Solid first third and then it goes downhill after that. Never too downhill for the movie to become "bad" or even a "chore to watch", but it felt just like another Crayon Shin-Chan movie, which is never a good sign quality-wise.
What I found so compelling in the first part of the movie was probably the numerous spoofs and nods to other classic films and genres. It mixed quite nicely with both the premise and the plot, to the extent that it never felt forced or shoehorned in. As an example, I was really a fan of the "sort-of-Slasher" sequence. It is the kind of situation I would never expect to mesh well with the Crayon Shin-Chan cast, and so I was more than happy to be proven wrong.
After that, "Shuurai! Uchuujin Shiriri" just went through the motion: the road-trip part was the most "road-trip part" you would expect from this kind of movie, it lacked the craziness of other Crayon Shin-Chan plots. It was really unremarkable in the most boring way possible.
When it comes to the climax, and thus the twist, they were, paradoxically, both surprising and expected. Surprising, because I was hoping that such a shift in the narrative would never come true, and yet it was also expected since there were too much hints that it was indeed going to happen. The said shift sure works in the context of the main theme (fatherhood, which is fairly standard for the series), but there are so many other Crayon Shin-Chan films that already tackled such an issue with more subtlety and cleverness.
This is exactly where the problem lies with "Shuurai! Uchuujin Shiriri": it truly is an unremarkable entry in the Crayon Shin-Chan movie franchise. The gags, while still funny at times, were nothing new to the series; the fatherhood subject has been done numerous times in the past; the sequence of events was expected after the first third; the twist is certainly followed by crazy moments, but makes little sense in the context of the story; etc.
The franchise has seen better days and Shin-Ei Animation is probably (hopefully!) going to release better movies in the future. I would not recommend to "skip it", since it has its charm despite all of its flaws, but really why watching it when there are already far better Shin-Chan adventures? |