Zebraman (2004)

A mild-mannered school teacher gets little love or respect from his pupils or his own family, and spends his free time making a replica costume of Zebraman, hero of a Tokusatsu show that aired for just 7 episodes when he was a boy. When he discovers that a new pupil at the school is a Zebraman fan, part of a small but loyal fandom that exists online decades after the show last aired, he is inspired to don the costume and patrol the streets - where a series of strange attacks have been taking place.

ZEBRAMAN was something of a change of pace for Takashi Miike when it came out, a fun and relatively commercial genre fantasy that delivers a fine balance of satire, silliness and sincere love for the Tokusatsu genre, with a pitch perfect performance by Sho Aikawa (as always). It could even be seen as a kid's film, though it has a vein of dark, deadpan humour that would likely be lost on them. Depending on the subtitle translation there's some swearing and general crudity, too.

The production values were quite high for the time, with a filmic look and some solid special effects. I like the way Miike uses/used CGI, he never aimed for realism but leaned in to the potential to create something unique with the technology.

At this point Takashi Miike's films had tended to be more about style than substance, more about mood and moments than narrative. ZEBRAMAN bucks that trend with a strong script that is surprisingly smart underneath the cheese and silliness, with thoughtful characterisation.

In some ways ZEBRAMAN might be considered "Miike-lite", lacking the kind of shocking or outrageous moments that he is best known for, but it is still very much a Miike film at heart - easily seen now when contrasted with the blandly commercial fare that has constituted most of the director's work in the past decade. It's arguably a good entry point to the director's oeuvre, at least for somebody who isn't accustomed to the more extreme side(s) of Japanese cinema.

It's worth noting that there seem to be two radically different subtitle translations out there, the Tokyo Shock DVD subs are very good but the others (not sure where they're from) are severely dumbed down and rather sanitised, even changing the story to some extent. If you haven't encountered pubic lice in the first 5 minutes you've got the latter, and would be well advised to seek out the former.