write lines sillier than these:

Pegasus: “That’s it. No more white wine spritzers before bedtime for me.”

Kaiba: “It looks like your unstoppable god cards…have been stopped!!!”

Anubis: “It is no longer time to duel. Now it is time to die!”

The dialogue here is so spectacularly bad it either produces a powerful cringe, or a big belly laugh, and sometimes both. It is frequently so overwritten that characters wind up having whole conversations with themselves before anybody else gets to reply – like Kaiba summoning his Blue Eyes Ultimate Dragon and declaring “If you think he’s scary now, just wait until he attacks. In fact, don’t wait … Neutron Blast!” – and there are a baffling number of overt references to old American movies and cartoons: Kaiba ends his duel with Pegasus with a “That’s all folks!” kiss-off, Tristan does a Scooby-Doo “Zoinks!,” and in addition to a thudding “We’re not in Kansas anymore” quotation, Joey does two separate Marlon Brando impressions, from The Godfather and On the Waterfront, films that were, respectively, 32 and 50 years old at the time of this film’s release.

The Japanese-language version of the film, which has never been officially released in America (but can be found via torrents), is quite a bit better, less for the 11 minutes of additional footage than for the presence of the top-tier Japanese cast. The English version of Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie is worthless, but no film featuring the dulcet tones of Kenjiro Tsuda, in the role he was born to play as Seto Kaiba, can be all bad – and the great musical score from the TV series, by Shinkichi Mitsumune, certainly helps. The film still looks bad, and the basic story (with its myriad problems) is largely unchanged, but it all goes down easier when the audio layer isn’t assaulting one’s ears like hot knives.

So that’s Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie. What did we learn today, from this soul-crushing exercise? What takeaways can we have from examining this particular work of ‘cinema?’ Do we better understand our relationship to nostalgia, or the way capitalism can take something good and fun and feed it through the corporate meat-grinder until it comes out the other end wearing the skin-suit of the original work but bearing none of the soul we loved on the inside?

I don’t know. You tell me. I feel embarrassed having done this.

NEXT WEEK: We take a jarring left-turn from Yu-Gi-Oh! and talk instead about the final film from the great Stanley Kubrick, EYES WIDE SHUT!

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1. Yes, there is the 1999 Toei film, based on the 1998 series where Kaiba had green hair, but while that was a theatrical release, it’s also a 30-minute short, so it doesn’t count as a feature.