Cyborg 009

The action scene are done well for it’s time and it’s entertaining to see how the Cyborg are overcoming whatever the organization is throwing at them. All of the cyborgs have their own unique abilities and they show it off how they are working with each other.

For the voice actors, they have done a decent job. The voices matches the character design and their personality. Even if some of them look like stereotypes, I’m surprised that they brought a nice voice for each of everyone where they could had easily done it the other way around.

I have no problem with how the character looks like, ... for the most part. But the design on their villain is too silly for me. I mean this is the guy who supposed to bring war to the world right? With those things being his actual mouth?

Besides that, the animation can suffers sometimes with repeated shots and sequences. This is troublesome since was on the big screen and not in the smaller screen, but I let these thing pass since it was made in the 60’s, where even Disney was doing it.

It follows the source material well, even if they changed Joe from being juvenile to a race car driver since he would look better I guess. But this movie is more of an adaptation than a retelling, which I think the movie suffers the most of. The story seems to be cover the first chapters of the first arc and the last chapters of the second arc. Which weird in the narrative when you consider 2/3 of the movie introducing the characters and escaping Black Ghost, just to have a time-skip and a final fight at the climax.

Even if we spend most of the movie introducing these characters, we know more about the cyborgs power than their personality. If you go through the movie, it also seems that this movie is more aimed at the leader of the group rather than the group itself, which can be a disappointment for those who wanted to see a chemistry with all the characters.

The movie is good for those who wants to skip the first two story arcs of the manga, but for those who already have, this movie will not give you anything new. Especially that first tv series started two years afterwards.

But I can say that the opening was nice :>

Go and see it if you are into some cheesy 60’s Cyborg action.

I actually didn't expect it, but I like the show! The whole "superpower group but each one has a specific power" is kind of nice to see even for a show / movie this old. I mean, some of it was quite cliche of course... well from that time anyways, (the main guy is a handsome, clean-cut bishie, the main girl is obviously the main girl because she's either the only one or the only pretty one, and you have the comic relief character, who in this form, is a tiny dude who can turn into anything).
Overall, if I was from that time, I think ... I would be obsessed with it. It's like an old Japanese version of the Avengers.

- the regression caused by Tezuka's Astroboy.

With the American theatrical failures of "The little prince and the eight headed dragon" and "Gulliver's Space Adventures", TOEI animation decided to abandon their typical fare of imitating western animation styles and adapting folktales. Bolstered by the success and glut of weekly animated tv shows featuring Cyborgs and Robots pioneered by Osamu Tezuka's Mushi Productions with Astro Boy and its myriad imitations, TOEI adapted a similar Shounen Manga about a cyborg troupe - Cyborg 009 as a feature film.

The reduced budget as a result of financial pressures on the studio is clearly visible in this movie. The animation is ... pretty lackluster and more reminiscent of budget constrained factory assembly techniques that the fluid and pastel like animation TOEI had come to master in the 60s. The narrative is genuinely schlocky and the characters are all paper thin. Everything serves only as foil for the constant stream of combat and violence, the scale and scope of which strains credulity at moments.

A lot of scenes were identically lifted off or poor imitations of some of TOEI's own excellent animated work. The dramatic and eery animated masterpiece of a battle scene between Susanoo and the Yamato no Orochi is reskinned into a fight by cyborg 009 against a horde of Brontosaurus styled robots, only much worse in quality and almost no complex choreography.

Japanese animation was going through a period of great change at this moment, as questions arose over the profitability of the theatrical model as the bread and butter of the animation industry. Mushi Production's success in TV with Astro Boy showed a much cheaper and more profitable alternative - the paint by numbers villain of the week model that eschewed narrative cohesion for a dedicated fanbase and character identification. The industry would be forever changed by this move, not just creatively but also in terms of economic prospects for Japanese Animators, who've ended up with slave like wages and overworked to this day.