Category: Japan

The Crowded Train (満員電車, Kon Ichikawa, 1957)

Posted on by

The Japan of 1957 moves like clockwork in Kon Ichikawa’s absurdist satire, The Crowded Train (満員電車, Manin densha). You can’t expect a seat to be there just because you want to sit down, according to go-getter Tamio, you have to fight for your place on the crowded train that is the post-war economy. His horologist father raised him to prize things like order, precision, and self-reliance, yet the irony is that in a nation like this, if everyone else’s clocks are wrong and only yours are correct, you may be better off resetting them.

Nevertheless, Tamio (Hiroshi Kawaguchi) comes to think of himself as part of the machine and does his best to slot himself into the rhythms of contemporary urban life. People move around in the same way as the bottles manufactured at the brewery where Tamio gets a job after graduating from a top university. But he soon learns fitting into the system requires a degree of compromise. On his first day at the office, he’s told off by his new boss for being overly efficient. He finished all his work before 10:30, but his daily quota is fixed and his productivity only makes things difficult for others. The head of brewery anticipates that increasing automation will allow them to increase efficiency through shedding personnel, only the unions and cultural practice won’t let them. Tamio is one of only three people was recruited for his skills. The other seven joining with him are nepotism hires that will likely drain resources due to their lack of ability, but will be promoted anyway because of their connections. 

In any case, he might have hoped for a better job after graduating from such a good university. A rational man like his father, Tamio meticulously works out how much he can expect to earn over a lifetime subtracting things likes taxes, insurance, and the costs of raising a family. It turns out, the salaryman life is rather disappointing and there’s relatively little reward at the end of it. His constant toothaches and mounting health problems are manifestations of his anxiety and buried desperation. He lives in a company dorm with no furniture surrounded by long corridors of identical rooms. Everyone leaves at the same time every morning to take their place on the train. His colleague Sarai (Eiji Funakoshi) tries to make friends with him, but also explains how most of the other men in the building have been ruined in one way or another by the salaryman life. One has returned to the dorm after his wife left him. Another has a heart condition, but has run through his sick leave and has no choice but to return to work. Tamio only got his position because the previous occupant of his room jumped from the window. 

Sarai says that he held off on making friends with Tamio because he was afraid of him. Graduates overthink things, he says, and are ill suited to the regimented life of a salaryman. The film opens with another kind of conveyor belt visualising the expansion of the educational sector beginning with a handful of graduates in the Meiji era to the present day in which there are so many the ceremony has to take place outdoors in the rain. Tamio loses his job after falling into a coma for month without giving prior notice and is told by a friend he asks for help that they just don’t need graduates from top universities. He’s eventually only able to get a job as a school caretaker by leaving his degree off resume, but is then abruptly fired when they find out. Despite the system apparently overproducing graduates it has no need for, all the teachers want their kids to university and are open to Tamio’s plan to set up school to teach people how to get in.

Meanwhile, Tamio’s father has since entered a mental institution and is apparently very happy there. Everyone else is mad except for me, he claims, but also appreciates the sense of order and precision he couldn’t find in the outside world. The doctors find it impossible tell patients apart from visitors suggesting lack of division between sanity and madness, while Tamio’s father had originally accused his mother of insanity simply for being cheerful. Cheerfulness or insanity seem to be the only ways out of this impossible situation as Tamio desperately tries to hold the roof on his shack during a storm while his mother is just happy to be able to live with her son and hopeful that her husband will get “better” so they can all live together again. “There is always another school year ahead of you,” the head teacher of the primary school tells his new charges somewhat omniously, suggesting that they too are destined to spend their lives fighting for a seat on a packed-out train with no clear destination.

Mr. Pu (プーサン, Kon Ichikawa, 1953)

Posted on by

Perhaps ironically, film censorship under the American Occupation was just as heavy as it had been under the wartime authorities if tilting in a different direction. Depicting the feudal past and straitened present were equally discouraged, as was anything that showed the Occupation forces in a less than ideal light. These restrictions were, however, lifted when the Occupation came to an end in 1952 and Kon Ichikawa’s adaptation of the comic strip by Taizo Yokoyama, Pu-san (プーサン), is a relatively early attempt to address this second round of post-war chaos characterised by high unemployment and defeated hopes for the future.

Yokoyama apparently settled on the nickname “Pu-san” just because it sounded funny, though the strip later moved away from the title character to focus more on an ensemble. That may be why the name is never mentioned during the film which also incorporates elements from another Yokoyama strip, Miss Ganko. The film then focuses on mild-mannered maths teacher Noro (Yunosuke Ito), a widower and war veteran living in a boarding house where he has developed a crush on the landlady’s daughter, Kanko (Fubuki Koshiji). Noro is the sort of person destined to suffer in life as evidenced by the opening sequence in which he is almost run over by a truck, but actually ends up injuring himself by becoming entangled with a fire hydrant in his botched attempt to move out of the way.

Nevertheless, he is really at the centre of a collection of people who are struggling amid the difficult economic environment of the early 1950s in which the nation still has not fully emerged from post-war privation. His boss at the school where he works (Daisuke Kato) is clearly exploiting his nature as someone unlikely to complain about ill-treatment by asking him to work both the day and night shift for no additional pay while forgoing a pay rise he suggests he may later to give to the other teachers. Noro goes along with it because he thinks it’s better to have a job than not and others are hard to come by. His students, meanwhile, are ideologically volatile, flirting with communism or trying to defend the nascent capitalism of the democratic society. It’s one of his students that invites him to the May Day march which leads to him being caught up in the “Bloody May Day Incident” of 1952 in which the police fired on protesters opposing the Anpo security treaty killing two and injuring 2,300 people.

Because Noro is an unlucky person, a photograph of him at the event is published in the newspaper which leads to him being fired from his job. He’s then thrown into a world of job hunters jostling for work outside the employment office with seemingly hundreds of applicants for every position. Many assume him to be further up the queue because he is a university graduate, but it’s clear that things like that no longer really matter in the post-war society and may even hinder his prospects. The job he eventually finds, thanks to his landlady’s recommendation which she only gets for him with the expectation of being able to raise his rent, is working as a deliveryman for a sewing machine company. 

After the war, Singer Sewing Machines gave the patent for the Singer 15 to Japanese factories so that those which once manufactured munitions could transition to making sewing machines. However, most in the film seem to be aware that these factories are actually still making bullets for machine guns, which turns out to be the case at the factory where Noro gets a job. Japan’s post-war recovery will largely be powered by manufacturing munitions and military equipment to be used in the Korean War. This leaves Noro understandably conflicted and leads to an ongoing sense of confusion about the nature of this new “pacifist” and “democratic society”, though he justifies himself that his is only a light crime as his complicity extends only to the delivery and not to the manufacture of these deadly weapons. The ranks of the protestors at the May Day march are contrasted with those of soldiers once again marching through the streets. Harried doctor Tezuka (Isao Kimura), sick of having to rush through patients, has apparently joined the Self Defence Forces instead. 

“Miss Stubborn” Kanko, by contrast, has a good job in a bank and though she goes on a kind of date with Noro, has fallen in love with a colleague she wishes to marry. Her mother objects to the match because her boyfriend is only a middle-school graduate, but as Kanko points out he’s had a steady job and worked his way up since he was 16. A university degree might not mean very much at the present time and those who entered employment earlier might actually have a head start. In a rather cruel moment, Noro overhears Kanko tell her mother that university graduates like him are “boring” while simultaneously suggesting they take part back of the area he’s currently renting to rent out separately without reducing his rent so they can make more money. Her father, an accountant who’s ironically never made enough to pay tax, has made himself ill through overwork leaving them largely dependent on rental income. Kanko intends to continue to working after marriage, though expects that her husband will eventually be promoted to a position offering a salary that will support a family.

This is not a realistic prospect for Noro, who has now essentially been cast aside by the post-war society. His hopes of romantic fulfilment with Kanko have been dashed, exposing his vision for a rosy future as nothing more than a delusional fantasy. Caught between idealistic students who have been, like him, displaced in the new democratic era, and amoral capitalists like his former boss and landlady, he has little other choice but to retreat into the mist of an uncertain future. Unexplored subplots including a sleazy right-wing politician’s collusion with the bank manager, hint at a still murkier world of backroom deals ruled by self-interest that betrays the “democratic” ideals of the new society along with those of a man mild-mannered man like Noro who can only survive by embracing his troubles with good humour.

Scars of the Sun (太陽のきずあと, Chusei Sone, 1981)

Posted on by

In the mid-1950s, a moral panic erupted as the wartime generation found themselves horrified by the world of post-war youth. They resented a generation of bright young things who listened to jazz music in cafes they saw as living hedonistic lives filled with sex and drugs. The irony is that the so-called “Sun Tribe” movement was crystallised in the writings of Shintaro Ishihara, a conservative who later became a very right-wing governor of Tokyo. His brother Yujiro, one of the biggest stars of the post-war entertainment industry, was the face of the Sun Tribe onscreen starring in several of the short-lived genre’s key titles including Ko Nakahira’s Crazed Fruit.

Chusei Sone’s Scars of the Sun (太陽のきずあと, Taiyo no Kizuato) is a reinterpretation of the Sun Tribe movie for the era of high prosperity. Almost an adaptation of Nakahira’s film, it co-opts its central love triangle and ends with a similar sequence in which the hero, Shuhei (Kenichi Kaneda), uses his speedboat to attack a former associate who has stolen his younger brother’s girlfriend and humiliated him by exposing his impotence, both literal and figural. This time, however, Shuhei’s rival isn’t his biological brother but his best friend. Shuhei thinks that this is his gang, but in reality Karasawa (Satoshi Sadanaga) is running it. They just let Shuhei play the gang boss to make use of his wealth and status. 

There is also, however, a degree of homoerotic tension between Karasawa and Shuhei with the implication that Shuhei’s impotence with women is due to homosexuality. When Shuhei arranges for his father’s bar hostess lover (Yuko Katagiri) to be gang raped, Karasawa declines to participate. He says that he does this out of sympathy for Shuhei, sitting on the sofa with him and turning down the attentions of the gang’s moll Kanako. The pair later put a record on and slow dance around the room. Karasawa’s decision to take up with Kaori (Mirai Hayashi), the apparent girlfriend of Shuhei’s estranged brother Koji (Koji Tanaka), is then a triple betrayal. Not only does he defy the longstanding rule of the group that women be shared, but ignores Shuhei’s authority and deliberately wounds him to assert his own superiority.

In a way, Shuhei did something similar in having Mayumi raped, only it doesn’t really bother his father from whom he may have learned his lack of respect for women. Mogi (Ken Ogata) is an Ishihara-esque award-winning novelist who has written screeds about the youth of the day and claims to have a special educational method for raising his son while secretly using his money to cover up all of Shuhei’s indiscretions. Shuhei’s actions are then in some part rebellions against his hypocritical father whom he resents. His unexpected reunion with Koji, his younger brother whom he hasn’t seen for 11 years since his parents’ divorce, reawakens his desire to lead a more conventional family life, though he can’t resist the urge to sabotage it by bringing Koji into his seedy gang boss life as a means of pushing him away.

The implication is also that all of Shuhei’s problems are due to a lack of maternal input and his father’s many failures as a man and a parent. He doesn’t know how to deal with a corrupted parental legacy and is essentially looking for a way back to his mother (Kyoko Enami). When he finally decides to see her, he tidies himself up and puts on a smart suit, making a point of telling his mother not to worry about him because he’s doing okay and will visit again soon, though all the evidence suggests he may be planning to go somewhere from which there is no return. He says that he has erased his other self, in one sense meaning Karasawa as an embodiment of his dark side while seemingly wanting to escape his father’s hypocrisy and corrupted morals to return to a more wholesome domesticity represented by his absent mother. With a lack of parental boundaries or guidance from his father, Shuhei is ultimately thrown into the arms of another authority figure in the form of the police force, signalling the futility of his rebellion. Sone seems to set Shuhei apart in this world, creating vistas of emptiness around him that he childishly tries to fill with violence and transgression amid the vacuity of an age of excess only to discover nothing but loneliness and desperation. 

Scars of the Sun is available as part of the Chusei Sone Double Feature box set.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Kinki (近畿地方のある場所について, Koji Shiraishi, 2025)

Posted on by

“No one can be saved now” intones a victim of a curse having apparently accepted the futility of his situation. In Koji Shiraishi’s Kinki (近畿地方のある場所について, Kinki Chiho no aru basho ni tsuite), adapted from the writings by Sesuji later published in novel form, everything is indeed connected, though our heroes will spend the majority of the film trying to figure out how. Yet perhaps these breadcrumbs were dropped for someone to find, and in a certain kind of way the mystery in the end finds us no matter how we may try to hide from it or mistakenly believe that the truth will set us free.

A case in point, there are two mysteries in play. The first, the editor of a paranormal magazine has disappeared taking his laptop containing the draft of an upcoming article with him. His assistant, Ozawa (Eiji Akaso), calls in a freelance writer, Chihiro (Miho Kanno), to help him reconstruct the article using the materials Sayama (Atom Shukugawa) left behind. Finding Sayama is something of a secondary goal in that they are less interested in what happened to him and why he disappeared than they are in what he was investigating. They only want to find him to recover his article.

Yet the materials he left behind are strangely full of missing people and connected only by a series of strange images such as a woman jumping with her arms stretched out towards a tree, an eerie drawing of a figure under a torii gate with the symbols either for “woman” or “end” surrounding it, and references to local folklore that all point to the “certain place in the Kinki region” mentioned in the title. In the course of their investigation, Chihiro and Ozawa are also unwittingly exposing themselves to whatever Sayama may have seen, running the gamut from fragments of old TV programmes on worn VHS, to forgotten internet viral videos, and even a slightly creepy children’s animation based on a local folktale and intended to preserve local culture.

Perhaps some of these curses are indeed ridiculous. No one really believes in the power of a chain letter, as a gaggle of high school girls giggle over a viral text that says they’ll die if they don’t pass it on. But it’s hard to deny the eeriness that surrounds the disappearance of a ghost hunting vlogger who appears to have lost his mind after straying into an abandoned house, or the young student whose friend disappeared after watching a viral video titled “Watch this and die”. The young student later finds himself haunted too, but his attempt to enlist a Buddhist priest for help goes disastrously wrong, as does Chihiro’s to consult a psychic.

Whatever’s connecting this disparate series of strange events appears to be something dark and evil. But on the other hand, what lies behind it is maternal grief and the desire to reclaim something that has been lost. As part of their investigation, the pair come across a strange cult that promises its devotees that their loved ones will return if they worship their god. The local folktale, meanwhile, is about a heartbroken son who is devastated by the loss of his mother. A wizard who descends from heaven tells him that he cannot bring his mother back and should try to find a wife to ease his loneliness, which could he do by offering her a persimmon only no one is interested and he dies of loneliness. 

This might be the cause of the mysterious mantra “thank you for finding me” that is heard on several tapes, as if this presence, whatever it is, is happy to have been recognised though it otherwise spells doom for those coming into contact with it. It has, however, seemingly weaved its way into the fabric of society, pushing its way into the digital realm as a background presence in every creepy video that haunts the internet. “You could have warned me,” Chihiro exclaims after seeing something unpleasant in a video Ozawa played for her, but really there is no warning any more and you have no control when videos autoplay on your feed. Even if you choose not to look, they come at you from ubiquitous screens and short of going to live alone in the mountains, they’ve become impossible to avoid. For some, however, these disparate clues act like stepping stones towards a particular destination they will stop at nothing to reach. Yet the scariest thing of all may be that at the end of the trail there are no answers, only more questions, and a deepening sense of mystery in that which cannot be explained.

Kinki screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

BRAND NEW LOVE (Ryuichi Iwakura, 2025)

Posted on by

Are antique shops a sign of love enduring, or of our inability to let things go even when they may have outlived their usefulness? Whatever the answer, it’s the perfect place for the troubled couple at the centre of Ryuichi Iwakura’s Brand New Love to face a crisis in their fracturing relationship. The burden of forced politeness colliding with slowly accumulated resentment threatens to push the pair beyond breaking point, but at the same, perhaps they aren’t quite yet ready to part with an idealised vision of their past romance.

Then again, the distance between them is evident in the opening sequence in which Kenichi walks one way while Yuiko continues in another. Kenichi was evidently going the wrong way, at least in terms of their current destination, though Yuiko didn’t bother to tell him, instead waiting for Kenichi to figure it out for himself. Kenichi seems to be in a bad mood overall because they were supposed to be taking a trip for his birthday, their first in four years, but cancelled to help Yuiko’s uncle out tending his antique shop while he attends a wedding. 

It might be a bad omen that the uncle, Goro, is divorced and the pair are staying in his former family home where he hasn’t finished packing up his ex wife’s things. In any case, Yuiko’s rejection of Kenichi’s assumption they’d be sleeping in the same room seems to signal doom for the relationship from the outset. But unexpectedly it’s Yuiko who takes a shine to a pair of matching tea cups that to her come to symbolise the couple’s relationship. The cups have technically been sold to a woman who’s coming to pick up her order the following day, but Yuiko can’t seem to bear to part with them.

The film is at it’s most interesting in Yuiko’s interaction with the other woman, Rei, who originally bought the cups in Italy with the intention of giving them to her partner, though they broke up before she had a chance. She got rid of the cups because they’d lost their purpose, but now she wants them back again, not to reclaim the failed romance but as a means of looking towards a new one. She intends to keep the cups until she finds someone worth giving them to. But on hearing Yuiko say she wanted to give them to her boyfriend, Rei surrenders them to her. 

The gift does, in a way, begin to repair their relationship, but in the act of doing so becomes broken beyond repair. In what seems like an ongoing flirtation with Rei, Yuiko vows to stick the cup back together to show her and as a kind of apology, while Kenichi decides to leave town but is prevented from doing so by a train outage during which he meets a man mourning the loss of his grandfather. Kenichi perhaps insensitively suggests he sell his grandfather’s camera if he doesn’t know how to use it, perhaps to the antique shop, before taking a moment to reflect on what he’s said and perhaps on his decision to exit the relationship. 

The cup is eventually repaired, though in an unexpected and not altogether aesthetically pleasing way which seems to suggest that the couple may be locked into this otherwise unhappy relationship for the rest of their days. Despite having dangled the promise of a “brand new love” for Yuiko at least, the film’s closing moments suggest the title may be ironic. Or else, perhaps the pair really have managed to find their way back to each other and past all the petty resentments and little niggles that creep into a long-term relationship, though they haven’t really done much to resolve any of those issues so much as reflect they may not be ready to walk away. Making fantastic use of natural light and a claustrophobic 4:3 frame, Iwakura subtly explores the growing distance between the couple in their silences and barbed remarks along with a quiet yearning that runs underneath all the resentment and frustration until all that’s left is the desire to save something that may already be beyond saving.

BRAND NEW LOVE screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Gosh!! (THE オリバーな犬、(Gosh!!) このヤロウ MOVIE, Joe Odagiri, 2025)

Posted on by

The world is full of strange things, according to the canine hero of of Joe Odagiri’s surreal comedy. GOSH!! (THE オリバーな犬、(Gosh!!) このヤロウ MOVIE, THE Oliver na Inu, (Gosh!!) Kono Yaro MOVIE) Edited down from a TV series, the film takes place in a kind of Lynchian dream space in which once can embrace one’s inner desires, while in the ostensibly “normal”, everyday world, Odagiri himself stars as a foul-mouthed, lecherous police dog burdened by the legacy of his legendary father whose disappearance remains unsolved. 

In another way, perhaps Oliver’s animalistic antics are a mirror for his handler Aoba’s (Sosuke Ikematsu) repressed desires or rebellion against his straight-laced personality. Describing himself as someone with a strong sense of justice, Aoba’s initial attempts to find his feet as an ordinary street cop were hamstrung by his clumsiness. He became a police dog handler hoping to find the perfect partner with whom he could find the “firmest trust,” only to be saddled with Oliver. Nevertheless, his ability to see him as a middle-aged deadbeat in a dog suit he can converse with in human language suggests a kind of synchronicity between dog and handler as is later praised by trainer Hagoromo (Eri Fukatsu).

The disappearance of Oliver’s father Rudolph, however, is one of the film’s central mysteries and linked with that of “Super Volunteer” Konishi (Koichi Sato) who has gone missing while looking for missing persons. Konishi seems to have been a regular salaryman before being struck by some kind of cosmic force that linked him with Rudolph and causes him to occasionally behave like a dog, in contrast to Oliver’s behaving like a human. He also ends up lost in a kind of other world with Rudolph’s former handler Mizoguchi (Masatoshi Nagase) who has become a freelance reporter and is recruited by his niece to investigate a sighting of a “little old man fairy” a boy she runs into is trying to catch. 

Each of these incidents is linked by the sound of glass smashing which echoes that in the Red Room-like cabaret of the dream space and acts as a means of breaking the spell. Playing out as a series of surreal episodes connected by the presence of strange red doors leading to other worlds, there is a definite blurring of the real world and that of dreams along with a meta dimension that allows those trapped within it to question their reality. A policewoman (Kumiko Aso) wonders why the whole room suddenly embarked on an elaborate dance routine when she arrived to confront her father but has no real answer, abruptly returning to a more concrete reality. 

Her father, meanwhile, had wanted to share a part of himself hitherto hidden from her that we later see fulfilled in the dream space. While this dream world appears to be somewhere that repressed desires are fulfilled, it seems that it may not have a wholly positive effect and as Oliver warns us at the film’s conclusion, there may be some doors that are best left closed. Nevertheless, making several homages to David Lynch including the discovery of a severed ear, Odagiri conjures an atmosphere of strangeness and mystery that goes beyond the weirdness of humanoid of dogs and alternate realities in which everything is the same but everyone is obsessed with takoyaki.

To that extent, Aoba becomes a kind of straight man frustrated by all this weirdness but unable to restore order to the world around him or accept the parts of himself that Oliver reflects. In his opening interview, he refuses to accept his fate, disrupting the interviewer’s questions by stating that he does not believe that his destiny is to be a dog handler, not because he is being modest about his abilities, but fundamentally because he resents his present reality and thinks he deserves better than being shackled to Oliver. There is, however, more to this world than we can fully understand with its various absurdities in which everything is strangely connected and “distortions in spacetime” can have profound effects on us all. Though some of its obscurity may stem from the film’s TV series origins with several seemingly pivotal characters appearing only for a few moments, there is a genuine sense of mystery and unease to be found within the noirish world that exists beyond a door some may wish they had never opened.

Gosh!! screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Trailer (no subtitles)

The Origin of Ultraman (Yu Nakamura & Kazuki Yoshida, 2026) [Fantasia 2026]

Posted on by

Ultraman is one of Japan’s most recognisable cultural phenomena. Loved by generations of children, the landmark special effects-heavy drama has proved incredibly influential. Despite its title, Yu Nakamura and Kazuki Yoshida’s documentary The Origin of Ultraman isn’t actually as much interested in the franchise’s history as it is in its reception, focusing on the recollections of filmmakers and creatives from Japan and beyond discussing what Ultraman meant to them.

In fact, the film is largely structured around a discussion between directors Hirokazu Koreeda and Guillermo Del Toro who find unexpected commonality in the reception of Ultraman in Japan and Mexico respectively. Nevertheless, one of the drawbacks of this approach is that it unwittingly adopts a US-centric sensibility in contrasting the lack of cultural impact the series has had in America with that in other areas of the world, while later somewhat contradicting itself in featuring discussions with the American directors of the Netflix-produced US animation Ultraman: Rising.

Though the insights provided by Del Toro in particular are often interesting, the film is at its best when focusing on those who actually worked on the series and were involved with its original run in the mid-1960s. One of the reasons for the franchise’s success seems to have been the determination of everyone involved to create something that felt real and authentic. No one was interested in writing the show off as disposable entertainment for children, but rather precisely because it was aimed largely at a younger audience, the creative team were universally focused on providing high-quality entertainment. 

Nevertheless, despite Eiji Tsuburaya’s admiration for the stop motion techniques he so admired in the Hollywood movie King Kong, the decision to use humans in suits was born of the realities of television production in Japan. Incredibly tights budgets and production schedules simply would not allow for a complex and time-consuming process such as stop motion. Instead, they used Tsubuyara’s iconic talent with miniatures to provide a sense of reality.

The film suggests that this sense of conviction in their work stems from the fact that, Eiji Tsuburaya aside, most of the creatives behind the creation of Ultraman were born in 1930s and had spent their childhoods against the backdrop of the war. They were interested in sending a more idealistic vision to the next generation of children that was about goodness and harmony. Nevertheless, despite their experiences and anti-war stance, they still had an admiration for the machinery of warfare and were attracted to the “coolness” of guns, tanks, and aeroplanes.

This contradiction is apparent in the Buddhist underpinnings of Ultraman’s design and the world that surrounds him. Ultraman then takes on a kind of divine presence representing “cosmos” in a constant battle with the “chaos” of the kaiju to maintain peace and balance in the universe. This duality is also reflected in his merging with the human Hayata and willingness to give up his own life to save him, eventually along with all mankind. Ultraman does not actually like fighting the kaiju and rarely kills them, while kaiju are not necessarily evil so much as just being what they are.

Del Toro suggests these themes as a reason why the show found an audience in Catholic Mexico it evidently didn’t in the predominantly Protestant United States. Monsters in American movies, he says, tend to be unnaturally oversized animals, in contrast to kaiju which often have more complex personalities and humanlike thought patterns. Which is to say they too have a quality of divinity or innocence. On discovering a kaiju graveyard, the decide to hold a Buddhist funeral for the fallen kaiju out of respect for their lives.

In other ways, however, the show was also a counter to the optimism represented by EXPO ’70 reflecting a degree of anxiety about scientific progress and the responsibilities that come with it. These dualities and contradictions seem to have struck a chord with post-war children who were drawn to the sense of safety and certainty Ultraman provided. Hideko Anno describes his encounter with the series as a kind of “curse”, realising that most of his work has just been in one way or another a reflection of Ultraman and that he is creatively unable to escape its influence. This may perhaps go someway to explaining the origin of Ultraman’s appeal as a force of unambiguous good in world that can, in other ways, seem random and chaotic.

The Origin of Ultraman screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

You Are the Film (君は映画, Makoto Ueda, 2026) [Fantasia 2026]

Posted on by

What if you went to see a film, but it was actually just a Zoom meeting with another person who thought they were there to see a film about you? That isn’t quite what happens in Makoto Ueda’s directorial debut You Are the Film (君は映画, Kimi wa Eiga), but it does take the protagonists longer than one would expect to stop suspending their disbelief, convinced that “a film” is conversing with them, and consider that they’re actually just watching a live feed of another person who is also watching them. 

But then again, the image reflected back at them from the screen is also a kind of wilful fantasy designed as both an escapist flight from an unsatisfying “reality” and a means of reframing their current dilemmas so that they can think about them more clearly. Effectively, it’s a way of realising what you might advise someone else to do in this situation, but wouldn’t actually consider doing yourself until you’re given this external vision of your own life. Ueda hints at this subtlety in the film’s opening sequence as he has playwright Madoka (Marika Ito) walk past a forked road representing a bifurcated reality, just as the film she’s going to see takes place directly adjacent to where she’s currently watching it, which is also the environment in which she spends the majority of her life. 

Both she and struggling musician Kazuma (Kai Inowaki) have enough in common to see themselves in the protagonist of the other film, and not just because Kazuma also inhabits this physical space too just on the other side of Madoka. He has a strained relationship with a band member and is so far failing to sell enough tickets for their upcoming concert. Madoka, meanwhile, has been offered the opportunity to put on a play at a larger, more prestigious venue but is feeling the pressure and struggling to complete her script. Despite what originally seems to be a very weird and uncanny situation, they eventually realise that they are able to help each other in a more direct way such as feeding back information about their respective “films” from the pamphlets they sell at the cinema.

But at the same time, the film seems to be in a way satirising these kinds of indie dramas or at least the sci-plot that develops on Madoka’s side is not that far away from the kind zany fringe theatre that troupes like hers often perform. In fact it’s even foreshadowed in the opening sequence as her co-stars seemingly play princess and retainer from another world mystified by the existence of a thermal tumbler, an apparent symbol of corporate oppression. Kazuma’s meanwhile spirals into an unlikely crime drama when his bandmate steals some money from a pair of counterfeiters which eventually exposes that the rock cafe he frequents is a front for an illegal gambling den run by an undercover gangster.

Despite these seemingly apocalyptic scenarios, what they learn is that they are able to change the script and eventually escape their own movie by transcending it, leading to the creation of a third movie starring those they left behind. It turns out that their friends are also yearning for escape in one way or another as Madoka’s friend Shiho has been offered a promising opportunity and secretly wants to move on, while the other actress sort of longs to escape by staying with the troupe but says she wants to leave as her parents have finally found out that she hasn’t been studying for the civil service exam after all. While watching these dramas play out Kazuma comes to his own realisations about his relationships with his bandmates, just Madoka begins to realise that all these desires must also be respected. If she wants to escape her movie, so does everyone else, and in order to be free she will have to let them go.

Nevertheless, each of them learn to embrace their status as the protagonist of their own lives with full authorial power to change the script, rejecting the meddling interference of some kind of engineer sent to rectify the “entanglement in filmspace” and get everyone back inside the right movie again. It turns out that you really are the film, and so is everyone else, but our realities aren’t as separate as they first seemed and we can still help each other out as we go along rather than remaining passive spectators within our own lives and those of others.

You Are the Film screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Specials (スペシャルズ, Eiji Uchida, 2026) [Fantasia 2026]

Posted on by

Times are hard for yakuza these days. Nevertheless, it seems there’s still a little of the old spirit left in Eiji Uchida’s light-hearted caper The Specials (スペシャルズ) as an underling’s desire to make his boss’ dreams of ruling the city come true sees him enter the world of competitive dance. It’s a compelling hook, but at the same time a slightly mystifying one seeing as it’s never really explained why the assassins would need to form a dance troupe to knock off their target as opposed to just purchasing a ticket for the competition. Nor does it it explain why they want to shoot him from the stage rather than discretely injecting him with something from behind to make it look like a heart attack. And all of that aside, couldn’t they just kill him during his granddaughter’s dance rather than actually having to perform as part as part of the show?

Granted, it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but as the gang are repeatedly told it’s not all about skill, passion counts for something. The main problem is that elderly rival boss Honjo seems to have an endless supply of henchmen who kind of look like him and are prepared to die in his place. The only time they can be sure it’s the real Honjo is when he attends his adult granddaughter’s dance competitions, which is why Kumashiro hits on the improbable idea of hiring a trio of assassins he believes has dance experience and getting them to enter in return for a huge reward. 

It doesn’t all quite go to plan, mainly because two of the assassins he picks are dealing with dance-related childhood trauma. The main man, Daiya, has retired from the hitman game and is currently working as a helper at an orphanage. He only agrees because the landlord’s trying to evict them so he can build luxury apartments there instead and they need money to buy the building back. The ironic thing is that one of the little girls there, Asuka, dreams of becoming a dancer. After the gang is kicked out of every dance school in the area due to their gloominess and emotional volatility, Asuka ends up becoming their coach. While there is something endearingly funny about the idea of these ice-cold tough guys being bossed around by a 10-year-old girl, there’s also an ethical issue that no one’s really considered yet given they’ve been lying to her about their true nature as killers for hire. Asuka will obviously want to be there if they make the final, and they don’t want to let her down but nor do they want her to witness them firing bullets from the stage to murder an old man and possibly a few others on the way given that this isn’t the most precise assassination plan.

Nevertheless, dance proves a liberating experience for all and as time moves on, most of the guys have sort of forgotten about their mission and are focussed instead of competition-winning glory. Even Kumashiro’s ambitious boss remarks that he seems different these days, somehow happier having traded his stern yakuza expression for something more friendly, which might not altogether be a good thing for his working life. The various assassins, who were accustomed to working alone, have now warmed to the idea of being part of a team and to a certain extent at least, it’s no longer purely about the money or achieving any of their singular goals. 

Then again, it says something that the ones who suffer most are old-school yakuza like Kumashiro and his prison buddy Murasame (played by V-cinema yakuza movie star Hitoshi Ozawa) who can literally only dance to old tunes and unlike the youngsters find it difficult to adapt to this more modern world in which things like loyalty have become “old-fashioned,” in the words of sullen hitman Kiryu. Though the tonal shift of the film’s unexpected final sequence may undercut the feel good quality of what is essentially a zany post-yakuza comedy that as much as possible glosses over the bloody reality, it does at least allow the gang to fulfil their mission in a more satisfying way that suggests loyalty may not be such an outdated idea after all.

The Specials screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Tokyo Burst: Crime City (TOKYO BURST-犯罪都市-, Eiji Uchida, 2026) [Fantasia 2026]

Posted on by

Ma Dong-seok’s popular Roundup series has a rather convoluted history in terms of its titling. The first film was screened under the literal translated title “Crime City” before being retitled with the ironic “The Outlaws” while all subsequent instalments in the series have adopted the title of the first sequel. Nevertheless, this Japanese spin-off set in 2015 which is two years before the first film’s release, comes with the subtitle “Crime City” and though a Korean co-production does not actually feature Ma Dong-seok but rather attempts to tell a similar story set in the world of Kabukicho.

Which is to say that it takes its equally from delinquent high school manga such as Be Bop High School which is name checked within the film rather than the maverick cop hamstrung by bureaucracy trope that lies at the centre of the Korean series. Though The Roundup may itself have become increasingly less gritty as the series continues to expand, it largely remains grounded within a more concrete reality which is not really something you can say about Tokyo Burst: Crime City even if does hint at the ways in which the crackdown on yakuza has accidentally led other kinds of organised crime groups flourishing.

In this case, that would the incongruity of a crime syndicate led by a greedy host who heads the club Dreaming and presses those who work for him into petty crime if they can’t make their onerous quotas. In general, the stereotypical image of a “host” who earns money by drinking with women in dedicated bars, is of someone slightly effeminate and sensitive. Their livelihood depends on at least appearing non-threatening while providing the illusion of unconditional love and acceptance to their customers while also perhaps coming across as young, vulnerable, and in need of looking after. Though legislation has now been brought in to help stop hosts exploiting women financially until the point that they force them into sex work, the kind of masculinity they present is gentle and non-violent, which makes them a surprising presence in the ruthless world of organised crime.

Yet as is explained to Korean detective Si-won the major difference between the two nations is the extent to which police build relationships with underworld figures in order manage rather than eradicate crime in order to prevent large-scale violence breaking out, though Ma had also been doing something similar in the first Roundup film. The political corruption angle so common in Korean films in which the sons of chaebol families are effectively above the law plays a less well in the Japanese setting while a subplot about a land rights for casino construction,  and upcoming election, the thuggishness of the Deputy Prime Minister’s son, and their collaboration with organised crime facilitated by the familiar face of Ma’s sometime sidekick Jang Yi-soo, seems underdeveloped and impossible to take seriously given the film’s cartoonish tone.

Nevertheless, The Roundup’s uncomfortable tendency to make light of police brutality is fully carried over as violent cop Shiro actively covers up security cameras to interrogate suspects, while the police are also guilty of making use of connections to speed up or frustrate justice. They are otherwise a comically bumbling bunch as is yakuza boss hold-out Iwaki frustrated at the loss of his turf to the host club upstarts. Shiro stands somewhere in the middle as a bruiser cop with a strong sense of justice but perhaps not so much ethics. Nevertheless, he eventually bonds with his new Korean partner through singing Linda, Linda at karaoke while becoming invested in his quest to catch those responsible for his late partner’s murder before they return to the safety of Korea where they are otherwise above the law. Despite the overarching silliness, there is an endearing sense of lived-in community in the Kabuchiko environment of which Shiro is at the very centre and even if the film refuses to take anything else to seriously, it does at least commit to the ferocity and carnage of its intermittent action scenes.

Tokyo Burst: Crime City screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)