Tekken: The Motion Picture

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Promotional art for Tekken depicting Kazuya, Jun, Heihachi, Nina, Anna, Michelle and Lee.
Promotional art for Tekken depicting Kazuya, Jun, Heihachi, Nina, Anna, Michelle and Lee.

Tekken is a 1997 anime motion picture, based on Namco's best-selling video game franchise Tekken. The story is an amalgamation of the first two games in the series, focusing on the first King of Iron Fist Tournament while giving a prominent role to Jun Kazama, who was introduced in Tekken 2. The film was released on VHS and DVD in North America by ADV Films and has occasionally been aired on cable television in the U.S.

Contents

[edit] Plot outline

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The film begins with a flashback featuring Kazuya Mishima, a child studying martial arts under his father. He meets a young girl named Jun Kazama, who is crying after seeing a bobcat kill a defenseless rabbit. When Kazuya offers to go fight the bobcat, Kazuya's father, Heihachi Mishima, appears and drags Kazuya away. To make his son prove his strength, Heihachi throws Kazuya into a deep ravine, but not before ripping a locket containing a picture of Kazuya's mother from his son's neck and tossing it aside.

Jun, who tried and failed to locate Kazuya, finds the locket and keeps it with her into adulthood.

On the day of the tournament, Kazuya and Jun fight their way through the other competitors on the island. Kazuya intends to fight his way to the center and kill his father, while Jun races to stop him. After catching up to him, Jun begins to make another appeal when they're attacked by monsters released by Lee, but they fight them off. Kazuya then continues on his way and quickly beats Lee in direct combat before squaring off against Heihachi.

The fighting is brutal, but Kazuya, who formed a pact with a devil to survive his fall into the ravine as a child, uses his demonic power to defeat his father. Before he can finish him off, however, Jun steps in one last time, and convinces Kazuya that he's going about things the wrong way. Kazuya is able to calm his spirit, and he takes mercy on his father. In the meantime, Lee, convinced that the Mishima Zaibatsu should be destroyed if he isn't allowed to inherit it, activates a self-destruct mechanism on the island. Kazuya, Jun and most of the other competitors are able to escape by ship, while Heihachi himself flees the island by air.

In a brief epilogue, Jun is by herself among some trees when her young son, Jin Kazama, who bears a strong resemblance to Kazuya, runs up to her, and they walk off together.

The other major subplot, which runs concurrently with the rest of the film, features Lei Wulong working as Jun's partner, who investigates the weapons lab located below the surface of the island with the help of the combat android Jack-2, who wants to cure a little girl of her illness. A few other fighters from the games, most notably Bruce Irvin, Baek Doo San, Michelle Chang, Anna Williams, Nina Williams, Prototype Jack, Roger, and Ganryu play small parts in the story. Most of the other game characters like King, Armor King, Yoshimitsu, Marshall Law, and Paul Phoenix appear in background cameos with no direct influence on the story.

[edit] Cast

[edit] English

[edit] Japanese

[edit] Notable differences from game to film

The Tekken motion picture takes several liberties with its source material. Along with combining events from the first two games in the series, it also rewrites important events.

  • Jun and Kazuya meet as children. There is no evidence of this in the games.
  • Anna Williams is given a rather gruesome death, but she remains alive and well in the fifth game in the series.
  • Jack-2 is stated as the prototype while Jack (Tekken)#Prototype Jack are shown as the final version.
  • There are a pack of Alexs instead of one. These don't wear the blue boxing gloves.

For these reasons and others, the film is generally seen as a poor adaptation of the video games, but is still considerably more accurate than many American live-action game adaptations such as Super Mario Bros. and Street Fighter, which paid considerably less attention to the source material.

Aside from its quality as an adaptation, Tekken is generally seen as a cult film or guilty pleasure to its relatively small group of supporters. Some fans also use the film to help explain how Kazuya and Jun conceived their son Jin, who would go on to become the lead protagonist of the video games in Tekken 3, since the video games have remained rather ambiguous on those details. Because of the number of liberties that the film takes with the storyline, the film cannot be considered completely canon, but the possibility that Jun and Kazuya's storyline as depicted in the film may share parallels with the video games remains open.

Spoilers end here.

[edit] Reaction

Tekken: The Motion Picture has been hailed and panned by fans and critics alike. The root of the movie's popularity stems from the action and the fighting, which fans consider to be outstandingly realistic. But the designs and English voices for some of the characters have led others to dislike the film, especially for Kazuya's striking resemblance to Dragon Ball Z's Vegeta.

[edit] Tekken (2007 film)

Little has been revealed about the new Tekken movie. What is known is that it is set later on than in the Anime film. Charles Stone III is reported to be directing.

[edit] Trivia

  • Kuma make a short cameo on a tree.
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