We’re calling on a pair of franchise players to lead Anime After Dark into 2025 with a secret double feature of small screen icons making a splashy leap to the big screen. We can’t tell you the titles we’re playing, but you know the names of these two after-school superheroes – beyond the hundreds of episodes of television and thousands of comic book pages, they’ve starred in a total of 18 feature films.

Franchise anime films are a mixed bag at best – especially ones from this era (we’re in the 90s this month), but these two outings represent the form at its best: punchy standalones with blockbuster spectacle, dazzling animation and loads of non-canonical whozwhatery.

Clues
❓Feature One is Movie 1.
❓Feature Two is Movie 12.
❓This is the second Anime After Dark feature for the director of Feature One, who went on from this project to create a magical girl franchise of his own.
❓Feature Two comes from a journeyman who first brought Saint Seiya to film and later Street Fighter Alpha and Digimon. He directed 93 episodes of this franchise’s TV series (bulk of the series, dude).
❓Keywords: Flowers, bubbles, magic, muscles, fusion, lost loves, Hitler