Category: Japan

009 Re:Cyborg

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Cyborg 009 by Shotaro Ishinomori is one of the most widely read and well regarded manga series in Japan. It has been adapted as an anime movie and TV series several times, most recently in 2001 where it ran for fifty-one episodes. Although the manga dealt with some complex themes, most of these adaptations had leant decidedly to the family friendly with the team of nine cyborgs squaring off against various deadly enemies and saving the world week after week. For this new adaptation, however, director Kenji Kamiyama – the creator of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Eden of the East and Moribito, famed for his willingness to engage mature, topical subject matter has decided to take the film back to the manga’s darker heart.

This is a world of mass destruction, sky scrapers fall, buildings explode, people run and scream yet it is normalised – this is the way of the world. Joe Shimamura is a bored high school student who feels as if he’s living his life in repetition. Recently he’s begun to hear a voice – His Voice that’s offering him a new purpose and a new path if he will only follow it. Follow it he must though what His Voice is asking him to do is something truly abhorrent. Thankfully, before he can accomplish the task he’s been charged with, a large Native American turns up and begins to beat the stuffing out of him seemingly with the guidance of a French woman giving instructions from an aircraft hovering above. Luckily for all concerned, Shimamura’s survival instincts kick back in and he remembers his true identity just in time to catch said French woman after she’s rather riskily jumped out of her plane. Shimamura isn’t a high school student at all, he’s the head of a nine cyborg crime fighting team and there’s something very wrong in the world. His Voice is reaching more and more people and convincing them to do awful things in His name – who is He, what does He want and how are they going to stop him?

It’s a truly international cast with each of the cyborgs representing a different nation – 001 Ivan (Russia), 002 Jet (America), 003 François (France), 004  Heinrich (Germany), 005 Geronimo (Native American), 006 Changku (China) 007 Great Britain (British), 008 Pyunma (Africa), 009 Joe Shimamura (Japan). Tellingly, Jet and Shimamura have had some kind of bust up prior to the action of the film and tension still lingers – is America behind these attacks? Why are the NSA so suspiciously present and why does it seem they’re so keen to scapegoat the cyborgs as a terrorist group? Can Jet still be trusted or has he become involved with this dark plot? If the team are going to succeed in figuring out just what is going on its going to need an awful lot of international cooperation.

A familiarity with the source material doesn’t feel a necessity whilst watching the film, however though those cognisant of Kamiyama’s typically complex themes may feel a lack of depth in some of the imagery used. Christian religious allusions abound with fossilised angels and biblical sounding pronouncements from our unknown assailant but the overarching mythology is never really addressed or explained in any significantly explicit manner. Despite this the dialogue sometimes leans towards clunkyness overloaded with the weight of complicated exposition. The lack of clarity in the cosmology at play may leave some scratching their heads as the film ends in its rather ambiguous fashion, few would deny though that it’s been fun getting there.

Alongside its cerebral offerings 009 Re: Cyborg also serves up its fair share of pedal to the floor action sequences. Making the most of its 3D production and accompanied by Kenji Kawai’s energetic score the film succeeds in providing some genuinely thrilling set pieces. The use of 3D here is truly inspired and provides a welcome level of depth and inclusivity which showcases the best use of the medium. Though it wears its 3D badge proudly, the animation has been rendered with a 2D, cel shaded look much favoured by Production I.G. in the past.  It may look hand drawn but it has of course been created with computer technology – this has its benefits but more than a few costs. Though the look of the piece is striking, the computerisation is at times overly obvious and detracts from the otherwise traditional aesthetic. Characters sometimes move oddly or lack expression – which might be accounted for when concerning the cyborgs themselves but is less easy to explain away when it occurs with characters intended to appear 100% human. Still, these are minor problems and if one is able to adjust to the stylisation of the film they shouldn’t overly effect the enjoyment of it.

009 Re: Cyborg is not without its faults but it is still a very enjoyable experience. Its use of 3D, unusual visual style and innovative technology mark it out as essential viewing for anyone interested in the future of anime film making. Fans of Kamiyama’s previous work may feel short changed that the confined format of a feature film hasn’t allowed him free reign to fully explore his complex ideas yet what 009 has provided is the opportunity to showcase his talents as a director whilst crafting an entertaining and intelligent action extravaganza.

Rebirth (Youkame no semi) 八日目の蝉

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高解像度寒霞渓First of the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme for this year up on UK-Anime.net. I’m going to do a general round-up later in the week but this was the best of the (impressive) bunch.

Kiwako has been having an affair with a married man who swears he’s going to leave his wife (just not right now) but now things have come to a head as she finds out she’s carrying his child. Despite her being desperately happy and excited about it – planning to call the child Kaoru and designing visions of the a domestic bliss, Kiwako’s married lover is decidedly less enthusiastic and persuades her to opt for a termination. However, complications from the procedure leave her unable to have any more children and she also begins being harassed by her lover’s wife who finally turns up on her doorstep one day, heavily pregnant, to taunt her – going so far as to remark that her ‘barren womb’ is a direct result of her immoral relations with her husband. One day Kiwako just snaps and in an act of madness abducts her lover’s newborn baby and raises the child as her own for four years until she is finally caught.

In the present day, Erina – who was Kaoru, raised by Kiwako for the first four years of her life, has grown up and is in college. She is deeply scarred by the traumatic events of her early childhood and seems to have difficulty with forming relationships with people, not that she seems to want to make any. After being returned to her birth parents she struggled to adapt to her new life and her birth parents struggled to come terms with everything that had happened. Now, as a young woman, Erina finds history begin to repeat itself in more ways than one and she’s forced to consider who she really is and what she wants out of life. In order to do that, she’ll finally have to confront her traumatic past and all of the complex questions and emotions that will inevitably arise.

In a Chalk Circle-esque way, Rebirth wants to ask a lot of questions about motherhood. Who is the mother of this child really? The woman who gave birth to it or the one who has cared for it all its life and who the child regards as its parent? It is obviously a terrible situation for all involved – the birth parents have lost their child, something truly awful, but the child now believes her abductor to be her mother and ‘returning’ her to a pair of ‘strangers’ she has no recollection of is beyond cruel. Being cruelly ripped away from everything she knew would be traumatic enough, let alone being dragged away from her ‘mother’ in a car park late at night and bundled into car by a harsh woman who tells her she’s being taken to her ‘mummy’ when her total understanding of that word is being handcuffed and taken away.

At only four years old you might think she’d be young enough to gradually ease back into her birth family, and you might be right had her natural parents been better equipt themselves to cope with the situation. Erina’s mother is very definitely of the ‘carry on as if nothing happened’ school so any allusion to the first four years of the girl’s life provokes a hysterical fit that only further exacerbates the confusion already ripping apart the poor child’s soul. So jealous is she that she’s effectively projecting all her resentment and bitterness towards Kiwako’s actions onto the child itself – as if she can’t forgive her for the crime of growing older or having spent so much time with the other woman. The child is a reminder of the trauma of its disappearance, of her husband’s infidelity, and subsequently of her own fear of not measuring up as a mother.

Izuru Narushima has crafted an intense and deeply layered character study that neatly sidesteps the risk of becoming as overblown or melodramatic as the plot description might sound. He approaches the subject matter with great sensitivity and with as even a hand as is humanly possible. His camera is incredibly non-judgemental and treats each of the characters with the same level of sympathy and understanding. Surprisingly, it is the birth parents that become the most difficult to sympathise with but even they are presented with a great deal of compassion.

Rebirth is certainly a very complex film that raises all sorts of uncomfortable moral questions from the nature of motherhood to the treatment of the women of society. If I had one criticism it would be that the male characters don’t come out of this well at all – which may be slightly unfair given the deliberate similarity between the two prominent male characters, but certainly the portrait it paints of masculinity is far from flattering. The performances are astounding, particularly those of Mao Inoue (probably still best known for Hana Yori Dango) as the damaged Erina and Hiromi Nagasaku as the desperately maternal Kiwako. Excellently shot and fantastically well conceived Rebirth is one of the best Japanese films of recent times.

I Wish (Kiseki) 奇跡

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Review up over at UK-A for the latest Kore-eda  to fetch up on out shores. Well, actually, I reviewed this at the LFF in 2011 as well but I like to think I’ve come on as a writer since then (maybe not though, oh well, I still have a ways to go). If this is playing anywhere near you I very much urge you to go and see it even if just to show there is still an audience out there for seeing Asian films in the cinema. It’s a great movie though!

Dragon Head (ドラゴンヘッド, Joji Iida, 2013)

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Judging from the scene that surrounds Teru (Satoshi Tsumabuki) as he struggles to open his eyes, he’s either just waking up after the best party ever or something truly awful must have occurred. Where is he? Feeling around it seems like there are a lot of seats – a plane, or a train? Yes, a train. He remembers being on some kind of trip with his school mates – they were all on the train together so where is everyone? Struggling to get up, stumbling against walls he finds them – dead, all dead. Seemingly the only survivor of some kind of accident, Teru tries to get off the train to find out what’s happened and look for other survivors. It seems the train is trapped in a tunnel, both ends blocked by fallen rubble. Beginning to fear he really is all alone he comes across another boy perched in the window of an adjacent carriage. Small relief however as Nobuo (Takayuki Yamada) seems to be acting very strangely and muttering on about red lights and embracing the darkness. Evading him leads Teru further along the train where he finds another survivor, a girl – Ako, desperately hiding from Nobuo after witnessing him completely losing control whilst looking for survivors.

You might think this is where our three plucky teenagers club together to figure out how to escape the train wreck and get home, but no this is not that type of film. Quicker than you can say Lord of the Flies, Nobuo has gone completely crazy – painting a strange grin on his face with some lipstick he found and dotting his his chest with it too, he even makes a makeshift spear go with with new tribal outfit as a sort of dedicatory effort to his new red light god. He’s very much of the opinion that this stretch of tunnel is the only safe space left on earth and its three inhabitants have inherited a new eden, if they’d just learn to accept it. Teru and Ako though, clearly terrified by Nobuo’s transformation, do little other than wait for help to arrive. When serious tremors start to shake the tunnel and they no longer have any choice but to act they finally manage to climb out through a supply tunnel. What they find on the other side though is a vast desert of ash – all visible signs of human civilisation have been destroyed and they seem to be alone in the world.

Dragon Head is a bleak, seventies style post-apocolyptic drama in which our ‘heroes’ discover that the threads that hold society together are incredibly weak and snap the moment the slightest pressure is placed upon them. Without spoiling too much, we never find out exactly what it is that has happened, only that whatever it was caused people to turn on each other in a terrible fashion and those few who have survived only want to forget. During in their travels our, frankly unbelievably clueless and incredibly lucky, duo come across a town full of men who’ve decided not to go on and don’t want anyone else to either; mercenary soldiers with dubious motivations; a pair of strange brothers who’ve been surgically altered to remove all trace of fear and sadness and myriad other examples of humanity’s darkest places.

In facing the successive crises, it has to be said that Teru and Ako are not exactly survival buffs. They react to each new situation in what might be termed a realistic fashion as far as two teenagers faced with seemingly impossible odds would do. Largely this means there is a fair amount of panic, crying, blind stumbling and a the recurrent idea of simply giving up. This realistic portrayal of ordinary people caught up in an extreme situation is quite refreshing and a direct contrast to the super smart, seemingly indestructible, level headed teens you often find in such movies. However, the vulnerability of the central couple may also be turn off those viewers who find them simply too whiny and wonder why they don’t get on with trying to find a better way to survive.

For what was seemingly quite a low budget picture shot on early digital, Dragon Head features some very impressive visuals. Making use of old school techniques like matte paintings alongside CG effects, the post apocalyptic landscape is rendered in an extremely convincing way and this is certainly one of those films that has made the best of what it had. In fact it benefits greatly from not relying on CGI to the extent other films of its era often did and so appears much less dated in comparison. Its real world effects and attention to detail mark it well above the some of the big budget disaster epics that began to appear around the turn of the century and help it become much more engaging as a result.

Dragon Head is not without its faults – it’s based on a manga which lends it an episodic structure which isn’t always conducive to good cinematic story storytelling. It’s also possible that some of the overarching mythology which isn’t really explored during the course of the film is more fully explained in the manga (not to mention the Seventies style ending) but really these are small problems. Dragon Head turns out to be much more impressive than you’d originally think it would be and offers a refreshing dose of bleakness that’s been absent from our screens for much too long.

Reviewed on R2 Japanese DVD release

The Foreign Duck, The Native Duck and God in a Coin Locker (アヒルと鴨のコインロッカー, Yoshihiro Nakamura, 2007)

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YgoLt - ImgurReview of The Foreign Duck, The Native Duck and God in a Coin Locker over at uk-anime.net I really enjoyed this one – great movie!

Director Yoshihiro Nakamura once again returns with another adaptation of a Kotaro Isaka novel, The Foreign Duck, The Native Duck and God in a Coin Locker (アヒルと鴨のコインロッカー, Ahiru to Kamo no Coin Locker). Having previously adapted Fish Story (also available from Third Window in the UK and itself a very fine film) and Golden Slumber, Nakamura and Isaka seem to have formed a very effective working relationship and this latest effort is another very welcome instalment from the duo. Elliptical, melancholic and thought provoking The Foreign Duck, The Native Duck and God in a Coin Locker is a minor gem and every bit as whimsical as its name would suggest.

Shiina (Gaku Hamada) has just left the small town shoe shop his parents own to study law in Sendai. Moving into his new apartment he attracts the attention of his neighbour, Kawasaki (Eita), who overhears him signing Bob Dylan’s Blowing in the Wind. Kawasaki is himself a great admirer of Dylan remarking that his is ‘the voice of God’. Aloof, cold, at once dominating and indifferent the prospect of developing a friendship with the mild mannered, short and shy Shiina seems an odd one but nevertheless the two seem to develop a bond. Kawasaki therefore proposes Shiina help him with a rather peculiar problem.

Shiina’s other neighbour, who rudely rebuffed Shina’s introduction and moving in present, is apparently a foreigner – Bhutanese to be precise – and although speaks fluent Japanese cannot read. He’s particularly perplexed by the different between ‘ahiru’ – the native duck, and ‘kamo’ – the foreign duck, and is sure that if he had a good dictionary he’d be able to understand the two fully and thus perfect his Japanese. To this end Kawasaki has decided to steal a Kanji Garden Dictionary for him and wants Shiina to help. Understandably confused Shiina originally declines but is soon bamboozled into helping anyway. There’s a lot more to all of this than a simple semantic quandary though and the only thing that’s clear is that Shiina has gone and gotten himself embroiled in someone else’s story.

‘That sounds like something you just made up’ is one of the first things Shiina says to Kawasaki and indeed everything about him seems studied or affected in someway as if he were reciting someone else’s lines – essentially performing the role of himself. Half of the crazy stuff he comes up with, like his warning Shiina to avoid a particular pet shop owner completely out of the blue, sounds as if he’s just invented it on the spot for a laugh were it not for his distant and humourless manner. Without spoiling the plot too much, you start to get the feeling that there’s really something slightly off about everything you’re being told, that crazy as it seems it is the truth in one sense but perhaps not in another. This is where the mystery element of the film begins to kick in – who is Kawasaki really? What is he on about? Is any of this really happening?

Wistful in tone, The Foreign Duck, The Native Duck and God in a Coin Locker is only partly a mystery, it’s also a bittersweet coming of age tale and an, admittedly light, examination of the Japanese attitude to foreignness. Away from home for the first time Shiina is obviously keen to strike out on his own and be his own his own person but at the same time wants to fit in and be liked by his classmates. A particularly telling incident occurs when a confused Indian woman tries to get some information at a bus stop only to be ignored by those waiting. Shiina seems to feel as if he ought to help her but having just heard two of his classmates complaining about ‘stupid foreigners’ does nothing. Feeling guilty he tries to reach out to his Bhutanese neighbour but is again rebuffed. Kawasaki wants to know the difference between the foreign duck and the native one – is there such a fundamental difference? As one character says ‘you wouldn’t have talked to me if you’d known I was a foreigner’ ‘Of course I would’ Shiina replies ‘no, you wouldn’t have’ his friend responds with resignation. Isn’t it better to just help those who need it, whoever or whatever they happen to be?

The Foreign Duck, The Native Duck and God in a Coin Locker maybe a little darker than its title suggests but its tone is definitely to the wistful/whimsical side – this juxtaposition might irritate some who’d rather a more straightforward mystery or a lighter, more conventional comedy but its refusal to conform is precisely what makes it so charming. That it also manages to pack in a decent amount of social commentary in an interesting way is to its credit as is its ability to make the totally bizarre seem perfectly natural. The Foreign Duck, the Native Duck and God in a Coin locker is another impressive feature from the creators of Fish Story and fans of that earlier film will certainly not be disappointed by their latest work.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

For Love’s Sake (Ai to Makoto) – LFF 2012

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Please click through to read my review of Ai to Makoto on uk-anime-net

I know, two links in a row, I’m so sorry! More original content coming soon, I promise (probably). The movie’s awesome though, a total delight!

Updates! (or Lack Of)

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I guess I haven’t been updating this blog as much as I should; I’m going to be trying to rectify but that but part of the reason is that I’ve been writing for UK-anime.net reviewing Live Action Asian cinema for about a year now so a lot of things that might have been here have been there! I’m going to try to remember to link them all here (as long as the good folks at uk-anime don’t mind) but here are a few recent ones:

Blu Ray:

Tetsuo: The Iron Man / Tetsuo 2: Body Hammer

Lady Snowblood

Festival Coverage:

Zipangu Fest 2012:

Raindance 2012:

Hopefully I’ll be able to keep this a bit more current! Anyway, in the meantime, here’s a trailer for Third Window Films’ Tetsuo release which (as you can see from my review) is pretty much essential viewing!

Pandemonium (Shura)

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Matsumoto once said that if Funeral Parade of Roses was filmed in white, this was filmed in black. It’s certainly a very bleak and unsettling film with its dreamlike horror and sense of inevitability. The film begins with a sort of vision sequence where the protagonist comes home to find a tangled mess of body parts, followed by bodies, followed by the lifeless corpse of the woman he loves and a man hanging from the ceiling. Later he is visited by a former servant who’s arrived with the news that 47 of his fellow samurai (yep, THAT 47) plan to rise against their cruel master and that his former serfs and peasant folk have clubbed together and raised the money for him to take his rightful place alongside them.

Overcome with joy and relief Gengobe takes the money and pledges to go to the town the next morning and join his comrades. However, he’s also gotten himself mixed up with a courtesan who has other ideas and urges Gengobe to spend this money on her freedom so that they might marry. At first Gengobe sticks to his duty but fearing for the courtesan’s life he gives in and squanders the money on her. Of course, as it turns out there’s more to this woman and her, er pimp?, than first thought. Gengobe has been conned out of the money so many people made big sacrifices to get him and now there’s no way he’ll be able to fulfill his samurai duties. Hurt, humiliated, ruined, Gengobe has nothing left to live for and this pushes him into a dangerous mania for revenge that trails behind him a wake of scattered corpses.

Chilling. Somehow the atmosphere of this film is so completely unsettling you feel the cold rising through your bones just sitting in the cinema seats. There’s no other word for the world of this film than hell. It’s not a horror film, it’s not the violence or the blood that’s upsetting, it’s the sheer oppressive atmosphere of despair. A claustrophobia of fate. It’s this that stays with you, an odd feeling of inevitable doom.

Not a pleasant a film to watch then, but a very impressive one.

A Man Vanishes

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Imamura’s A Man Vanishes starts out as a documentary surrounding the disappearance of a plastics salesman but eventually becomes a discourse on truth, reality and cinema. We begin in documentary fashion by paying a visit to the police station and having the details of the missing man related to us. We then hear from the man’s fiancée who it seems is very keen to find him, and his family who are worried but also hurt and disappointed. It transpires that Oshima, the absent centre of the film, had many secrets those closest to him did not know. He had previously been suspended from his place of work for embezzlement, though the money had been repaid and the matter settled. He was also a drinker and according to his friends had been expressing doubts about his planned marriage, either because he did not want to marry or because he disapproved of his future sister-in-law’s supposedly ‘immoral’ lifestyle. There is also a rumour he’d been having an affair with a waitress which resulted in a pregnancy.

All this information uncovered and still no real clue as to Oshima’s whereabouts, Imamura takes the bold step of deciding to put the fiancée on television. After this things start to change, the fiancee seems to have lost her zeal to find her intended and, as it turns out, has developed feelings for the interviewer on the documentary (who is actually an actor). Shortly after this they visit a kind of spirit medium who claims the future sister-in-law has poisoned Oshima and disposed of the body because she too was in love with him and did not wish to share.

This ultimately leads to a showdown in a tea house in which the fiancée confronts her sister with the evidence so far and seems unwilling to believe her denials. Except at the climactic moment Imamura orders the set to come down around them and we see they’re just in a pretend tea house room in the middle of a soundstage. This ‘reality’ was fabricated, and other filmmakers will come here to make their fictional truths or untruthful realities. We thought we were watching fact, but it was a construction.

The final scene of the film then follows this up further, Imamura announces what we’re watching is a reconstruction, a fiction, as a man swears he saw Oshima going up the stairs with the sister, which she flatly denies. Another witness then shows up and reaffirms his testimony about having seen Oshima and the sister, and the debate continues with some of the participants becoming quite irate. Can we believe anything we’re seeing here, what or how much of this is truth? What is truth anyway, what is reality?

Was there a man who vanished, are these the people in the his life? If they are, are they themselves or have they begun to play versions of themselves more suited to film? Imamura later said this film might more rightly have been called ‘When a Woman Becomes an Actress’, and it is true that you can see a definite change in the fiancée after her television appearance. Or can you, is it just the way Imamura presents it or has the change really taken places since the woman became a ‘character’ watched by the TV audience? Just as we’ve been unable to reconstruct a accurate picture of Oshima through the descriptions of those who knew him, our vision of the major players, the fiancée and her sister is also clouded by Imamura’s presence.

Imamura’s assertions that objective documentary making is pointless and that greater truth can be displayed through fictional film making are carried right the way through the film. What you largely have are ideas which are then reconstructed by the film maker in the editing suite. It’s a document of real people and real lives but only from one perspective. Fictional film making, in Imamura’s view, is better able to articulate human truths than this patching together of material which cannot be a fully accurate representation.

A Man Vanishes is one of Imamura’s most intriguing films but nevertheless has been unavailable with English subtitles for a long time. Thankfully Masters of Cinema will be releasing a new version on DVD in a couple of months the viewing of which will, hopefully, help to clear things up a little (but then again, maybe not).

Funeral Parade of Roses

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An inverted retelling of Sophocle’ Oedipus, Funeral Parade of Roses has become a landmark in Gay Japanese Cinema. Eddie (geddit?), a transvestite living in Tokyo makes her money at a gay bar and has begun an affair with this boss. This has created an awkward situation with the boss’s ‘wife’ who runs the club and has become increasingly jealous and antagonistic towards Eddie.  Something from Eddie’s past is also haunting her and will turn out to have major repercussions for herself and others.

Funeral Parade of Roses is notable for its explicit detailing of 1960s gay life in Tokyo. Eddie and her friends have wild parties where they take drugs and discuss avant-garde films from America whilst watching distorted pictures of the student riots on the TV. The films even breaks with its narrative to interview various people, including a couple of the the actors, about gay life.

This is just one of many of the post-modern techniques that Matsumoto employs, often breaking up the narrative with vox pop sessions, inserted signs etc. He often repeats scenes or sections of scenes and sometimes breaks them off only to return at exactly that point later on. The overall timeline of the plot only becomes clear near the end when you’re able to piece these scenes together into a coherent narrative. An important and influential film, Funeral Parade of Roses is a must for fans of Japanese Cinema.