Zebraman 2: Attack on Zebra City

So return one must after the surprise success (in terms my reaction) from plain old Zebraman to Zebraman 2: Attack on Zebra City. 

In 2010, Ichikawa (Show Aikawa) saved the world from aliens by embracing his inner-Zebraman. Fifteen years later, he awakens, whitehaired and an amnesiac in a dystopic new Tokyo named Zebra City. At 5pm every day the Zebra Police and politicians can, for five minutes, commit whatever crimes they like without consequence, to weed out the weak from the strong. And Ichikawa is shot by them. A lot. I mean a lot. Taken to an out of zone clinic, run by Asano (Masahiro Inoue), Ichikawa starts to remember himself, only his powers are not what they were. He is white but has no zebra stripes. How then will he deal with the Zebra Queen (Riisa Naka), music star and daughter of the overlord of Zebra City, who wants to bring back the aliens for her own nefarious schemes.  

The original Zebraman, filmed six years before, had a certain simplicity to it that works very much in the film’s favour. The story of the dull everyman suddenly finding the ability to protect the world, while also finding a new family more important to him than his own, lent the film a sense standard plotting with the unusual aspect of finding himself more interested in his pupil, Asano, and relating more spiritually with Asano's mother than he did his own wife.

Zebraman 2 is a trickier affair, narratively speaking, at first being slightly hazy but intentionally so, even if the pieces fall into place in a pretty straightforward manner. The problem is that the pieces don’t always fit together as well as the first film, or rather I felt the film was just not downright bonkers enough. True the tone changes, there’s a lot of black leather and plastic here, usually worn by women: note that the Zebra Police have their own storm-trooper masked force but also a mini-skirted division; our Zebra Queen too, is all shining sexualisation. She’s a popstar so that sort of makes sense and true, returning director Takashi Miike handles these pop sequences better than you would expect most to; there’s a darkness here but it’s one of vision that is very much binary: white zebra vs dark zebra. Though arguably you can read some depth into this I think that’s probably a bit of a stretch considering the separation of good and evil is ultimately a forced activity and one that the film undermines at the end by a streak of sentimentality that never quite fits, even if when it happens and the reuniting is done with humour. 

Part of me wished for the film to have been set in a separate universe, with Ichikawa as Zebraman in a full-on Zebra World of its own creation rather than an extension of our own. That said there’s still much fun to be had with the story and, just as with the first, Miike is comfortable outside the action, when dealing with our characters, including Asano, the young boy from the first film here now as an adult (though disappointing we never understand what happens to his mother and it’s never asked). There’s also a nice parallel to the original story, as we meet Ichiba (Naoki Tanaka) who had acted in a TV version of Zebraman (set after the first film finishing) but really is just a man, no matter how he might dress.  

I suspect there will be a tranche of viewers who will prefer Zebraman 2 to the original, but I felt it tried a little too hard and become too sentimental towards the end to fall fully into place. Aikawa is again quietly very good in his role. The moment at the start of the film, where he’s putting his rubbish out, just after the end of Zebraman, surrounded by press and fans, where fame is doing him no favours, brings greater sympathy than you might expect for his quiet dignity in the face of no understanding of him as a person: adulation as hell. 

I still had fun with Zebraman 2 but I wanted it to be more... more what? Probably more everything. True, it does not try to recreate the original film and that is good, but I was hoping for a more visceral creation. Miike handles the various scenes well, as you’d expect, but it lacked spark for me and I’d have rather something a bit more hardnosed. Though those that like women in tight leather and plastic... actually the film messes with this, recognises it, laughs at it, and does not fetishise it as much as you might think based on the music video intro.