'Cutie Honey' is one of the sillier cutesy, unfocused, exuberant, action/fantasy anime for grade school girls. Usually this is TV show material but here it is a love-conquers-all themed feature length film...and yeah, there's the minor detail that it is a live action movie. But don't think that this is comparable to the Wachowskis' 'Speed Racer' which adapted anime to live action with an overall western understanding of aesthetics and with certain anime-touches only giving it an anime-like FEEL...believe this statement to be true or not now, if you see 'Cutie Honey' you will immediately realize through juxtaposition that it is true. 'Cutie Honey' in contrast is conceived EXACTLY like an anime in all its unapologetic hyperkinetic, fetishistic, shallow silliness, adding nothing to it and subtracting nothing from it. There is no adapting going on whatsoever, it obviously was storyboarded as if it was to become an anime (the behind-the-scenes feature proves this assumption to be true) and then they had to figure out how to realize it in front of a camera.Composition, mis-en-scene, framing, pacing, acting, music, you name it, there's nothing that distinguishes it from an anime, except of course that by default this has more details than the drawings of an anime. Seeing such an anime played out for real automatically multiplies the inherent silliness making it difficult to bear for probably any adult without the proper fetishes, this especially applies to the acting considering that those characters all have terrible mood swings. All things considered it's all achieved with the aid of relatively little CGI (and animation) which in a way makes it seem like it's ignoring the artificiality of its visuals while 'Speed Racer' is celebrating and actively using it.It would have been a dreadful experience if only...yes, if only I wouldn't have been so fascinated by the uniqueness of having the visual language of anime and all those well-worn anime conventions transferred into a different medium (basically). The sheer wrongness of the whole endeavor is enough of a reason to be amazed by it and to be fascinated by the experiment that it is. It's interesting to see in practice that what works for anime doesn't work for live action movies, what's stylish in one often comes across as cheap in the other. And so it isn't a particularity successful or enjoyable movie but at least for me it was a fascinating one, akin to the experiment of a certain shot-for-shot remake of 'Psycho'.

This film does not need any deep serious in depth analysis.....it is what it is....a weekend popcorn munching, cola swigging, sugary sweet sucking blast of power ranger silliness, glittery costumes, over the top posing villains and a sugary sweet, naive but extremely sexy heroine running around in underwear and skimpy costumes kicking the bad peoples behinds.....all as it should be. Cutie Honey really is a Cutie Honey and for this reason alone males will want watch this film and the females will be hitting them over the head with the nearest non lethal object to try to keep them more than six inches from the screen in case they go blind.............oh by the way.....did i forget to say i totally enjoyed the film. settle down and prepare for some action packed silliness from beginning to the end !! dryadcrow

Saw Cutie Honey at the Leeds Film Festival on Saturday... not sure if James Maruyuma had been paying attention until the last half of the movie, because people breaking into song for no particular reason and "metaphysical" (actually psycho-sociological but nevermind) thoughts about love and opening your heart to people are there throughout. The film is 95% very very very silly, with a couple of curveball moments where things get a bit more serious, then right back into silliness and fluffiness again. The film is shot and edited in a very anime-esque way, with extensive use of CG to enhance the stylisation and "cartooniness" that's already quite abundant from the costumes and overacting. In fact, so much effort has been spent making the live action film feel like an animated film that one sometimes wonders why they didn't just animate it ;) The answer is, of course, the super-cuteness of Sato Eriko (though I was actually more partial to Ichikawa Mikako's super-repressed detective character, make of it what you will).Overall, very very camp and silly fun with a fluffy message about the power of love n' stuff. Not the stuff classics are made of, but worth seeing if the opportunity arises.

I have to go with the other posters. This was the most amazing and revolutionary action-adventure I have seen since "Road Warrior" way back when! Yes, maybe I sound like a nut after saying that, but the energy from the Fantasia Festival debut of this movie has convinced that I am not insane after all. "Cutie Honey" (the most unlikely action-film title I ever heard or could imagine) deserves to go down in film history as one of the greatest action-adventures of all time. For instance it's 10X better than the Lethal Weapon series, and Quentin Tarantino only wishes he had the talent to create a film like this (rather than steal it).Then again, since "Hollywood" denigrates films like this? I am not sure what its fate will be. But if it got a US release it could revolutionize the US film industry like nothing people have seen. In the meantime I only hope anyone reading this has a chance to see this amazing film.It's that F'N good.,