5 Great Anime Fights

In no particular order…

Street Figher II: The Animated Movie: Chun-li vs Vega

This film was not not made to showcase the game’s plot, and that was a good thing. The entire movie seemed to be planned and timed to show you fights between your favorite Street Fighter characters more than to show you every plot hole Capcom has ever devised in order to do what they did with this classic fighter. The entire film is basically moved not by plot and not by character development but who was going to fight who next. And that was how it should have been.

There were some surprising fights to be had here, most notably Ryu vs Fei Long (a shockingly awesome matchup), but it was the grudge matches everyone wanted to see. Quite possibly to the most anticipated fight since the game’s release in 1991 was Chun-li vs Vega and boy, this movie did not disappoint.

The obvious fan service aside, this fight shared it’s raw and somewhat earthy approach to no-holds barred melee. Running up a wall, jumping into some rafters and punching a man in the face isn’t what you’d call realistic but the entire bout had some ounce of believability to it. This is exactly why everyone, especially Vega himself, is shocked out of their minds when tiny Chun-li lifts a couch over her head and throws it across the room.

I know girls who thought that Chun-li was awesome after witnessing this feat alone.

Naruto: Gaara vs Rock Lee

The Naruto series is no longer about stealthy group tactics and finesse. Instead, Naruto has adopted the Dragonball Z principle: if you can’t level a forest or create the dirt-equivelent of a nuclear bomb (I wish I was joking) then you’re basically nobody. Most saw this coming when 12 year-olds were re-arranging arenas with their superhuman powers but fools like me remained hopeful that the only thing that seperated the men from the boys was experience and cleverness.

Surprisingly, however, it’s one of these showcases of ridiuclous power that really set itself apart from the other battles in the series. That showcase was the physics-defying fight between Gaara of the Sand and Rock Lee.

The fight basically forced you to appreciate Rock Lee, who up until that point had been nothing but a retarded hand-to-hand specialist with feakishly enormous eyebrows and and a love of green spandex. Going into the fight it was made quite clear that Rock Lee stood no chance against Gaara, a character whom the series made sure you hated quite a lot by then because of his various displays of dickishness (like encasing people in sand and making their defenseless bodies explode). This fight made you root for the underdog, and before you knew it you actually kind of liked Rock Lee. Considering what you had to work with before this battle, that’s a great feat all by itself. And like most anime, Naruto managed to drag this fight out forever, filling it with highs and lows and ultimately causing you to private hope that Rock Lee somehow wind out in the end with sheer tenacity or an act of god.

But he still loses. Aww!

Black Lagoon: The Black Lagoon vs Hind Assault Helicopter

Black Lagoon is a series best described as a mash-up of stereotypes and cliches from both Japanese and American film. The violence, the gunplay, the unnecessary profanity, it all works together to shout, “Hey! Look how awesome I am!”. And while we may have allowed ourselves to partake in these brilliantly animated cliches now and again there’s one scene in here that pretty much forces you to draw comparisons to epically insane movies like Die Hard, and that’s where a torpedo boat successfully one-shots an assault helicopter.

It’s probably one of the most recent examples of a “WTF moment” in anime history. The series doesn’t bother telling you that the main characters are going to drive a boat onto a makeshift ramp in order to eject it’s normally aquatic ordinance into the face of an insane mercenary piloting an assault helicopter. It just sort of does it. Then it shouts “I fucked you!” in your face and lets you try to cope with what you’ve just seen.

Ninja Scroll: Jubei vs Gema

There really aren’t many ways to measure how awesome this fight was. Before you ever got to this point in the film you’d already seen a man literally fight from the shadows, a woman with snakes in her vag, and a blind swordsman who probably could have kicked the crap out of the film’s male lead if he hadn’t been rudely interrupted sex-deprived female lead. So when you finally get here your expectations are high and if you’re a sensible pessimist you’re likely not counting on seeing anything that can top a snake slithering out of a woman’s vag.

Then Jubei unleashes a flurry of rage-soaked head butts, reducing Gemma’s face to a puffy, blood-soaked crater. Holy shit!

Cowboy Bebop: Spike vs Vicious

Bebop was one of those anime series that oozed cool from every oriface and somehow made leaking orifaces look cool, too. With a soundtrack that still beats the tar out of 90% of every other anime ever made and a fascinating character-driven plot Cowboy Bebop redefined how cool anime could possibly be. It seemed to come as no surprise to anyone that the ending was quite possibly the greatest we’ve ever seen. And it just so happens a bad ass fight gets us there.

After pretty much making an entire sky scraper full of merciless syndicate killers his bitch, Spike finally faces off against his former comrade-turned-bane of his existence psychopath named Vicious. The fight is nasty but brief, punctuated by a moment where either man ends up with his enemy’s weapon of choice. Fans who paid attention know exactly what was running through their heads before they executed a move we’d seen many times before but never so appropriately: they politely swap weapons and calmly deliver a mortal blow to one another. It’s so cool that even the syndicate killers Spike failed to shoot or explod on the way up are impressed and let him deliver the film’s final epic line rather than shoot him for all the horrible shit they just had to live through.

~ by KT Samurai on May 20, 2008.