Apprentice superheroes fight the forces of evil in an anime adventure overloaded with Japanese bizarro zeal

A second feature-length outing for the popular shonen (teenage boys) anime from Tokyo’s Bones studio, Heroes Rising milks the 21st-century superhero fetish with Japanese bizarro zeal. One of the villains here isn’t just an anthropomorphised wolf – he’s an anthropomorphised wolf with an alligator tail in a trench coat smoking a fat stogie. He’s one of a trio of malefactors who alight on Nabu island in order to steal a unique “Quirk” – a special ability exhibited by 80% of the world’s population in the My Hero Academia universe – from a local boy. Only Class 1-A – the apprentice saviours sent out on superhero work experience to what was supposed to be an evildoing backwater – stand in their way.

Heroes Rising starts out endearingly low-key: less Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters than a manga-haired version of the Prince’s Trust. At first, the greenhorn superheroes are stuck on mundane service provision for the villagers – the excellently Ronseal-named Chargezuma, for example, helps out with rundown car batteries. Unfortunately, this begets an annoying line in small-deeds-count-most pedagogy that sits uneasily with the ballistics frenzy that follows once the villain squad shows up. Badboy pupil Bakugo (voiced by Nobuhiko Okamoto), determined to outdo his nice-guy classmate Midoriya (Daiki Yamashita) and marmalise the invaders, is the film’s chief outlet for this destructive urge.