A series defined by duality, the FUUTO PI anime managed to balance the double tasks of being a sequel story for fans of the original Kamen Rider W tokusatsu series, as well as a series that allowed new viewers to jump in. Kamen Rider W itself started in media res with many of the origins of its characters and plot being pieced out in beats across its run and in spin-off material. FUUTO PI functions the same way, and the anime series capped off by leading into the movie now finally streaming on Crunchyroll: Fuuto PI: The Portrait of Kamen Rider Skull.

Even more than the preceding anime series, The Portrait of Kamen Rider Skull is going to display one of two very different sides depending on the familiarity of the audience approaching it. Much of the material covered in this movie was done so previously in parts of the Kamen Rider W show and its multiple spin-off and crossover movies. For the familiar fans, that means this is a treasure trove of fanservice, reiterating and reinterpreting characters and moments that are iconic to the story they know and love. New viewers, meanwhile, find themselves in the shoes of Tokime being told this story for the first time, getting a revelatory host of clarifications about how Shotaro and Philip got their start, and the man named Sokichi Narumi who gave it to them.

It's an interesting needle to thread, because as those familiar fans know, the material compiling this story can be…disparate. The nature of Kamen Rider Skull and how his story was detailed over the years means that his plot wasn't always fully considered each time they appended it. To be less judicious: much of the material for Skull in crossover movies came off like retcons a lot of the time—circuitous, ill-advised explanations for things like his absence from Akiko's life, how his powers came and went, and how they even worked. Taking all that and smoothing it into one coherent feature that satisfies following fans and makes sense for anime-only viewers would be seen as an unenviable task.

Luckily for The Portrait of Kamen Rider Skull, it has an extremely effective blunt object with which to brute-force that thread through the needle in its titular character. Regardless of the context of his appearance, no matter how forced-in he felt by the mandate of being a fan-favorite, the fact remains that Narumi Sokichi, AKA Kamen Rider Skull's appearance almost always works on some level thanks to being predicated on one specifically salient theme: this guy was the coolest motherfucker to ever live. From Shotaro's point of view, this telling of Sokichi's story is about how the hard-boiled man impressed upon the half-boiled guy, leading him down the path seen in both the tokusatsu show and the anime.

It means that even being assembled out of disparate parts, this movie works as a whole by having room for a whole arc around Sokichi; despite appropriately articulating how awesome he is, the writing is never unilaterally in awe of him. Sokichi is brusque and outright abusive to Shotaro in a couple of moments. Despite Shotaro's characteristic blaming of himself for Sokichi's eventual death, it is made clear that it was Sokichi's own less-considered momentary decisions that did him in. Nobody's perfect. The point is that Sokichi's distance from people wasn't a cool, unilaterally good thing, and did cause issues between himself and the people he cared about, whether it was on account of his own stubbornness or something like, say, spider-bomb monsters he had stuck inside of him at the time.

See, a detail like that is what I mean by disparate. This new anime movie may adapt elements of the Skull: Message for W feature, including the fate of Sokichi's previous partner, informing how he reacted to Shotaro. But it strategically avoids getting bogged down in denser technical details, letting new and old viewers hone in more on the character of the man and interpret how that informed his relationships. It arguably loops around to making him seem even cooler—an imperfect man who still stood up to do the right thing whenever it counted most, and looked badass doing it. It brings together the previously disconnected threads of Sokichi's partner and the saving of Philip during "Begins Night," reflecting on people who might be considered "monsters" and how they deserve saving or penance. The result is a movie that just might be the best distillation, the most coherent adaptation of all this material, whether it's for the established fans or the anime-only audience learning about it for the first time.

It certainly stands out in the stylistic side of things. Kamen Rider Skull's undeniable popularity in the fandom has always been carried a fair amount by just how cool he looks. He's a gun-toting skull-man superhero in a scarf and fedora! Few people could resist such a slickly styled siren song, and Studio KAI's rendition of it in this movie absolutely dials up that appeal in animation. All told, this film's looks aren't too much of a step up from the TV anime, but FUUTO PI already looked pretty great to begin with. The biggest treat is seeing designs like Skull, W, and the various kaijin pop off outside their live-action tokusatsu constraints. The Taboo Dopant could never move like this in the live-action show, and the animators seem to particularly delight in depicting the wild fighting style of W's FangJoker form. A couple of new Dopants get to break out into bigger, wilder designs that would be impossible (or at least awkward CGI) in live action, adding some strong climax even as the last third of the story circles a part of the plot that previous fans have seen several times over by this point.

The treatment adds to what I mean when I say this is the "definitive" version of the Kamen Rider Skull and Begins Night story. Slotted into the middle of the ongoing FUUTO PI story as it is, it almost feels like it could just go into a full new animated adaptation of Kamen Rider W itself. Maybe then we'd actually have a chance of getting the story streamed for those new audiences, but outside of that, The Portrait of Kamen Rider Skull does get a little overindulgent in its own continuity. Familiar viewers can spot a few places where the writing has to zig and zag around story points from multiple mediums in an effort to keep things within canon. Plus, there's just a little more overt infodumping at the end than I might have preferred, seemingly both to pad out the runtime a bit and show off in the more frustrating ways this franchise always has. You will never escape the specter of hypothetical Kamen Rider W forms. Some of it's clearly here to set up a potential second season for FUUTO PI, which you know I'm all here for, but here and now, it dents the momentum of a movie that had been moving pretty well by that point.

Deep in this series as I am, I can't speak exactly to how The Portrait of Kamen Rider Skull will play for FUUTO PI fans who have stayed doggedly anime-only all this time. Part of me does wonder how they might feel finally going to the Kamen Rider W show after this and seeing all these scenes oddly precreated in live-action. I feel like it does work as a distilled version of the origin story—it must. If fusing all those premade parts means there's less here to surprise familiar fans, it still delights in that retelling. Full disclosure: Kamen Rider Skull's design was the deciding factor in convincing me to pick up Kamen Rider W as the first Rider series I ever watched so many years ago, so I'll always have that fannish fondness. Early on, this movie features a loving scene tracking a young Shotaro walking through the Narumi Detective Agency, and it genuinely feels like coming back home for the first time. Nobody's perfect, and The Portrait of Kamen Rider Skull can be an imperfectly awkward, uneven indulgence assembled out of disparate parts But like a half-boiled detective and a magical human encyclopedia, those parts come together surprisingly well, and make for a fully worthy follow-up for fans of both the original series, and its newbie-friendly anime continuation.