Gyo: Tokyo Fish Attack (2012 Video) User Reviews

strange, gross and oddly compelling...

[joelherro · 6/10 · 24 March 2012]

this was one of the weirder animes i've seen in a while...and i've seen some weird ones...

fish decide they've had enough of living in the sea and grow mechanical legs and invade the land in huge numbers, killing or worse, infecting people with a strange virus that make them bloat up, turn green and expel noxious gases...

i haven't read the manga (if there is one), but i've heard the creator or director was into weird stuff and i heard right...the animation is good and the characters interesting...good story, but kinda bleak...i wont spoil it, but say its definitely different and more than a little gross, but i didn't mind it...

Surprisingly good horror anime

[jessemobile1021 · 7/10 · 8 May 2015]

This movie's audience is obviously looking for more "Sharknado" than "Silence of the Lambs," and thats what it delivers: a silly, scary good time. It's creators push the boundaries of the B-movie genre to hilariously stupid limits. You don't watch a movie about fish with fart-powered spider legs and expect a philosophical mind- bender. This is a horror movie that a seven-year old boy would dream up.

That being said, the film succeeds in creating more than just silly scares. Edge-of-your-seat terror is nicely punctuated by dark comedy in the first half. The second half mixes character development, conflicting origin theories, and post- apocalyptic thrills. All of this is accomplished while paying homage to slashers, body-horror, zombie movies, and even tentacle porn.

No, this is not a movie to be watched with your parents. No, it has no relevance to serious film criticism. No, it is not a classic that I would watch multiple times. But it is a good movie that delivers on its promises, and then some. As a huge fan of horror and anime, I would certainly recommend this movie.

Done different, still enjoyable

[ArasVorte · 6/10 · 16 May 2021]

As someone that has read the manga that this movie is based of, I can saffely say that booth are enjoyable in their own way. Some things have been changed within the story, but it does follow the same plot and at times re-enacts the same exact scenes from the manga. The fish were creepy and gave me a very strange feeling of dread in booth versions. I will however complain about two things: The first one is a particular octopus-scene that was not in the source-material and felt completely unnecessary and forced. The second thing is that the movie didnt end as in the manga. That is not a complete dealbreaker but I enjoyed the ending in the manga better. Wouldnt recommend watching this if you havent read the manga. It might be to much for some...

A very strange afffair.

[RatedVforVinny · 6/10 · 14 November 2018]

A graphic, weird film that depresses more than it thrills. Still you certainly won't forget it and contains a strong eco, disaster meassage. Not sure if there is a huge fan base for this one but it's surely an oddball entry, to the 'Anime' genre. 6 stars for just being different.

GYO: Tokyo Fish Attack

[Tweekums · 6/10 · 1 November 2017]

College friends Kaori, Aki and Erika have just graduated and are celebrating by taking a holiday in Okinawa. When they get back to the house they are staying in they notice a foul stench, something akin to the smell of rotting corpses! They then see a strange creature running round the room; it is a fish with legs! This was just a little one but soon there are fish with legs, including sharks, everywhere. Kaori is determined to get back to her fiancé in Tokyo so flies back leaving her two friends in Okinawa. Something strange starts happening to Erika after she is attacked by a shark and Kaori discovers that her fiancés uncle is involved with the events we are witnessing.

This OVA is rather strange to put it mildly; the idea of fish growing legs and rampaging around major cities is odd enough then things get even weirder when their victims mutate and behave in a strange way. At just over seventy minutes in length the story doesn't outstay its welcome… to be honest I thought it could done with being slightly longer. There are plenty of fairly disturbing moments; especially what happens to the victims as they mutate. Given its short length the characters are developed fairly well; especially Kaori and the photojournalist she meets on the plane back to Tokyo. The animation isn't the best I've seen, some of the CGI is particularly obvious, but it is good enough. Overall I'd hardly call this a must see but if you want a bizarre animated horror it is strangely compelling.

I am not ignorant and therefore not blissful.

[Xparasite · 2/10 · 23 October 2012]

I just don't get movies like this. Why make a movie based on a certain thing and then have such utter disrespect for that certain thing. Junji Ito is by far one of my favorite authors, and while Gyo is far from his best work it still was pretty good. It was Ito doing what he does best. Evoke an otherworldly feeling of terror and mixing that up with bizarre imagery.

While this movie has some elements from the manga it completely lacks the essence. The world wide chaos is somewhat there and some of the imagery really lives up to the manga. But for the most part I just get the feeling this is based on a badly told resume rather than the manga itself. Characthers that where not even in the manga are added. Now that wouldn't be a problem if they actually did something useful to flesh out the story, but no. They are a complete waste of space. Only there to fill out key elements of the manga where they didn't belong in the first place.

The characters that was in the manga are completely altered beyond recognition. Kaori and Tadashi even switch places in the chain of events that took place in the manga. Important pieces of the story are breezed over or just omitted. The sheer incompetence at work here just astounds me. As an adaption this fails miserably. Maybe you can enjoy it if you haven't read the manga. But as one who have I must say this one was just painful to watch. Some credit must be given to the animation witch at times is really great, apart from the cgi. I never was a fan of 3d animation.

The sense of total despair and hopelessness as the army of fish is slowly taking over human territory is there. I just wish they could have at least tried to follow the manga better. A total waste of time if you have read the source material. I give it 2/10 and that's being generous.

The Vidiot Reviews...

[capone666 · 6/10 · 9 November 2016]

Gyo: Tokyo Fish Attack

The reason why fish don't speak is they would drown every time they tried.

Although verbal evolution is far-off, this anime confirms upward mobility is not.

Graduates Aki, Erika and Kaori head to the seashore to celebrate their recent liberation from the classroom only to discover a freakish fish on the beach that has grown a pair of motorized legs.

More ambulatory vertebrates soon appear on land, including a Great White Shark that stalks the sidewalks for its next meal.

Time reveals the military's involvement in creating a self-perpetuating mechanism propelled by the death stench of its victims.

The most bizarre aquatic tale to ever surface, this acutely drawn anime inspired by the multi- volume horror manga fails to deliver the unnerving scares of its muse, but it does feature the key moments that comprise its greatness.

Incidentally, once they can ride a bike, these biped fish will dominate the Ironman Triathlon.

Yellow Light

vidiotreviews.blogspot.ca

Eco Thriller

[kosmasp · 5/10 · 30 September 2013]

An animated movie that does take environment very seriously. Japan is an island and therefor isolated. It also seems to heighten their fears and how they portray them. Another case in point is this movie. Just because it is animated though, doesn't mean it is child friendly. There is nudity, there is violence and there is body horror that Croneberg would be jealous of.

Apart from things (machines) sticking things in human body parts (where they shouldn't be) and other out there ideas, you have to be pretty open minded to watch this movie. It's not great, but it has a message. Is that enough/sufficient for your viewing pleasure?

Incoherence in Anime form

[AliasPseudonym · 3/10 · 28 September 2013]

Giant fish on mechanical legs invade land and... well, that's more or less about it really. Apart from the farting green multi-corpse cyborgs, of course. And intelligent gas. And zombie circus clown musicians. And...

I've not seen the source manga that this is based on (if indeed there is any such thing), but i'd hazard a guess a lot of it has been lost in the translation to anime.

With a name like "Gyo: Tokyo Fish Attack" i didn't sit down to watch expecting a highbrow classic, but still felt distinctly underwhelmed after the 70-odd minutes were up.

The animation was in places pretty good, more often somewhat average, and somewhat let down by some cheap-looking CGI, and the story was decidedly offbeat, to say the least - which is normally a good thing with me. However, it's all just a bit too random and tenuous, even for a film i'd expect to have all the depth of a puddle to start with.

If you are hoping for a coherent plot, or the occasional credible explanation as to what the hell is going on, then i would say this maybe isn't the film for you. On the other hand, if just watching a man fight a giant mechanical spider-squid that just unexpectedly fell out of a tree on him is your thing, then fire in.

Pros: This is the only film i've ever seen have a leading character savaged by an angry mob containing zombies, a cow and a shark at the same time.

Cons: The rest of the film makes as much sense as the above.

Downright awful

[windera · 6 January 2018]

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.

Bug-eyed OVA adaptation.

[lost-in-limbo · 5/10 · 15 April 2020]

Jinji Ito's manga is an odd beast, which doesn't fully come together in this OVA adaptation. More vanilla than I was expecting, not the imagery or ideas, but mainly the story's assembly of the concept and social themes. An outlandish premise is set-up, although you wouldn't think it at first and its tone remains unpredictable throughout due to many genre switches, but the shallow script didn't take full advantage of its bewildering mystery or stereotypical characters. Neither one is successfully built upon, especially the characterisations. The protagonist is bland, not helping is that her journey (the focal of the story) to find her fiancé is just as colourless that she becomes part of the scenery. As for the mystery we get a strange explanation for what we are seeing blurted out in a revealing scene, but it's hard to comprehend, nor does it really answer the bigger picture.

So I found it rather frustrating, because you get a real air of catastrophic fear, and uncertainty plaguing the characters as they hopelessly watch on. While the imagery of the walking fish, drooling spider-sharks engulfed in clouds of death-decaying stench can have you going WTF! Sadly there's not enough of it. The first spider-shark encounter is furiously destructive and bonkers, it wets your appetite. After that, we get one more cracking set-piece with a spider-shark in the streets of Tokyo followed up by an octopus rendezvous of tentacle action. Surprisingly the gore is kept in check. Outside of those instances most of the imagery had hordes upon hordes of walking fish swarming Japanese cities. So it can start to wear thin seeing the same old scenes of 3D fish scurrying through streets, highways and doing nothing more then just that. But about half-way through, it offers another batty and grotesque surprise of metamorphic tin-pot bio-weapons, viruses and body configuration horror of apocalyptic consequences. So the walking fish threat becomes secondary to parasitic affected humans all bloated and gassed up. Oh, the fumes are overwhelming, to the extend the fragrance becomes its own character. Yep, WTF x 2!!!

So in a way it felt like I was watching something taking bits and pieces from such films as The Birds, The Crazies and Dreamcatcher. I know, what a cocktail. The animation is sort-of-plain, but serviceable, whereas the 3D images of the fish do pop out and give a novel touch. In the end it's ridiculously entertaining, but you can't help expect a little more from it.

Uhm okay.

[blumdeluxe · 3/10 · 30 May 2019]

"Gyo" tells the story of an invasion of fish monsters that leaves a young woman on a desperate hunt for her missing fiance.

You really have to accept a lot of absurdity in order to take this film a hundred percent serious. I can't deny that it dares to be dark and graphically explicit but apart from that the logic seems hugenly bent and I have to say that apart from disgust at some points, the movie didn't evoke many emotions in me. Possibly manga and anime fans will get more references and backgrounf than me but I doubt that this is enough to make this one a good movie.

All in all this might be a good choice for people who look for some explicit catastrophe films (or films containing monsters) and aren't to sensitive about plausibility. For others I guess there are better options.

Something's fishy...

[paul_haakonsen · 4/10 · 19 June 2023]

...and it ain't just the walking fish!

Granted, I haven't read the Manga upon which this 2012 Anime movie titled "Gyo" (aka "Gyo: Tokyo Fish Attack") is based upon. And after having sat through this 2012 Anime, then I can honestly say that I have zero intentions of reading the Manga.

Writers Junji Ito, Takayuki Hirao and Akihiro Yoshida put together a very bizarre storyline here. Sure, as I sat down to watch this Anime in 2023, I thought that zombie fish was a strange concept, but I opted to watch it regardless, giving the Anime the benefit of the doubt.

And I have to say that "Gyo" was no my cup of tea. Sure, there were parts of the story that were good, but the overall picture was a swing and a miss. I just couldn't get into the vibe here that director Takayuki Hirao was trying to portray on the screen, and it was just difficult to take the whole thing serious.

The art style in "Gyo" was adequate. Not the best of art seen in an Anime, for sure, but it was adequate enough. Despite the fact that the creature concepts made zero sense. The animation in "Gyo" was good, though.

I am sure that there is an audience out there for something such as "Gyo", I just happened not to be a part of that particular target audience.

My rating of "Gyo" lands on a four out of ten stars.