BLACKJACK: THE MOVIE

Doctor Tezuka has not left the building



Review by: M.H. "Dr. Feelgood" Torringjan

Length: 200 minutes
Genre: medical, drama
Watched: Entire movie, subbed

Anyone who's heard of anime over the past forty or so years is very familiar with one of the most famous names in anime, or at least his works. Dr. Osamu Tezuka, creator of series such as Astroboy, was an innovator in the field of manga and anime, as evidenced by his nickname, the God of Manga. Many of our parents remember watching Astroboy on the television in black and white, while we may have seen the new Astroboy series, as well as the video game and numerous attempts to merchandise it. Unfortunately, he went the way that many manga artists go, and passed away in 1989. This did not prove to be too fatal a career move for him, however, as his projects have continued to enjoy popularity. In 1996, one of these projects, Blackjack, was made into a feature length movie. When I saw who it was by, I decided I'd enlighten myself and watch it. Overall, this wasn't a bad decision.

Plot summary: At the 2000 Olympics, an unusually large number of world records are broken, all within hours of each other. Oddly enough, instead of blaming some sort of steroid problem that probably rubbed off on them from those darned baseball players, the media immediately christens the new record-holders superhumans and proceeds to make them into media darlings. When all of the superhumans begin to fall victim to a mysteeeeerious illness, an equally mysteeeeerious woman calls Dr. Blackjack to try to entice him to help cure them. Doctor Blackjack is an unlicensed freelance doctor who charges exorbitant fees to perform miraculous surgeries on the cases he wants to take. He reluctantly takes the case, but soon finds out that there may be more to this case than his employer is letting on.

Artwork: The artwork is extremely clean and sharp, and actually has a more modern and stylized look to it than Doc Tezuka's original (what I've seen of it, anyway). The character designs are very characteristic of Tezuka, especially the character of Pinoko, which looks very much like a female Astroboy. She's kind of disturbing, to be totally honest. The depictions of medical procedures is very crisp, and seems very real. The only issue I have is with the movie to occasionally do a split-screen of the same scene in all three or four sections of the screen, just at a slightly different angle or at a slightly closer frame than the other images. Really, if we can't see it in the other ones, there's something wrong with us. And personally, I don't care to see the news reporter's mole or shiny white teeth.

Music: The soundtrack of the movie is mostly nonexistent, save the opening song, the closing song, and a song during the climax. Overall, these tracks, which I can only describe as J-blues, fit the mood of the movie well. This is the sort of thing you'd expect to hear in an old-timey detective movie, but it works very well here. Since there's only three songs, though, I doubt you could make a playlist out of the soundtrack. Otherwise, the silence fits the movie as well as any track you could put to it.

Characters: Start out with Dr. BlackJack, the gruff-looking, enigmatic star of the show. If you never thought that a badass could wear scrubs thanks to those pusses on ER and Chicago Hope, think again. The renegade doctor has skills to back up his crazy fees, and he genuinely cares for his patients, as well as takes his profession very seriously (although, apparently not the need to get licensed). His concerns for medical ethics stems from that same professionalism, as well. Pinoko is the traditional child character of the series, although she shows a certain sense of maturity as she is left home alone often while Blackjack performs his operations and is taken along as an assistant the rest of the time. The major downside is that she looks way too much like Astroboy for my comfort level. Joe Carol Brain is the woman who contacts Blackjack insistently about hiring him to aid the research effort, and has some ties to the Pharmaceutical company, Brain Industries (imagine, having ties to a company with your name on it...).

Plot: If you've ever seen the movie (or read the book) "The Andromeda Strain," then the plot will seem somewhat familiar. This particular version of the story, however, is somewhat more believable than "alien germs try to kill us all" was (not to say that Andromeda Strain was bad, I enjoyed both versions of that very much). The only complaint that I have is that the plot twists were extremely predictable, even to someone who has the attention span of a gerbil on crack, and sometimes the plot points were extremely convenient. Despite its predictability and convenience, the plot was well-carried out and pretty darned interesting. Another drawback was when it started getting all preachy near the end about environmentalism (which was kind of out of the blue in a medical movie). That makes the 512th anime series to remind us of that (yes, I've been counting).

CHICKS!! There's only one real chick that shows up very often, Joe Carol Brain, and she isn't much of a chick. Although I will admit that she's extremely ambitious and devoted to her cause, she seems a career woman that you'd only see for an hour a day and would smell like hospital for most of the relationship. And even if you go for the smell of antiseptic and death, I'm just not seeing it. It's a shame that there's no chicks on which I can waste the perfectly good "hit on sixteen, hold on seventeen" crack.

Overall: Despite the fact that the manga's creator was dead before this film went into production (or maybe he's just living with John Lennon, Elvis, and Tupac Shakur out in the middle of the Australian outback; we'll never know), the idea is interesting, the plot was well-done, and the film was pretty enough to stand with many of the productions of that day. Although the problems with the plot's execution and the lack of soundtrack were drawbacks to this film, the film was generally pretty good. You might want to check it out, even though it isn't anywhere near one of the top ten films ever made.

In a nutshell:
+ Sharp, modern animation
+ Blackjack is a badass
+ Story's by the God of Manga
+/- Sparse soundtrack
- Kind of precictable plot
- Could have done without the preaching
Final grade: 7.5/10



On a final note, the images for this review were used without permission from Anime Planet's Anime Recommendations. Visit their site, since they've got lots of interesting stuff over there!

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