Kisarazu Cat's Eye: SAYONARA GAME is the sequel to the hit 2003 film Kisarazu Cat's Eye, that was in turn based on a cult hit TBS series about five madcap members of the Cats, an amateur baseball team in the seaside town of Kisarazu. Scripted by Kudo Kankuro (Go, Ping Pong) and directed by Kaneko Fuminori, the first film was a picaresque comic gumbo with the team's cancer-stricken leader, one Bussan (Okada Junichi), as its main ingredient. Told he has only six months to live, Bussan decides to go out in style, cramming all the wild-and-wacky action he can into his brief interval before eternity.
As the sequel begins, three years have passed since Bussan's untimely end, and the remaining four Cats have gone their separate ways. The sweet-faced Bambi (Sakurai Sho) is working as a minor bureaucrat for the city government when he hears Bussan's voice from the beyond, urging him to build a baseball field and promising to “come”.
Bambi goes in search of the frizzy-haired Master (Sato Ryuta), who has given up his pub in Kisarazu for a pushcart in Osaka, the blonde-haired Ani (Tsukamoto Takashi), who is bumming around Akihabara, and the spiky-haired Utchi (Okada Yoshinori), who has joined the Self-Defense Force and is thus spiky haired no more. At first skeptical of Bambi's story, the boys become believers - and determined to give Bussan a proper farewell.
Wackiness abounds, supplied by both the boys and the eccentric town folk, including Ozzy (Furuta Arata) an alcoholic homeless guy returned from the dead. But rather than ascend again to the loony heights of the first film, the sequel opts for milder forms of craziness, including a friendly team of American baseball-players-turned-zombies and a sexy, sadistic female drill sergeant (Kuriyama Chiaki).
It also tries, as the first film did not, for pathos - the Field of Dreams references are not for nothing. Like his five Cats, scriptwriter Kudo, the boy genius of Japanese films, is growing up. In other words, regardless of the box-office math, say sayonara to Part 3.