First begun as a cinema in Shinjuku (where Obayashi’s 8mm shorts had originally been screened), Art Theater Guild had morphed first into a distributor for foreign art films, and then into a production and later distribution company, teaming up with maverick directors to help them realize their artistic visions, free from the interference of the more commercially-minded movie studios. ATG, as it was known, produced some of the most enduring Japanese classics of the 1970s and 1980s.
Obayashi’s three films for them are no exception; they’re especially remarkable since ATG represented the alpha to producer Kadokawa Haruki’s omega, but it should come as no surprise that Obayashi was able to work simultaneously for both companies.
Obayashi’s first film for ATG was Exchange Students, also known under the unwieldy title I Are You, You Am Me (Tenkosei, 1982). It was produced between his first two Kadokawa films, retaining much of the flavor of those bigger-budgeted studio efforts.
Also set among high school students, it’s a
Freaky Friday-style body-swapping story that doesn’t shy away from the kind of sexual curiosity teenagers might actually have if they suddenly found themselves of the opposite gender.
Kazuo (Omi Toshinori) and Kazumi (Kobayashi Satomi) fall down a set of temple steps together, and wake up the next day to find that they’ve switched bodies; Kazuo is fascinated by his new budding breasts and Kazumi can’t believe the extra part she finds in her pants.
Until they can figure out how to return to their own bodies, they resolve to do their best with the unfortunate situation and some incredibly open-minded and prescient gender comedy results, with Kazuo being forced to find his feminine side and Kazumi doing her best tomboy routine.
Exchange Students is rightly considered one of Obayashi’s best films, and it deserves its reputation; it’s funny, a bit edgy, nostalgic and sentimental in just the right ways, and accessible to almost any type of audience, while lacking the kind of crazy special effects sequences that characterized some of his earlier films.
It also established the first of Obayashi’s well-regarded “Onomichi trilogies,” set in his hilly seaside hometown outside Hiroshima, and Obayashi’s career has since become inseparable from both the location and the films he shot there. Due to its enduring popularity, Obayashi remade the film himself in 2007 as Switching – Goodbye Me (Tenkosei – Sayonara Anata).