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Cutey Honey Flash: The Movie
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Title Info
- type: movie
- grade: flawed
- people: Go-Nagai
- made: unknown
- Review created: Recently, but I didn't record the date.
- mod: none
This one ends up as a victim of its own internal conflict. The origin is a pervy Go Nagai take on the magical girl theme. This product tried to continue the popularity of that series while moving closer to being a magical girl show. And you really have to wonder why they bothered. The story is a typical super-powered fight-em-up over an ancient relic. In this case an ancient chrysalis containing a living butterfly that will lead the way to an ancient treasure. On one side is cutey honey, and various others dragged into the story, while on the other are some of the strangest female insectoid monsters i've ever seen. In the middle is the professor who found the chrysalis, still trying to recover from the tragedy involved in that incident.
And given that, let the battle commence. One is the battle between the various characters, the other to determine the nature of the film. The heroine, who it is assumed you know from the TV series, has the power to change into various `forms' with special skills and one tough sword fighting version. The pervy transform sequences, suprisingly, are still there albeit a bit toned down and the outfits (one per form) are still fairly revealing (especially topless jungle honey). On top of this are the magical tools and special attacks, but these versions are actually used to chop the enemy into bits, in order to keep the action level up. Thus the uncertainty, because the magical girl stuff is fairly lame, the character interaction too shallow to meet true shoujo requirements and the action not sufficiently interesting for the teen babes and action fan. This combines with the fairly simple and predictable story to present a very average experience. Still, this is often a problem with Magical girl films, balancing action and character, so perhaps the TV series is better... but my hopes are fairly low.
Certainly the animation is nothing special. The movie was letterboxed so perhaps it has had a cinematic release, but the quality feels much like an older TV series. Simple character and color in the drawing and economy in the action scenes lead to wondering about the budget. The silly monster designs (lolita-crawler? yech) and bad magical attacks further reduce from the effect. The final battle is just strange, with an unexciting finale and some scenes that make no sense unless you have information not available in the movie. Voice acting was fairly un-subtle for the most part and the music relied heavily on repetition of the (very dodgy) title song. The phrase `she has the nicest butt' in a magical girl intro song makes you realise that something has gone wrong somewhere.
None of the sites I source had a review for this movie.
Words by Andrew Shelton, Web by Ticti, Last Compile: Wed Aug 5 12:39:16 WST 2009