Teen Titans: Trouble in Tokyo 2006

[6.3/10] The Teen Titans television show essentially had two modes. One was a dramatic, if irreverent, story of young adults facing great challenges, both in the form of fearsome foes and the growing pains of coming into your own. The other was a wacky, over-the-top comedy whose tether to reality was thinner than an overstretched Elongated Man.

I loved the former and loathed the latter. While the show itself had some growing pains, it eventually proved able to address issues like abuse, agency, and of course friendship with a mix of excitement and poignancy. But the show’s “play it for the cheap seats” sense of humor never struck a chord with me, making those episodes a chore rather than a treat.

Trouble in Tokyo, the de facto series finale for Teen Titans, tries to have it both ways. That’s appropriate for a capstone to the show, which had plenty of each type of story. But it makes this film an odd duck, with grand tonal inconsistencies that undercut some solid dramatic work at its core. But even if the movie could strike a better balance between its serious plot and its remedial humor, it would still waste time on the dumb gags that dragged the series down rather than livened it up.

Beast Boy, the veritable mascot for the show’s tepid comedy, eats up narrative real estate being chased by fangirls, singing the literal translation of the show’s Japanese theme song, and aiming to be a tacky tourist. Cyborg’s main bit of business in this movie is to get in a stand-off with the chef of an all-you-can-eat restaurant over what exotic/disgusting foods he can stomach. Raven at least finds a key piece of info about the apparent villain of the story, but otherwise wanders around looking for something she can read and accidentally becomes a gum mascot.

These are major characters on the team! Of course there’s not time to service each of them fully in a seventy-five minute movie. But surely you can do better than cornball gags and go-nowhere stories like these!

Worse yet, despite a Tokyo setting, the Teen Titans*movie only embraces the shallowest, most surface-level elements of Japanese culture. There’s a karaoke segment, and an arcade segment, and a glimpse of sumo wrestlers, and Beast Boy becoming obsessed with manga and giggling Japanese schoolgirls. Most of this stuff is played for laughs, and it gets none. A change of scenery is always a chance to spark something new and different for familiar faces. *Trouble in Tokyo squanders that opportunity in favor of skin-deep snippets of stereotypical Japanese culture.

The closest the movie comes to actually embracing the place where it’s set comes in homages to Akira. Robin briefly (and nigh-pointlessly) dons a motorcycle gangster disguise, hangs out in dingy bad guy bars, and even strikes the famous pose. The climax sees our heroes fighting a large, viscous monster whose defeat results in his overinflation and whiffs of body horror. These shout-outs are pleasant enough, but so sanded down for a younger *Teen Titans*audience that they lack any force beyond the minor joy of recognition.

It’s a shame, because at the core of this one, there’s a strong central arc for Robin (albeit one that reduces Starfire solely to a romantic lead). It is, oddly (or appropriately) enough, one that mirrors Terry McGinnis in the Batman Beyond television show.

In brief, Robin focuses too much on the abstract ideal of “being a hero” as the only thing he has time for. He eschews vacations, fun, and most importantly for present purposes, romantic attraction, because like his mentor, he thinks there’s only time for the job. Being a hero, saving people, protecting people, is too important to allow yourself to be distracted by other things.

Only then, he meets Commander Daizo, a Tokyo law enforcement operative so obsessed with being seen as a hero that he devolves into manufacturing villains so he can continue soaking in public adulation. When the original bad guy is subdued, Daizo can’t leave well enough alone, and instead builds both an army to police the city and a collection of colorful villains for them to fight, so he can keep winning medals.

I like the idea that Robin sees this obsession with herodom going too far and pulls himself back from the brink. The fact that he’s so determined to solve the case and save the day that he nearly breaks his (and Batman’s) no-kill code is another great wake up call on that front. And I like that after these experiences, he finally makes room in his life for his love for Starfire.

There’s a lot of catharsis to the show finally pulling the trigger on the romance they’d been teasing for seasons up to this point. Their coming together here isn’t an arbitrary cherry on top of the series, but something earned through Robin’s hang-ups, and the experiences here that help him get over them. I wish Starfire had more to do than pine for Robin and have a cute but insubstantial one-sided conversation with a young girl to square up her feelings, but it’s still a nice note to end the Titans’ adventures on.

Heck, I even like the semi-silly notion of Brushogun here. The concept of a villain who tried to bring his drawings to life, only to become a symbiote-esque ink monster when his dark spell went wrong, is a little out there even for Teen Titans. But Trouble in Tokyo gives him a tragic air, as we watch him be enslaved by Daizo, plead for help from the Titans by the only means available to him, and gain peace when Robin frees him for his ghastly vocation. Like the best of this series, it takes an inherently outlandish concept seriously and finds the paths and meaning in it.

There’s even some cool visuals to go along with it. I am a sucker for sluicing monsters in animation, as the medium allows for creative gestures and poses, and more fluid movements than normal, which show off what animators can do. Likewise, while the manga characters designs are pretty generic, the concept of ink-based baddies pays off with their melting, color-changing tones as the good guys defeat them.

The big catch to all of this is that much of Trouble in Tokyo is a mystery, and not a particularly good one. When the villain is unseen and mostly unknown, and a long-running series conveniently introduces a brand new character, it’s not hard to figure that he’s the bad guy. Which is to say that even if Daizo’s exact plan wasn’t necessarily obvious from the beginning, him as the culprit certainly was.

At the same time, it’s not hard to put two and two together with the fact that Beast Boy is fawning over a particular Manga publisher in town, whose doors are conveniently closed, while monsters with three-color insides are attacking the city and the Titans. Even if you didn’t recognize Keone Young’s distinctive voice as Daizo, the major ingredients of the whodunnit here were apparent early on, making many of the reveals seem academic.

More to the point, Robin spends most of the story spinning his wheels despite the cool ideas at the center of his arc. His case of being mistaken for a villain serves a thematic purpose but plays more like filler. The other Titans each have fight scenes that don’t really add anything beyond pre spectacle. And Robin’s identity crisis here is so brief and underfed as to seem pointless. The core idea here is great, but the way it’s realized leaves plenty to be desired.

The other side of the coin is this. Plenty of people adore Teen Titans’ sense of humor. The truth is that the show was always aimed at a somewhat younger audience than works like Batman: The Animated Series. So it’s not necessarily a bad thing if the humor skews toward the dopey and dumb, and the mystery’s easier for a grown-up to figure out. Much of this movie’s sense of humor on the one hand and filler amid the drama on the other fails to light my fire. But for kids who grew up with the show, it’s probably about right.

All that said, I’ll still take “Things Change”, the last episode of the television series, as a more fitting end to Teen Titans. There’s still some laughs there, with snarky remarks from Raven and blithe inquisitiveness from Starfire. But it’s a more bold, even somber reminder of how grown-up and mature the show could be when it took big swings. Despite Cyborg’s call out to Japanese enthusiasm for baseball, Trouble in Tokyo is more of a bunt, with some pleasant moments and neat concepts at play, but which doesn’t reach the heights of Teen Titans at its best.