Street Fighter II the Movie (Group TAC)

Next up I will talk about the Street Fighter movie...

NO, NOT THIS ONE. (I still like it though.)

This one.

Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie is a 1994 animated film adaptation based on the game series of the same name (Y'know… Street Fighter II, Street Fighter II: Champion Edition, Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighters, Super Street Fighter II - The New Challengers, Super Street Fighter II Turbo…), written by Kenichi Imai, directed by Gisaburo Sugii and animated by Group TAC, fight sequences in the film were choreographed by K-1 founder Kazuyoshi Ishii and professional fighter Andy Hug (Badass!).

The film focuses on the antagonist Bison, leader of the terrorist organization Shadowlaw as he desperately searches for the greatest fighter on the planet (AKA, Ryu), when he is not able to, he instead sets his attention on Ken Masters, Ryu's friend. Meanwhile, Major Guile and Chun-Li  team up in hopes of tracking down and apprehending Bison and stopping him once and for all. The movie serves as a basis for future Street Fighter games, such as back stories and character designs as well as character relations.

Group TAC was a Japanese animation and computer graphics studio founded in 1968 and located in Shibuya, Tokyo. They have worked on movies, videos, TV shows and commercials, contributing not only for the animation process, but also for planning, production, sound effects and so on. There were especially known for Manga Nippon Mukashibanashi and Touch. Sadly in September 2012, Group TAC filed for bankruptcy, their remaining animation projects were taken over by OLC, Inc. and XEBEC.

To me, this was one of the most amazingly done cel-shaded animations at the time, of course what was most outstanding about the film was its action sequences, that were realistically portrayed in comparison to other Street Fighter animations, and action anime in general (The 1998 Tekken anime also fell short when it came to that aspect), it just goes to show you, if you want to create something amazing, you will definitely have to get some proper references and help to do so.

Sadly I can't find any videos showing the behind the scenes look into this film, but I did manage to find one for Street Fighter Alpha: The Animation, the other Street Fighter animated film they had worked on in 1999:

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Up till today, this film is still considered as one of the best video game to movie adaptations, and it's not surprising really since it remained amazingly faithful to the source material (Which was still lacking a lot at the time) and actually went through the effort in animating some proper, badass fight scenes (Which was a rarity for japanese animations). It also had some surprisingly adequate english dubbing done for it, and in my opinion, a fantastic western soundtrack that was a lot better than the original music used.

Bless my parents for getting this laser disc for my siblings and I back when I had the attention span of a gnat...