“Ultraman: Rising” is what the old-time studio bosses used to call “an audience picture”–meaning you get a lot more out of it if you see it with an audience. Especially the audience for which it was designed: in this case, young children who like watching baby creatures act like misbehaving baby humans, and adults who game for a story that celebrates both the wonderful and terrible aspects.
Of course, the big problem here is that Netflix, the film’s releasing studio, has made it logistically difficult to watch with an audience by releasing it only on a small number of screens and only for a week—just a little more than the minimum theatrical exposure required for it to be considered for the Academy Awards. More on that in a bit.
Co-directed by Shannon Tingle and John Aoshima (seasoned animators who worked on “Kubo and the Two Strings“), it’s a movie that jumps straight into its premise and forces viewers to catch up and infer their way through any plot confusion. Professor Sato (Gedde Watanabe), the original Ultraman, defends humanity against rampaging kaiju until he disappears while fighting the dragon Gigantron. His wife The story flashes forward 20 years as the professor’s son Kenji “Ken” Sato, a professional baseball player, impulsively decides to relocate from an American team in San Francisco to a team in Tokyo. Turns out Ken has inherited the Ultraman duties from his father, who’s a non-presence in Ken’s life even though he’s the reason Ken took on the Kaiju-battling job.
Ken defeats Gigantron but, in the process, comes into possession of one of Gigantron’s eggs, and it’s here that the film reveals its early Pixar heart. Ken is an arrogant, selfish, narcissistic person (for psychologically explicable reasons that make you not hate him). Like his father before him, he doesn’t understand the concept of “balance” in one’s life. Baseball and being Ultraman are all he’s got room for.
The movie’s middle section is in the vein of “Mr. Mom” or “Raising Arizona” or some other slapstick comedy where adults get a crash course in parenting, but with monsters and robots added. Baby kaiju does the same things that all babies do. She poops, she cries, she throws up, she drools, she falls down and breaks things, she gets into all kinds of trouble. She doesn’t know her own strength or her own weaknesses. And she turns Ken’s life upside-down and inside out. Ken starts messing up at work (i.e., playing baseball) because of sleep deprivation. He can’t say why he’s so exhausted without blowing his cover as Ultraman.