The creators of the new Street Fighter movie have been sitting on a secret: A surprising amount of the film is told through traditional 2D animation, one of the film's many throwbacks to the '90s. Capcom and Legendary's new Street Fighter movie is a period piece, if that hasn't been clear from the trailers; it's set in 1993, the same year Capcom released Super Street Fighter 2: The New Challengers in arcades. For a movie that is steeped in '90s sights and sounds, the use of sequences inspired by Japanese animation to tell parts of Street Fighter's story makes sense.
It's a way to avoid being "cheesy" during key emotional moments, according to Street Fighter director and co-writer Kitao Sakurai. The new Street Fighter movie uses animation almost exclusively during flashbacks. These sequences touch on Ken and Ryu's training under their sensei, Master Gouken (played by Don Lee).
Street Fighter actually opens with an animated sequence that recounts the first World Warrior tournament and the history of two great rivalries in Street Fighter lore. Speaking with Sakurai, I asked why the filmmaker decided to insert 2D animation into the otherwise live-action production. "When we were writing it, we knew that we needed to understand the sort of emotional backstories of Ken and Ryu and what led them to this place, because that's really the heart of the story," Sakurai explained.
"Traditionally, if you're gonna do these flashback sequences, you need to make a choice whether to [either] de-age the actors or to hire child actors, and with the tone that we were going for, none of that felt right." Sakurai said that the stylistic choice made perfect sense for the Street Fighter franchise. "We were just thinking, OK, well, Street Fighter has this incredible connection to anime, like very deeply so," he said, "so why don't we go for a weird, bold choice to animate these backstory sequences and make them these incredible pops of energy rather than something that might be cheesy or take you out of the movie." Sakurai and team turned to a familiar name in 2D animation, Los Angeles-based Titmouse. The animation house is more than 25 years old and has worked on high-profile projects like Critical Role's The Legend of Vox Machina, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and Star Trek: Lower Decks.
Titmouse recently animated the video game adaptation Golden Axe and previously worked with Street Fighter on an animation for the franchise's collaboration with Overwatch. "The decision to go with Titmouse was, for me — in kind of both honoring the ‘90s of it all and the movies that I loved growing up, like Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and Street Fighter 2: The Animated Movie," Sakurai explained. "I wanted to do it in that same style and with the same techniques.
Titmouse they're very gung-ho on traditional hand-drawn animation. So I'm very proud of the fact that every single frame of animation in this movie is drawn by hand by a person. It's completely organic and real and it just makes it special.
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