Anime Review: "Kaiju Girls Black"

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 the fuck 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. But in all honesty, still was pretty fucking lost.

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 or furry, if you will) series in which various Kaiju (from Ultraman? I think, based off reading some wiki articles and watching a YouTube explanation vid, but don't @ me if that's wrong) 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 merch, so I’m not one to really judge things out of the gate. Transformers, a series made to sell action figures, has now had 6 feature films, (all of which were bad, again, don't @ me), 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 this, 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 an absolute dumpster fire, and for me to light that shit on fire, but you’d be surprised, because this wasn’t a bad film. It lacked much substance, and so will this review. It certainly wasn’t ground breaking entertainment; 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 - high school kids (and all the rotten anime-girl figure buying otaku as well), I think it says a lot considering that I enjoyed it, considering I'm well out of those age demographics (though I suppose I am a rotten 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.

You can watch it now, streaming on Hidive. Unfortunately, the original anime television series (which turns out to be done very different stylistically, and in short format), is licensed by Crunchyroll. So hopefully you have subs to both of them.