Review of Gyo: Tokyo Fish Attack

I'm surprised many reviewers are even positive about this movie. This has got to be one of the worst movies I've seen. It's incompetent but fails to even relish in its awfulness. In the end, this movie has left me with the question, "Why?"

Let me preface this by mentioning that I have read the manga and am a big fan of Junji Ito's work.

The story:

• The introduction is short and lacking. Introducing the main character, Kaori, and her two friends takes about two minutes. A few more minutes in we're already headfirst into the action. Considering a total running time of 70 minutes, I would overlook this if it weren't for my next point.
• The movie makes terrible use of its time. Many scenes drag on unnecessarily and there are many scenes that simply aren't relevant to the movie at all, while some interesting scenes from the manga are omitted in their favour and many others that are supposed to be key points are cut short. As a result, much of the original detail is lost and certain scenes feel disconnected from the story. In the same vein, the movie makes changes to the original story that just don't add anything to it.
• The movie has an overall even pace and is neither slow nor fast, I'll give it that. It does a pretty decent job of switching between calm and action scenes, never really giving too much or too little of either. That didn't stop me from pausing about halfway in to watch The Voice out of sheer boredom, though.
• Unnecessary motivational speeches and monologues. I'm pretty sure there's like five of them, if not more, and the movie is only 70 minutes long. We get it, you can't wanna give up. One monologue would have sufficed.
• Awful, awkward and unnecessary sexualisation. I'm not even gonna explain this one, just look at the octopus scene.
• The lacking visuals and characters and the watered down story cause it to completely fail as a horror. If anything, it's just gross. But whereas many seriously intended bad movies result in unintended comedy, Gyo, sadly, fails in this as well. It's too badly written to be taken seriously, but it's still too sensical to be funny.

The characters:

• All the characters are underdeveloped. They're boring and flat. None of them have a real personality, most can be summarised in one personality trait. None of the characters are really likeable. I couldn't get myself to care for any of them.
• All the characters except for Kaori have vague, nonsensical or seemingly no motivation to do anything. They assume unlogical things and say things in awkward ways.
• Characters are added and introduced unnecessarily and either fade out or are killed off without even serving a plot point. The biggest let-down was the fact that Tadashi's scientist uncle, who serves a major purpose in the original, was stripped of most of his relevance, but they added him to the movie anyway.
• The main character is swapped for no reason. In the manga, Tadashi is the main character and Kaori a side character with basically the same story arc as Tadashi in the movie has. In the movie it's swapped.

The visual and sound design:

• The visual style is bland and flat, sometimes even bad, and generally inconsistent. The line-art is often awkward or crudely drawn, resulting in unintended hilarity. The colour palette is boring and matter-of-factly, and doesn't add anything to the story. There is hardly any detail.
• The animation is incredibly inconsistent, sporadically jumping from mediocre to bad and lazy to completely excessive. The animation of subtle body language is downright awful. The quality level is about the same as you'd expect from a short-running low-budget anime series, which shouldn't be the case for a movie.
• The CGI is just bad and looks completely out of place in a 2D animated movie. I get that they used it because it's a lot easier and cheaper to animate than regular 2D animation, especially with the quantity of all the fish, but the end result just looks awful.
• The movie completely fails to capture Junji Ito's iconic style, the atmosphere hardly holds up to the creepy and disgusting atmosphere from the manga.
• The sound design is mediocre. The voice acting is generally okay. The sound effects are tolerable at best, albeit sparse. The music is what you'd expect from a low-budget drama anime and fails to capture the creepiness that the movie intends, often even ruining the atmosphere of a scene; I feel it would have done better even without the music.

Going in my expectations were low but Gyo still managed to shatter them. The movie barely even tries and fails to live up to a cult classic.

If you're looking for a creepy, absurd story, just skip this movie and read the manga, or do yourself a favour and watch Sharknado.