Tiger & Bunny Movie 1: The Beginning

Pfff. Another recap from Sunrise. They sure want their money well... NO, wait. This is all new and.. and different? And better? What the shit!?

Tiger & Bunny The Beginning is like Tiger & Bunny tv series in the beginning, except this movie isn't lost. The problem with the start of the tv series was that Sunrise had not decided what to do with the series when they started with it. It was a mess, ugly and basically one rough diamond. What Tiget & Bunny The Beginning movie does, is polish that diamond, and it polishes it good.

The story starts off the same, the idea is ... the same as in the fist 2 episodes. We have some scenes from those and the same plot, but, in this time, made into a solid packet with neat pacing and rythm, and all in all, better execution. While this is recapturing in a way, I would say these are around 10% similar to each others. The movie is well worth the watch, offering more new material than fans of the series would expect, and actually matching the MAL's describtion of an "alternative version" of the tv series. Without raping the series like is a general habit, but instead making it all better than it was. Yes.

As a person who end up loving the original tv series, I recommend this movie to all the other fans, but not only that. I recommend this to people who didn't care about Tiger & Bunny's start, too, because this is just so damn much better.

1st Film from the Tiger & Bunny property
2012 Anime produced by Sunrise and licensed by Viz Media
Review from my POV (w/ personal biases)
I've seen the TV series and will include comparisons between Film and Series.

PROS:
+ Its storytelling is much more cohesive, which gives a more movie-like feel.
+ There's a good balance of screen time for the all other heroes (with the exception of one)
+ They use that extra screen time to further explain some of the heroes and their respective abilities (although short, there's a significant scene involving Rock Bison)
+ Last 3rd of the movie was all new material.
+ The design of the new villain ... looked pretty cool

CONS:
- The new villain felt 2-Dimensional and was only being used as an obstacle for the heroes to conquer.
- Origami Cyclone is probably the only one that didn't get enough screen time and yet he's the most different from his "TV" counterpart. (why the hell did he get so emo?)
- Kotetsu is still too much of a pushover and Barnaby is still a jackass at first.

Final Note:
New material and a more balanced plot might pull viewers of the 2011 Anime Series back into the city of Stern Bild while also attracting new viewers for simply its wonderful premise. I mean, who wouldn't want to watch a Super Hero Game show?

Recommends to:
Fans of the show
Those looking for a drama involving Super heroes.

This is a much better version of the first two episodes of the series, but it's polish on a turd. By cramming all the backstory elements into the beginning—where they should have been all along—it managed to set the series up better in 1 hour than the series itself managed to in 10.

It also paused to answer questions that should have been answered in the show itself. "Why doesn't Sky High fly to solve all their problems? If flying is his power, why does he have a jetpack?" (His power is just floating.) "When did Barnaby train to become a hero if nobody had ever ... heard of him?" (He actually went to the Hero Academy that we saw in the show and was Steel Samurai's classmate.) "Why did the villain with the crazy eyes suddenly decide to attack during the show when he'd been stewing for decades?" (He saw Barnaby on TV going purely for points and not helping people.) "What the fuck even is Rock Bison's power?" (He can harden his skin and have super strength. This is completely obscured by his costume in the show and here, so they put a little moment in where he used it on Kotetsu.)

It also showed the heroes being less than co-workers for once. In the show, they're basically always shown as friends and we are informed that they are not actually friends. Here, they are much more explicit about being rivals only.

And the resolution of the original story in this is a much more direct reason for Barnaby to start softening towards Kotetsu than anything the show offered.

This all should have been in the show. But it wasn't. And an hour and a half is only enough time to fix the first two episodes, so knowledge of where this whole thing is going kind of puts a damper on it. Especially since these characters don't have what little development they got during the show yet, and most of them were dysfunctional at this point in the story.

But that leads to the worst part. Although they gave each hero at least one moment where they showed a personality. Fire Emblem's moments (plural) were gay panic sexual harassment. I remember that early on he appeared to be a bit of a gay (perhaps trans-spectrum) stereotype, but I watched the show dubbed and he gets SO MANY great moments where he's just a character who happens to be gay, including one or two that accentuate him being particularly BLACK and gay and perhaps trans. I don't know if those were changed for the dub, but there is none of that energy in this movie. It's a character assassination.

The last thing I'll say is that the Hundred Power is literally the worst power in the show and it's just absurd that they even let Kotetsu be a hero, let alone Barnaby. Every other character has access to their powers permanently, and those powers are way stronger. The joke characters from the Superhero Academy episode during the series had better powers. It only lasts 5 minutes and takes 1 hour* to recharge? Fuck outta here.

*or whatever suits the plot