Child actors are everywhere in Japanese films and TV series today, the most famous being Ashida Mana, who memorably ran for her young life from kaiju (space monsters) in Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim. On the other hand, Japanese live-action films aimed at kids are relatively few. Far more common are anime targeting under-twelves, including ones featuring child heroes, such as the long-running Doraemon series.
Executive produced, co-written and co-directed by Ishii Katsuhito, Hello! Junichi is even more of a rarity in allowing its flesh-and-blood third graders to behave like real raucous kids, instead of shaping them into cute stereotypes. Also, instead of plunging them into fantastic adventures, as per the local kiddy-film formula, it plunks them into situations familiar to kids and former kids everywhere, from the thrill of first love to the exciting discovery of an abandoned skin mag in the riverbank weeds.
Hello! Junichi is something of a departure for Ishii, best known abroad for his wacky, high-powered genre mash-ups, beginning with Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl, his 1999 feature debut. But he also showed a more whimsical, child-centered side in The Taste of Tea, his 2004 family drama that features a lonely, imaginative girl who starts seeing her gigantic double everywhere.
The title hero of Hello! Junichi is ordinary enough, though on the shy and wimpy side compared with his boisterous pals. But there is also a spunky, even righteous side to Junichi (Kabe Amon), encouraged by his kindly, philosophizing grandfather, who tells the boy he is a “diamond who needs to be polished.”
Junichi’s biggest immediate problem, though, is what to do with an eraser lent by Maeda (Meina), his classroom crush. If he returns it, he loses a precious keepsake of a peak moment in his young life, but if he keeps it he becomes a promise breaker – and smaller in Maeda’s eyes.
While he is wrestling with this dilemma, a momentous event shakes his entire class: the arrival of Miss Anna (Mitsushima Hikari), a new student teacher. Waltzing into the classroom wearing heels, a mini-skirt and hair styled into long, sexy curls, she stuns all the boys, though the girls are not so impressed. When Anna rattles on about a weekend date as though she were confiding in her best friends, not a class of third graders, the tomboyish Tanaka (Sasaki Rio), angrily asks when they are going to start the math lesson.
Later, when her car in the school parking lot is keyed with the word “slut,” the enraged Anna becomes determined to find the perpetrator. Junichi has a clue – but not the courage to come forward.
This may sound like serious stuff – and it is, but Ishii and his co-directors keeps the tone mostly light, the energy level high – and the volume loud. This last may surprise those who think of Japanese kids as quiet, obedient sorts, but Junichi and his pals, whose conversations sound like shouting contests, are actually closer to the boisterous, boyish norm.
Also, many of the film’s grown-ups, from Anna to Junichi’s gawky classroom teacher (Morishita Yoshiyuki), may seem cartoonish, but Ishii and company are trying to entertain kids – and to nine-year-olds adults often look funny, scary, grotesque or some combination thereof.
But the film’s kids also encounter types, such as the friendly rock guitarist who lets them use his studio for band practice or the enraged store clerk who catches one of them shoplifting, who represent the real world in all its promise and danger.
So Hello! Junichi is something of a coming-of-age movie, though by its end Junichi and his friends are still kids, if ones who have learned and grown in ways both ordinary and extraordinary. The film itself, which ends with an infectious energy lift, is definitely the latter.
Mark Schilling