'Yu-Gi-Oh!' isn't very animated

By Chuck Graham
Tucson Citizen

YU-GI-OH! Rated PG One Star (Poor) If you think America is sharply polarized over the two candidates running for president of the United States, that's nothing compared with the polarizing effect of "Yu-Gi-Oh!" The kids who play the game will love this full-length animated feature based on the TV series. Everyone else will hate it. Starring Dan Green. Directed by Hatsuki Tsuji. Warner Bros. 89 minutes.

If you think America is sharply polarized over the two candidates running for president of the United States, that's nothing compared with the polarizing effect of "Yu-Gi-Oh!"

The kids who play the game, on which the film is based, will love this full-length animated feature, which also has its own TV series and comic books. Everyone else will hate it. Not even the "Pokemon" movies divided the country into such cleanly bifurcated parts.

We just had to use "bifurcated" in a sentence because our favorite moment in "Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie" is when one character uses the phrase "imponderable conundrum." Despite this example, the filmmakers chose not to use their film as a tool for expanding the vocabulary of children. The rest of the script depends on the same 250-word vocabulary the rest of commercial television uses.

Since any thinking person attending this movie — parents, grandparents, kindly neighbors — will have plenty of time to think while waiting for "Yu-Gi-Oh!" to end, they might enjoy ruminating on the metaphors, hidden meanings and questions of symbolism in this supposedly "harmless" movie.

Here's an obvious example. Why do the filmmakers spend so much time explaining the game, when the only people interested already know how to play it?

This one's a little harder. If Yu-Gi-Oh is a Japanese invention, why do all the characters look European-American? One character, Maximillion Pegasus, even has mannerisms and a haircut reminiscent of Michael Jackson. Every person we see definitely has that same cute little, perky Michael Jackson nose.

As for the plot, well it seems to involve a couple of super players in the heavens and a couple of hot players on Earth who keep threatening the lives of the teen cast.

There's also kindly Grandpa Muto, a retired Egyptologist who runs a little game store selling Yu-Gi-Oh cards. He also taught one of the characters, Yugi, the most powerful Yu-Gi-Oh moves, and provided some killer cards to play with.

The filmmakers try to make the game of Yu-Gi-Oh on the screen look as manly as possible, but they aren't fooling anyone. As for the actual movie on the screen, watching is as scary as imagining the day when movie theaters don't show anything but television programs. On that giant screen with those massive THX sound systems — even the "Happy Days" gang would look like gods in blue jeans on Mount Olympus.

In "Yu-Gi-Oh!" there's also an off-screen Don Pardo voice describing the battle strengths of each card before it is played — just like those off-screen voices that describe the prizes on those daytime TV game shows.

Looking on the bright side, "Yu-Gi-Oh!" might inspire some young players in the audience to grow up to be Egyptologists like Grandpa Muto. It could happen.

Rated PG for mock violence.