Kaijuu Girls Kuro: Ultra Kaijuu Gijinka Keikaku

I picked this movie out, at random, basically on a whim, when I was browsing Hidive’s film library. I had zero knowledge of it, or expectations going in. After about ten minutes in I was truly baffled, and went off to figure out what in the world I’d gotten myself into.

15 minutes later, after taking down some notes on a nearby post-it, I had a rough idea of things.

Kaiju Girls Black is a feature film anime sequel to the Kaiju Girls anime series, which I had not watched prior to screening this film, while I played Minecraft; now I understood, at least in part, why ... I was so confused. This is the kind of movie that it helps to have gone into with some base level of connection to the franchise. Basically a movie made for the fans.

In short, Kaiju Girls is a Gijinka (think anthropomorphic) series in which various Kaiju (from Ultraman? I think, based off reading some wiki articles and watching a YouTube explanation vid) take the form of cute, kawaii, moe anime girls (most likely in an effort to sell merch).

Now, lots of anime is only made to promote LN’s or Blu-Rays, or sell Toys, so I’m not one to really judge things out of the gate. Transformers, a series made to sell toys, has now had 6 feature films, which have, according to a quick google search, about $4.8 billion in total box office. Plus they probably did also sell a lot of toys too, but I’ll not get into that. What I’m saying is, I’m not going to wholly discount this movie because it may or may not have been just a toy commercial.

With that being said… I bet you expect me to now say the movie was absolute garbage and trash it, but you’d be surprised, because this wasn’t that bad a film. It lacked much substance, and so will this review. It certainly wasn’t amazing; but I got a few giggles, and occasional chortle, out of it, the animation was clean, it was delightfully self-aware, the voice acting was well done, and the characters were pretty decent to look at in terms of originality (and cuteness). Given that this was probably being marketed at middle school – high school kids (and all the otaku as well), I think that says a lot considering I’m well out of those demographics (though I suppose I am an otaku).

So I guess what I’m trying to say is that this movie succeeded in making me curious enough about the franchise that I’m now putting the original anime into my ptw list with all the other stuff… there’s quite a bit in there now, but I’m gradually getting through it.