This Martial Arts Classic May Be the Best Attempt at Live-Action Anime We Ever See -

Live-action anime adaptations are one of those golden tickets that mainstream Hollywood is still trying to crack. Netflix has certainly taken a swing or two at adapting huge properties, resulting in the success of One Piece and the not-so-much success of Avatar: The Last Airbender. Some of the earlier big studio efforts were hollow disappointments, like Ghost in the Shell, and others were tragically unheralded masterpieces, like Speed Racer. The transition from animated elements to live-action is already difficult enough as it is (just ask Disney), let alone when it’s an animation philosophy from another culture and one prone to pushing the envelope with plausible reality. Shaolin Soccer, by renowned goofball auteur Stephen Chow, is one of the few films to truly nail the feel of anime in live-action, which is all the more ironic because it’s an entirely original film that only he could have made.

What Is ‘Shaolin Soccer’ About?

Iron Head (Wong) balancing a ball on his head in Shaolin Soccer — Image via Miramax

Golden Leg (Man-Tat Ng) was once a great soccer player who is betrayed and crippled by his teammate, Hung (Yin Tse), never to play the game again. 20 years later, Golden Leg is the destitute and bitter punching bag for Hung, who’s now the mustache-twirling owner of the top soccer team in Hong Kong. Leg knows how low he’s fallen, and has no hope of anything changing, until he meets Mighty Steel Sing (Chow), a man who believes that kung-fu can change the world. Leg is impressed with his raw physical power, and Sing desperately needs to promote his kung-fu teaching business, so the two decide to team up. They go on to form a soccer team that will go all the way to the championship for fame and fortune, along with sweet revenge against Hung and his team. To do so, they’ll need to recruit a ragtag team of social rejects who all used to train under Sing at his now-failing academy, none of whom are aware of how much power still lies dormant in their competitive hearts.

Stephen Chow Uses Just the Right Amount of Silliness

Shaolin Soccer admittedly adheres pretty closely to the sports movie cliché formula, but the joy of the film comes from Stephen Chow’s Looney Tunes-indebted direction. Anybody who’s seen other films of his, like Kung Fu Hustle, knows that he has a gift for stretching gags and personalities to silly degrees while still keeping a firm handle on the verisimilitude of his characters. Anime is often known for externalizing the internal qualities of characters in ways that are hard to imagine people doing in real life, but Chow makes it work. No matter how silly they look—for example: women players with braids and French mustaches, a goalie who dresses and acts like Bruce Lee—or how relatively outlandish their behavior, the characters feel plausible in the world that he’s created. Other adaptations frequently stumble when they try to lean into the more outlandish parts of anime but are often too half-hearted or go way too far, leaving their characters looking and feeling like amateur cringe cosplayers. Chow treats his silliness with conviction and respect, owning the logic of sports anime that he’s lovingly recreating, like how the rival top team is literally called “Team Evil” and they only wear black uniforms and are pumped up with magical purple steroid juice. He ensures that since you can believe and understand each character’s eccentricities, you can buy it when he takes it one step further by going full Super Saiyan with the sports scenes.

‘Shaolin Soccer’ Thrives Where Others Stumble

Where Shaolin Soccer truly goes for broke is in its depiction of how kung-fu mastery turns into a superpower, where all the players have the abilities of benders, with no need for any further explanation. In Stephen Chow’s world, knowing kung-fu means you can push cars across the street, make a ball defy gravity in how it curves in the air, and kick a ball so hard it bursts into flames and turns into a tiger. The casual dismissal of physics in favor of selling the impact of physical conflict is key to anime’s unique hype, and Chow’s use of the camera and early-2000s CGI generally excels at shaking and rattling your senses to leave you in a sort of sugar high. If you can forgive that much of the CGI chicanery gives off Matrix Reloaded vibes or that Chow is more in love with absurd wireworks than Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon ever dreamed of, then Shaolin Soccer is simply too much fun to not be smiling all the way through it. Even for the non-kung-fu-related scenes, the way he has the camera moving to the left or right of a character as they talk feels so evocative of the motion lines and dynamic framing that anime loves to put its characters in.

Custom image of Gordon Liu in Heroes of the East

After ‘Enter the Dragon,’ This Overlooked 1978 Kung Fu Gem Should Be Your Next Watch

The underrated movie combines Chinese and Japanese martial arts in a respectful manner.

While other adaptations have been commendable in their attempts at recreating the zoom-tastic forcefulness of anime mise-en-scène (with only Speed Racer coming anywhere close to really getting it to a similar level), many come off cluttered and clunky in their attempt at corralling disparate elements into one cohesive whole. Shaolin Soccer has all of its elements in such sharp alignments that it’s practically bouncing off the wall with its zaniness, making this an ideal gateway drug for people who haven’t seen a Stephen Chow film or for people who still think it’s impossible to do a live-action anime film well.