A massive day-glo rail of cocaine that hits your brain like the Acela Express and kick starts your pleasure centers, this flick pops the pip all over your popple. The original Yatterman was a goofy 70's television anime. Every week, toy shop owner, Gan (Sho Sakurai) and his cute assistance, Ai, battled the evil and incompetent Doronbo gang led by femme fatale, Doronjo, and her assistants. Everyone talked in cute phrases (Toy-Botty ends his sentences with "-botty," while evil Skull Obey ends his with "-obey") and the mecha were nuts: clunky Yatter-wan (or Yatter-woof) is a giant, rolling mechanical dog, there's a Yatter-panda and even a Yatter-pelican. Every week, like clockwork, Yatterman and the Doronbo gang battled for piece of the mystical skull stone, every week the Doronbo gang failed, there was a mushroom cloud, Gan and Ai did their Yatterman dance and they all came back the following week to do it all over again.

Takashi Miike takes this basic idea and injects a dose of self-awareness. The Doronbo Gang are tired of getting beaten up every week, Gan is a bit of a dolt, bystanders watch he and Ai break into their Yatterman victory dance and mutter, "These people are crazy." The heart of the movie, however, is Doronjo. Played by Kyoko Fukada, the sugar princess from Kamikaze Girls, she's a preening, prancing, pretty pony princess who’s evil because, well, she's a genius. What else is she going to do? She brings adult shading to her cartoon character and maintains her essential humanity no matter what kind of onscreen indignity is being visited upon her.

This flick is kid friendly, but it's a Miike movie through and through, delivering more "I can't believe I just saw that," moments per minute than any other film out there today. Projected digitally, watching Yatterman is like getting Candyland poured in your eyes. Attack sushi, the Funny Bunny Club, a pile of all the schoolgirls in Japan...Yatterman offers up something shiny, new and nutty in every frame. Miike's idea-cup is more than overflowing - in Yatterman it's practically a geyser.