Abril Martinez

So, I am not any sort of long-standing fan of Ultraman so I went into this movie pretty blind (after seeing a YouTube video of how much if a parent Ken ended up being lol gotta love people making fun of their favorite characters) and oh. My. Gosh. I loved it. Kenji was such an annoying personality at first, because he was so smug!! I lowkey hated him, but in a fun way after I realized how much of a front it was for his character. I also liked how flawed he was. It's not often we get smacked in the face with prideful characters; the mainstream thing is to make them likable, y'know? I liked the exaggerated proportions of all the character designs, though theo g necks got a bit ridiculous after a while. But the characters are clearly designed to look Asian, even if the style is very exaggerated, and they pulled it off so well!! It added to Kenji's sharpness. I loved seeing him grin, he always looks dangerous when he smiles in interviews or when he's angry. You can really see that sense of anger and fury at his childhood has been engrained into him as a person. The baby was also well designed, in part because I'm the movie she's the only one with realistic facial and body proportions (though her head is a bit big but whatever lol not a big deal). She's so cute! Watching Kenji figure out how to treat her was funny because of how bad he is at it; his character was well done, infuriating but not to the point he's a terrible person. His hubris is entertaining. He switches up a bit quickly with his dad, but that's probably due to the time skip. The movie does great at showing his struggle of balancing ultraman, baseball (which is not a very common day-identity in superhero stories!!) and being a parent. Though I'm surprised he didn't have to give up baseball in the end, it was a bit unrealistic but I really don't mind it. The animation was beautiful and breathtaking. Some sound effe ts were missing, imo, but the way the animation has this air of painted over it is just... AHHH I love it. I'm always a fan of new animation styles. There was so much effort put into it, I can tell. And I'm someone who usually dislikes 3D animation because often times people get lazy with it, but this was great! Anyway, my favorite character was Kenji, this movie rocks, and I'm glad there was 2 hours of content. I look forward to finding out if they make a sequel. Gosh. I HOPE they make a sequel.