Every 333 years the demon Kuiba is born. After much bloodshed, he is defeated, but is always reborn to begin the slaughter again. After the fourth time, the gods got a bit sick of the clockwork slaughter and decided to nuke his birthplace from orbit. It didn’t work, and Kuiba lives again. But although he was not killed, he did get amnesia, and now he wants to join the army to protect the world from the years of war, horror, bloodshed, cats and dogs living together and mass hysteria that is surely on the way.

Initially quite controversial because of perceived parallels with Dragonball, (the main characters of both are based on Sun Wukong, a character from the Chinese novel Journey to the West) Kuiba is a weird one. Playing at TAAFI earlier this year, and distributed by Toonmax media, I thought it was a complete, done-in-one story, but it’s the first in a series. Kuiba 2 was released in May of this year. That’s a marketing problem, though, and I don’t think it’s entirely fair to judge the movie on that. Kuiba sets out to show us a world and a cast of characters, and it does that very well. Some of the characters are pretty stereotypical, some could have done with more development and some of the designs don’t work very well, but on the whole, it’s an enjoyable, fun movie, with some great moments between Manji (Kuiba) and his adoptive father, Man Xiaoman, and interesting class clashes. It left me wanting more, but in a good way. I want to see the sequel, I want to see more of this world, and I want to see what happens next.

Highly recommended.

Donal O’Connor