My Hero Academia: Two Heroes (2018)

For a film about a floating island of research scientists and one very tired Symbol of Peace, My Hero Academia: Two Heroes conducts itself with the tidy efficiency of a franchise doing precisely what it was built to do. Deku accompanies All Might to I-Island, a manmade city of gadgetry and good intentions, and within twenty minutes a hostage crisis has swallowed the place whole. The students of Class 1-A punch their way up a tower. Villains are defeated. The torch gets passed in the final reel with the gravity of a state funeral.

Little here registers on the modern social consciousness scale. The cast is uniformly Japanese, the setting is a technological marvel untroubled by ecological anxiety, and the film's brief swipe at corporate sponsors seizing David Shield's invention is a plot hinge, not a manifesto. Melissa Shield stands out as a capable, Quirkless young woman who hacks the island's security system and drives the story in her own right, and the girls of Class 1-A fight alongside the boys without a speech attached. The film draws no attention to any of this. It simply proceeds.

The speeches do arrive, as they must. Characters speak sincerely about heroism, about the Symbol of Peace, about the next generation inheriting a safer world. This is standard shonen liturgy, delivered with a straight face and a swelling orchestral score. We have sat through this sermon many times, in many costumes, and this instance is at least honest about its intentions. Two Heroes is a superhero picture adapted from a long-running manga, an earnest and well-animated exercise in franchise maintenance. It asks nothing of the surrounding culture and offers it nothing in return. That is not a criticism. It is a classification.