Shannon Tindle
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Add to that sleekly designed visuals, well-choreographed, easy-to-follow set pieces, and inspirations lightly drawn from anime, manga, and cultural imports (e.g., Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim series), and the result will, if nothing else, create an entirely new set of fans eager to take a deep dive into Ultraman's cross-media iterations.
Fans of flicks like Pacific Rim (2013) may discover a new obsession but anyone suffering from superhero fatigue can probably pass.
Hints of manga influences from Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira to the E…
Imagine How to Train Your Dragon (2010) but none of the characters have much personality or relatability. There’s little reason to like them or care about their predicaments or journeys. It’s mostly just spectacle carried by the conveyor belt of a cookie cutter plot.
But writer-director Shannon Tindle and co-writer Marc Haimes, who wrote the script for Kubo and the Two Strings, do their best to enhance it: Not only do they add a brand new subplot involving the baseball career of Kenji “Ken” Sato aka Ultraman (voiced by Christopher Sean), but they introduce a real emotional arc about the hero’s traumatic past, as well as an extremely cute fatherhood narrative where Ultraman is suddenly forced to raise an orphaned child.
Full disclosure: this critic has no prior exposure to Japan’s Ultraman franchise (which encompasses the full spectrum of entertainment, including television, film, toys, video games, and comic books) but found director Shannon Tindle’s (making his feature-length narrative debut after working in the art department for several animated movies, including gems such as Kubo and the Two Strings and trash like The Emoji Movie, proving that real talent will always inevitably emerge from a dumpster fire) and co-director John Aoshima’s (also with a background in the art department, even working on some of the same projects as his collaborator) Ultraman: Rising to be not only a thoroughly enjoyable gateway into this animated sci-fi world of gargantuan Iron-Man colored aliens neutralizing Kaiju monsters but also a thoughtful and emotional take on the sacrifices parents make.