Still Killing Bill
Dec. 8th, 2025 06:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
setsuledI've finally had a chance to watch the new short Kill Bill film, "The Lost Chapter: Yuki's Revenge", which Quentin Tarantino made for the MMORPG Fortnite (you can watch it, too, embedded above). Actually, I've watched it twice now. It's pretty damned good, of course, with expertly choreographed action and cunning dialogue. Uma Thurman returns to voice the Bride while Zoe Bell did motion capture stuntwork. The new character, Yuki, is played by an actress named Miyu Ishidate Roberts. The short comes from a scene Tarantino wrote for 2003's Kill Bill: Volume One that was cut. Gogo's sister, Yuki, comes to California to avenge her sister's death at the hands of the Bride.
I've heard Tarantino say that he doesn't play video games (not that he dislikes them, simply that he doesn't play them) so I wonder how this came about. Tarantino's an auteur director who doesn't believe in compromising his work, but here he is making a short film in the kid-friendly Fortnite universe in which the blood is all replaced with glowing blue gel and the Bride's famous "Pussy Wagon" has it's name changed to an image of a cat followed by the word "Wagon". I guess he can be flexible.
The short also functions as promotion for the new cut of Kill Bill that combines what were previously two separate volumes into one film. Sadly, I can't see that in Japan. I haven't met many people in Japan who've expressed interest in Tarantino. Generally, any movie older than 20 years isn't talked about unless it's gone through a rigorous communal approval process, like Back to the Future. Once a woman asked me and another American if I liked Tarantino in the presence of a bunch of other Japanese teachers and it was clearly one of those rhetorical games designed to demonstrate to everyone in earshot what uncultured foreigners we were. This is the kind of thing Tarantino actually captures really well in the dialogue he writes for Japanese characters, like Yuki, whose oddly effusive praise for the Bride is a pretty common kind of bullshitting in Japan.
I've never played Fortnite but as a nerd in general I can appreciate how Tarantino took care to include familiar characters from the Fortnite world in the short. A lot of the students I work with actually play Fortnite. I wonder how they'll react to the short.
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