[Kamen Rider Die]

GRIDMAN UNIVERSE



It is amazing to me that, after years of watching Kamen Rider, and seeing what felt like a million movies where they cross over different expressions of the franchise to muddled if not diminished results, that an animated movie I literally didn’t even know existed a week ago would somehow be the best inter-franchise toku movie I’ve maybe ever seen.

It starts with how smartly this film took what SSSS.Gridman was best at – talking about how we learn about ourselves through toku, and in turn how we reveal ourselves through our toku fandom – and weds it to what SSSS.Dynazenon was best at – talking about how we only become our best selves by connecting with other people, and the compounding of those connections is how we find happiness. There’s a threat in this story that starts mundane and becomes metaphorical, that can only be resolved by making as many friends as possible. This movie uses Gridman to talk about Dynazenon, and then Dynazenon to talk about Gridman. It’s perfect, that engine. Best goddamn way to use these two casts.

Just… that moment when Yuta has to go outside of Gridman Universe (the story) to see the scope of it, to understand that it’s a story Gridman’s telling about them, made up of the story they’ve been telling about Gridman… I love stuff like that? I loved the way SSSS.Gridman foregrounded toku fandom, and how we tell stories to make sense of our world, so you know I’m in the bag for a movie where the connective tissue is the cast of Gridman writing a play about Gridman. (I mean, it’s no TV series adaptation of their adventures, but these are just kids! They got no budget!) It’s all them processing their shit through Gridman – Rikka, mostly, but Yuta as well – and it’s the literal text of this story. We are big screen now, and it’s time to push the subtext into the biggest, boldest conception of the themes and messages of these shows.

Which, y’know, helps to have the cast of Dynazenon here, too! While their job here is a little more Unfinished Business amongst their own cast, owing to the messiness of their show’s conclusion versus the cleanliness of SSSS.Gridman’s, their presence is the power of their show, brought to bear on the dilemma of collapsing narratives and chaotic guilt. “It’s fun with more people around,” as a main theme. Gridman’s power is that he’s a story that the kids can tell about him; this movie just adds more voices, more perspectives, more ideas to the mix. Gridman’s power-up at the end is basically that there’s no story you can’t tell with toku, no such thing as tonal dissonance, and everyone here proves that.

Also: Holy shit this thing was just a blast to watch! The new designs for old characters were uniformly great (Gauma/Rex and Chise S-Tier, everyone else really good), the action was continuously appealing, the various weirdo sequences were jaw-dropping (Yuta outside the Gridman Universe! THE LIVE-ACTION PARTS!!!), every good song showed up somewhere, the jokes were reliably perfect (Chise losing it at Access Flash killed me), and I genuinely could’ve watched this thing for another two hours. I cannot believe how good this movie was.

I was honestly sort of trepidatious about watching this? SSSS.Gridman’s ending was so tight it was practically hermetically-sealed, while SSSS.Dynazenon’s ending was elliptical and open to interpretation – I sort of didn’t want to see a continuation of either one, for completely opposite reasons. And yet, this movie not only worked in its own right as a thrilling adventure that beautifully wedded two different shows’ messages in a way where they felt like one cohesive statement, but it honored where each of those shows ended by shining them up just a little bit with some sweet grace notes: Yomogi and Yume are doing well, and he brings her to meet his family; Gauma and the Princess reconnect sweetly -slash- in the most ridiculous way possible, but just for her to tell him to stop living in the past; Akane helps her friends, the way they helped her once; and Rikka and Yuta finally tell each other how they feel. It’s not massively evolving or undoing or explaining or inverting anything from either show (you could seriously skip this movie and you’d be fine on both shows), but instead it feels like a charming and inessential epilogue – little moments that reflect their successes, nothing more. It’s what these shows did best: finding the mundane in the extraordinary, to find the extraordinary in the mundane.

This was such a treat to get to watch. What a gift this was to fans of both shows, and toku in general.