Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie

The 1994 adaptation of Capcom’s seminal fighting game is a classic, not just for video game adaptations but for martial arts anime. Street Fighter II’s story is pretty meh, but it does its job in getting a bunch of strong people to throw punches in its iconic fighting scenes. The Chun-Li vs. Vega fight is a great example of how the movie captures these characters’ fighting styles and personalities while placing them into a new framework, and that’s only one of the many action scenes that embody the game’s legendary fighters. Yeah, there’s some weirdness with how the score got redone entirely for the English version, alongside shoehorning American bands like Korn and Alice in Chains into the mix. But when no one was meddling with it, Street Fighter II captured the immaculate vibes of one of the most important fighting games of all time and brought them to a wider audience. — Kenneth Shepard