Pictures Gallery For Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Movie

Yûgiô: Gekijô-ban (2004)

Also known as "Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Movie"
Overall Score: 1 out of 10

Everything else was just practice!

Starring: Dan Green, Eric Stuart, Scottie ray, wayne Grayson, Frank Frankson, Tara Jayne, Madeleine Blaustein, Darren Dunstan, Ben Baron, Mike Pollock, Andrew Paull, Ed Paul, Lisa Ortiz, Marc Thompson, Sebastian Arcelus, Amy Birnbaum

Director: Hatsuki Tsuji

Running Time: 90 minutes

US MPAA rating: PG
UK BBFC rating: PG
Action, Adventure, Animation, Family, Fantasy

If a feature length movie based on a kids' trading card game sounds a bit on the rubbish side, it's with very good reason. After all, you wouldn't get adults going to see 'Gin Rummy: The Movie' or 'The Legend of Whist', would you? But kiddy-winks, as we all know, are a different beast entirely. For one thing, they tend to be much shorter than the rest of us. And, for another, they like complete and utter bunkum like this.

Like the 'Pokemon' tales, 'Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Movie' is basically a feature-length advertisement for the latest Japanese toy fad, only it makes even less effort to justify its existence with a token storyline. Shabbily-animated and lacking in even the slightest degree of depth, it centres around tweeny gamesmaster Yugi Moto (voiced by Dan Green). Thanks to being sporadically possessed by the ghost of an old Pharoah, and also the fact that he owns the best cards, he's the undisputed king of the playground game (which basically involves using different cards to summon up various daft monsters to do battle with each other).

Kaiba, Yugi's biggest rival, can't stand the guy, so he seeks the help of the ancient Egyptian spirt Anubis to even things up a little. The catch? Anubis, being a bit of a sod, wants to destroy the entire planet. Or something like that.

The vast majority of the film is taken up by the endless back-and-forth duel between Yugi and Kaiba, each one calling up monster after monster in what amounts more to a battle of gits than a battle of wits. What really makes it painful is that each of these drawn-out fight scenes are all talk and practically no action, comprising little more than our two rivals repeatedly spouting "my card does this" and "my card does that". So pointlessly-elaborate does it all seem, I half-suspected them to be just making up the rules as they went along.

It all seems to take itself remarkably seriously, and you get the usual stomach-full of taped-on morals about the values of friendship and all-round do-goodery. But really folks, I ask you, how seriously can you take a children's cartoon which talks about "polymerisation" and includes ridiculous lines like "we're close to postulating a new stratagem"? Not that I'm against teaching the young 'uns some rudimentary science - but asking them (or, more likely, their parents) to pay for the privilege of having a 90-minute commercial rammed down their throats is another matter entirely.

It's Got: More mummies than an open day at a nursery.

It Needs: To try telling an actual story, instead of desperately trying to flog us its merchandise.

Alternatives: Any of the 'Pokemon' or 'Digimon' movies.

Summary: Something sphinx in this cynical, unimaginative and crudely-made attempt at selling as many kiddies' games as possible. Overall Score: 1 out of 10