The creators of the upcoming Street Fighter movie have revealed that a surprising amount of the film is told through traditional 2D animation, one of many throwbacks to the ’90s. The Capcom and Legendary film is a period piece set in 1993, the same year Capcom released Super Street Fighter 2: The New Challengers in arcades.
Movie director and co-writer Kitao Sakurai said using sequences inspired by Japanese animation to tell parts of the story was a way to avoid being “cheesy” during key emotional moments. The film opens with an animated sequence recounting the first World Warrior tournament and the history of two great rivalries in Street Fighter lore.
The animated sequences appear almost exclusively during flashbacks, touching on Ken and Ryu’s training under their sensei, Master Gouken, played by Don Lee.
“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 the stylistic choice made sense given Street Fighter’s deep connection to anime.
“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’s team turned to Los Angeles-based Titmouse, an animation house more than 25 years old. The studio has worked on high-profile projects including 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.”
Street Fighter 2: The Animated Movie fans might notice a nod or two to that animated adaptation when the new Street Fighter movie hits theaters on Oct. 16.
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