8 Man After

8 Man is not just another anime with a totally stupid title, but also one of those many anime productions that, for some incomprehensible reason, has been hailed as a cult classic by many fans of Japanese factory cartoons. It is only the slightly better drawings (compared to the large mass of the bad anime film genre) that do not push the film down to 0 stars. Or 1 Star, because you can't give no star at imdb.

The Perfect Collection brings to one "film" all the episodes of this story, and I was glad to find this VHS when I did. I grew up with the original "8th" Man TV series in black and white, during the same TV era as Astro Boy, Ultra Man and continued with Speed Racer. Even though those productions were somewhat raw, the underlying themes and cultural sensibilities spoke to me at the gut level.

This is not a "modernized" version of the original. It stands alone as the retelling of the story by new writers and artists, making their choices and giving it their style.

No character is flat. None of them is without some sort of flaw or inconsistency. This is story and character development at its finest, even with the production flaws when compared to more modern efforts. On my copy of the video tape, the major flaw was in the audio tracks, but it's still watchable and enjoyable. The poor audio is the only reason I took my rating down a peg from a 9 out of 10.

I do have one complaint: the character of 8 man seriously pre-dates Robocop, and while it is speculative to say that Robocop was directly based on 8 man, it is totally wrong to say that 8 man was based on Robocop. Please, do your research before making such claims.

One thing that impresses me about the Japanese culture is that it really does first class job of creating its own culture. When you go to Japan, you can see the interest people has on intellectual subjects just from the sheer number of book stores you see there. Also go into any stationary store and you'll note that they have the best stationaries, and writing equipments in the world. This is a sharp contrast from any other Asian countries, and maybe the chief reason why Japan is the only preeminent first world country in Asia.

Eighthman, or Eitoman is one example of that culture. Mind you, the original comic appeared in the early '60s. First robot that I know of that has plastic skin that can be formed to disguise himself to anyone he chooses. A robot that can run at supersonic speed. This is idea that really ahead of its time as no other robot since then had a feature like this.

In the original comic, Eitoman was a peaceful character. He would not maim a weaker human being. But this Eitoman is different. He doesn't mind hurting his human opponents.

I don't know how much the original author Kazumasa Hirai was involved with this movie, but the style is very different from the original Eitoman.

I'm not for this version of the Eitoman character very much, although I'm very fond of the original Eitoman.

I hope that the Japanese will keep the Eitoman franchise alive. It's one of a kind first class robot genre action adventure. Keep this fantastic robot's stories coming.

This film is an excellent action film where you can turn your brain off and just watch as a human turned cyborg goes after a crimelord called the puppetmaster, who uses cyborgs of his own to control the city. Probably the most dimensional character is the washed up football player who has cyborg implants put in that just cause him and his son more trouble.

Some of the English dubbed dialogue was a bit messed up, as it is in many foreign films, but other than that the voices were coherent and the story was as good as an action film could get.

I'm sure I'd give it a much higher rating if the english dubbing wasn't so terrible. I want to hear the original language of any foreign movie with subtitles. I'm an extremely fast reader so subtitles don't bother me, in fact I welcome them. If you absolutely have to dub at least get people who can act. I know this will offend people but I don't care.