I feel conflicted about this film: it's clearly aimed at a young audience and I struggled a lot with the childish humour; however, it does deliver on the monster action, which I felt was lacking in the previous yokai movie, 100 Monsters.
The villain of The Great Yokai War is an ancient, blood-drinking Babylonian bird monster called Daimon (Chikara Hashimoto), who flies to Japan and assumes the identity of a benevolent lord magistrate. Kappa, a water imp who lives in the magistrate's pond, realises what is wrong and confronts Daimon, but the monster is too strong. Samurai Shinhachiro (Yoshihiko Aoyama) also realises something is up and asks a Buddhist monk for advice, but again Daimon proves too powerful. Eventually, Kappa and his yokai pals summon all the monsters in Japan to do battle against the invader.
Overall, this is passable entertainment for fans of strange Japanese cinema, but I could have done without the puerile comedy (especially the two guards who think they're Abbott and Costello) and the obligatory 'cute' youngsters (an obese boy with his arse out and his little sister).
The villain of The Great Yokai War is an ancient, blood-drinking Babylonian bird monster called Daimon (Chikara Hashimoto), who flies to Japan and assumes the identity of a benevolent lord magistrate. Kappa, a water imp who lives in the magistrate's pond, realises what is wrong and confronts Daimon, but the monster is too strong. Samurai Shinhachiro (Yoshihiko Aoyama) also realises something is up and asks a Buddhist monk for advice, but again Daimon proves too powerful. Eventually, Kappa and his yokai pals summon all the monsters in Japan to do battle against the invader.
Overall, this is passable entertainment for fans of strange Japanese cinema, but I could have done without the puerile comedy (especially the two guards who think they're Abbott and Costello) and the obligatory 'cute' youngsters (an obese boy with his arse out and his little sister).