Children take center stage but aren\u2019t the real stars of \u201cUltraman: Rising,\u201d a new animated superhero fantasy about absent parents, lost kids, and other Pixar-entrenched stock types. The movie follows (but predictably differs) from \u201cShin Ultraman,\u201d the most recent high-profile project featuring the 58-year-old alien hero. \u201cShin Ultraman\u201d was more of a retro-modern redo of the original \u201cUltraman\u201d series and its serial format. \u201cUltraman: Rising\u201d aims squarely for a family-friendly mass audience, one that\u2019s probably less concerned with the character\u2019s previous incarnations. That\u2019s not a major or concerning difference, though it\u2019s sometimes frustratingly apparent given that so much of this new movie\u2019s formulaic daddy issues drama recycles decades of pseudo-adult animated movie clich\u00e9s.<\/p>\n
This new Ultraman\u2019s a brooding hero who must grow up to be truly great, which in this case means getting over his domestic hangups\u2014angry with his dad and missing his mom\u2014and also taking care of a giant baby dragon monster. The dragon\u2019s cute and instantly amusing, partly because it doesn\u2019t speak or have a character beyond its wild mood swings and heart-tugging character design. This new version of Ultraman is also not as charming, especially not when he\u2019s a regular person with a family and other mundane concerns. That was never exactly Ultraman\u2019s strong suit, though he still looks good when wrestling with monsters, robots, and other sci-fi menaces. <\/p>\n
In \u201cUltraman: Rising,\u201d baseball prodigy Ken Sato (Christopher Sean) serves as Ultraman\u2019s alias. Ken tries and mostly fails to juggle both a major league career and a kaiju-battling calling. Ken\u2019s arrogance defines him for a while, though that and a few other qualities seem only to matter whenever the plot needs an extra push. Our hero avoids his doting father, Professor Sato (Gedde Watanabe), because he blames his dad for not protecting his mom, who goes missing after an early scene. In that establishing flashback, Sato tells Ken that the key to being a hero is finding balance. So Ken takes it upon himself, with some help from his robot minder Mina (Tamlyn Tomita), to care for Emi, a baby kaiju<\/em>\u00a0discovered shortly after a battle with the dragon Gigantron. This puts Ken at odds with the stern Dr. Onda (Keone Young), the generically militaristic leader of the Kaiju Defense Force. <\/p>\n It takes a village to raise Ken, who rejects all of his father\u2019s calls and doesn\u2019t know how to respond to nosy but well-meaning journalist Ami Wakita (Julia Harriman), a single mom of a young, Ultraman-obsessed daughter. Ami puts Ken on the right path, but Mina does most of the work of caring for both Emi and Ken. Dad inevitably swoops in later, but not until it\u2019s time for him to rescue Ultraman from the burden of being a psychologically complex character. <\/p>\n By contrast, Emi is mostly defined by her attachment to Ultraman, whom she assumes is her mother, and her own monstrous bodily fluids, including slimy puke, fiery gas, and gooey \u201cpoopies.\u201d These jokes seem to have written themselves, and so do most of the movie\u2019s contrived plot twists and unseasoned dialogue. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Children take center stage but aren\u2019t the real stars of \u201cUltraman: Rising,\u201d a new animated superhero fantasy about absent parents, lost kids, and other Pixar-entrenched stock types. The movie follows (but predictably differs) from \u201cShin Ultraman,\u201d the most recent high-profile project featuring the 58-year-old alien hero. \u201cShin Ultraman\u201d was more of a retro-modern redo of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[36,34,32,46,51],"class_list":["post-1232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-action-movies","tag-action","tag-animation","tag-family","tag-netflix","tag-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1232"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1232\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}