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The Creed franchise was birthed as a spinoff of the Rocky movies but, as the three films were released, the series carved out its own path and began to truly stand on its own. At present, there’s even a fourth installment planned. One of the most noticeable ways in which the series has differentiated itself from its predecessors is through the staging of fight sequences in Creed III. And, as it turns out, those were directly inspired by anime, which has me looking at these scenes in a whole new way.
Michael B. Jordan took the director’s chair for Creed III, the first film in the series to not include Sylvester Stallone. In accepting the job, Jordan took the boxing franchise in a direction that we can pretty safely say never would have happened in a Rocky movie. Speaking with GQ, Johnson talked about the fight scenes in the film, which he says were something he had in mind from very early on, as he wanted to bring his love of anime into the sequences. Jordan said…
The fights were something that I [had] kinda been imagining for a long time. That was the one part of the movie I wasn’t really nervous about. I had a pretty clear vision on what I wanted to do with that and how I wanted to incorporate my love of anime into that. Usually, in anime, when you have two characters who are fighting to the death, inside themselves they’re having a very quiet conversation. They’re having a very emotional one, and it usually takes place in a void. It’s usually all black or all white or just void of anything, where these two characters kind of exist and they can kind of communicate.
The final fight between Adonis Creed and Damian Anderson in the threequel is quite interesting in that it goes to nowhere. In the middle of the fight, the crowd disappears, and the boxing match continues in an empty void space that is as much symbolic as a literal battle.
I remember watching the sequence in Creed III and being impressed with it from a filmmaking standpoint, but also shocked, as it was the last thing I expected to see. While these movies had never been afraid to do interesting things with cinematography, the epic one-shot fight sequence of the first movie being a prime example, this was something very different. It was a sort of magical realism that we had never seen before in the wider series.
Michael B. Jordan says the scene was all about having the two characters “talk” in the film’s “fourth language” and so taking it to the void made sense. He continued…
In the two characters, between Adonis and Damian, they wouldn’t be able to talk about their issues as characters. So they had to go to this void to sort of figure things out, and it was through fighting. Our movie, Creed III, was a quadro-lingual film. You had English, Spanish, ASL, and then fighting would be our fourth language. So they communicated through their fists, and that’s why the anime element kind of came into the mix.
While I’m not an anime expert, and this didn’t make the connection the first time I saw Creed III, the comparison does certainly help explain Jordan’s thinking on language as a director, and it makes a lot of sense. As he says, the “void” is a concept that you’ll find in a lot of different anime, and thus many people likely made the connection. He explained…
The void exists in so many different anime. When people are watching [the movie], I wanted them to associate that to their memories and what their experiences were with the void. It could’ve been Naruto, it could’ve been Dragon Ball Z. It could be Jujutsu Kaisen. It could be so many different — it’s in the fabric of what anime is. So, if you’re an anime lover, you would be like, ‘Oh, I remember that from X, Y and Z.’
If nothing else, the fight scene is certainly unique. While the symbolism of it all still makes sense in context even without the known anime influence. Seeing it again with that knowledge certainly changes things up.
It makes one wonder what the future will hold. With Michael B. Jordan set to star and direct Creed IV, will we see additional anime references in the new movie as well, or does Jordan have new influences he plans to interject in creative ways? We’ll have to wait and see.