Miyazaki Hayao’s Spirited Away earned a record-shattering
US$230 million in Japan in 2001. But nothing of that order
occurred in 2002, and the Japanese film industry resumed
its long retreat in the face of Hollywood films. In 2002,
domestic films accounted for only 27 percent, or US$451
million, of total box office revenues. This compares with 39
percent in 2001.
Once again, most of the films at the top of the charts were
animations. Eight of these grossed more than one billion
yen (US$8.3 million). Most were new entries in long-running
franchises for children, like Detective Conan: The
Phantom of Baker Street, and Pokemon the Movie 2002:
Guardians of the Water Capital. One partial exception was
the latest film in the Crayon Shinchan series. Based on a TV
series about a sexually precocious, potty-mouthed fiveyear-
old and his eternally flustered parents, the film was
intended for adults as well as their offspring. Another was
Inu-Yasha the Movie: Feelings that Transcend Time, the
first film based on a popular manga and TV anime about
the half-demon hero’s search for magical jewels.
Heading the box office list was Studio Ghibli’s The Cat
Returns (Neko no Ongaeshi). Directed by Morita Hiroyuki,
under the supervision of Ghibli co-founder Miyazaki, The
Cat Returns is a follow-up to the 1985 film Whisper of the
Heart. The story, about a girl who finds herself in a kingdom
of cats and forced to marry a cat prince, has nothing
to do with the earlier film, however. The only connections
are two cats who appeared in Whisper of the Heart and
become the heroine’s allies in the new film.
The Cat Returns has its moments, including a breath-taking
free-fall sequence. But it’s also generic and plot-driven in a
way the best of Miyazaki is not. Fortunately, Miyazaki is
now making a new film, Howl’s Moving Castle. Based on a
1986 novel by British author Dianne Wynne Jones, it tells
the story of a girl transformed into a wizened crone by a
handsome young wizard who lives in a strange moving castle.
Advertised as Miyazaki’s first love story, it is set for a
summer 2004 release.
Among non-animated Japanese films, the biggest earner
last year was Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidora: Giant
Monsters All-Out Attack. Directed by Kaneko Shunsuke,
Japan’s current master of the monster and SF genre, the
film marked a return to the series’ roots. The Big G was
bad-tempered as he was in his original 1954 incarnation.
The film also had a fresh undercurrent of black humour
that it made more bearable for the adults. In one of the
more memorable scenes, a woman, catching sight of the
rampaging monster Baradon in the distance, poses her
uneasy hubby for the ultimate tourist snap. Then she sees
Godzilla glaring down at her from the mountain behind. The
kick that follows atomizes mountain, tourists and all.
In addition to the franchise entries, new trends and talents
have been emerging. But old favourites like the samurai
period drama have, against all odds, been reviving. Most of
the new films are by older directors, such as Shinoda
Masahiro (Owl’s Castle), Ichikawa Kon (Doraheita) and
Okamoto Kihachi (Vengeance Is Such a Great Business).
Ironically the director getting the most attention is Yamada Yoji, who made his reputation with the long-running Torasan
series. He filmed his first samurai drama, The Twilight
Samurai, only last year, after a four-decade career. Sanada
Hiroyuki stars as Seibei, a low-ranking samurai clerking in
a clan office and supporting his two daughters and senile
mother, when he falls in love with a childhood friend
(Miyazawa Rie) who has run away from a brutal husband.
Seibei later defeats the husband in a duel, using only a
wooden stick against his opponent’s sword. When the clan
elders learn of his skill, they send him to battle a clan
opponent (Tanaka Min) - a poor-but-proud samurai very
much like Seibei.
Sanada, a veteran action star who trained with Sonny
Chiba, brings a quiet conviction to the role of Seibei,
though his romance with Miyazawa is a tepid affair. In the
film’s big fight scene Sanada and celebrated Butoh dancer
Tanaka perform their dance of death with power and grace,
while connecting as comrades in injustice and misery. Their
duel is one of the best things Yamada has ever done - and
is one reason why the film has swept film awards in Japan.
Higher ranking on the box office chart, though rated as
one of the ten worst Japanese films of the year in the Eiga
Geijutsu magazine poll, was Horikawa Tonko’s Genji - A
Thousand Year Love. A romantic fiction reading of
Murasaki Shikibu classic The Tale of Genji, the film featured
gorgeous Heian-era frocks and a straight-faced performance
by former Takarazuka star Amami Yuki as the great
lover Genji.
Japan is famous internationally for the classic period dramas
of Kurosawa and Mizoguchi. But comedy is another
matter. Itami Juzo’s social satires The Funeral and A Taxing
Woman, as well as his Western parody Tampopo, made a
splash abroad in the Eighties, but there’s been relatively little
since. But now comedy has made a comeback. A leader
of the revival is Hirayama Hideyuki, whose black comedy
Out was selected as Japan’s 2002 Foreign Film Academy
Award nominee. Harada Mieko, Baisho Mitsuko, Muroi
Shigeru and Nishida Naomi star as women who work
together in a box lunch factory, but end up in the body disposal
business when the youngest strangles an abusive
husband. Despite its gruesome premise, the film is less a
revenge fantasy for frustrated women than a smart, funny
examination of human behaviour at its most extreme.
Last year Hirayama also released Laughing Frog, a comedy
about a marriage gone wrong, in which the wife has gains
the upper hand when her fugitive husband comes home
begging for shelter. Though even funnier than Out, it was
released on far fewer screens and got correspondingly less
attention from critics and audiences alike.
The comic drama that made the biggest box office splash
was Sori Fumihiko’s Ping Pong. Based on a manga compilation
by Matsumoto Taiyo, the film focusses on high school
ping pong players who are undergoing common adolescent
crises, but living in a hyper-charged, hyper-strange parallel
world. They play ping pong at mach speed, with comically
surreal CG effects highlighting the critical moments.
First-time director Sori, a CG whiz who apprenticed with
James Cameron, takes a discursive route to the obligatory
Big Match in the final reel, exploring the personalities,
philosophies and relationships of his heroes. Kubozuka
Yosuke, who swept acting awards last year for his performance
in Go, plays an angelic zany, with a pudding bowl
haircut and performance style reminiscent of Jim Carrey’s
in Dumb and Dumber. Co-star Arata, a model-turned-actor,
portrays a nerd who makes Woody Allen look like the
Optimist of the Year.
Television shows also spawned their share of comedies.
One was Morosawa Kazuyuki’s Leave It to the Nurses, a
slapstick affair, based on a hit Fuji TV show, about the
chaos that ensues when an armed man takes over a
nurse’s station at a busy hospital. Another was Tsutsumi
Yukihiko’s Trick, a film inspired by a late night show that
became a cult hit. A struggling magician (Nakama Yukie) is
recruited to pose as a “god” for the credulous residents of a remote mountain village. When she arrives, however, she
finds herself pitted against three other god candidates, all
con men, and learns the losers will not leave the mountain
alive. She is in a panic when a tall, scraggly-haired physicist
and former client (Abe Hiroshi) comes improbably to her
rescue. Enough to say that the life-or-death god contest is
good fun, especially if you enjoy solving puzzles that rely
more on brain power than smoke and mirrors. The complications
that ensue are far over the top, but the film never
loses its dry sardonic tone.
Also ranking high on the box office charts were films - contemporary
and period - that made extensive use of MTV
editing techniques and CG effects to lure a younger audiences.
Veteran Morita Yoshimitsu (The Family Game)
weighed in with Copycat Killer (Mohouhan), a thriller based
on a best-selling novel by Miyabe Miyuki. Nakai Masahiro of
the pop group SMAP and Fuji Takashi star as two long-time
friends and co-conspirators who turn to murder as a kind
of extreme sport, with aim of manipulating the media and
feeding their ravenous egos. The story begins intriguingly
enough, but it folds back on itself midway through - and
tells us more than we want to know about the killers and
their motives. Who would have guessed that an absence of
mother love is the root of all evil?
More consistent, if hardly more credible, is Returner,
Yamazaki Takashi’s SF thriller that might be described as
Leon meets A Better Tomorrow meets The Matrix meets
E.T. meets Alien meets Terminator. In short, a hodgepodge
of Hollywood movie samples with a kind of retro appeal, as
when an alien cargo plane morphs in mid-air into what
looks to be a giant hovering insect, clearly inspired by
transformer robots.
Hong Kong star Kaneshiro Takeshi plays an underworld
money collector or “returner” who, in the course of a particularly
violent assignment, encounters a girl from the year
2084. In the course of the obligatory street-smartstrangers-
become-buddies sequences, Miyamoto learns
that she has come to 2002 to kill an alien creature whose
spawn will launch a war of extermination on humanity.
Playing a blond-haired gangster who wants the creature for
his own nefarious purposes, Kishitani Goro struts and
sneers with a reptilian contempt for anything that moves,
human or alien - and single-handedly raises Returner
above the level of action movie cliché.
Kishitani also starred in, in a strangely similar role, in Miike
Takashi’s Graveyard of Honor. A remake of a 1975
Fukasaku Kinji classic, Graveyard features Kishitani as a
self-destructive gangster who obeys no rules, including the
ones that govern yakuza society, while creating his own for
his tempestuous affair with a club hostess. While making his
usual stops for extreme sex and violence, Miike creates an
absorbing, if distressing, character study, with an unusual
amount of empathy for and insight into its twisted hero.
This year major studios are preparing big-budget films
aimed regaining ground lost to Hollywood. Toho, the industry’s
leading distributor, is weighing in with Azumi, a samurai
swashbuckler from Kitamura Ryohei (hot after his successes
with Versus), and Alive, Spy Sorge, veteran Shinoda
Masahiro’s World War II drama based on the exploits of a
German spy for Stalin, and Yin-yang Master 2, a follow-up
to Takita Yojiro’s 2001 hit about a professional battler of
demons and other supernatural folk in ancient Kyoto. Toho
also has several animation sure-bets on its 2003 slate,
such as the latest entries to its long-running Doraemon
and Detective Conan series and Steamboy, Katsuhiro
Otomo’s first feature-length film in fifteen years, since his
influential hit Akira.
Rival Toei also has several major releases on its schedule.
The first is Omori Kazuki’s T.R.Y., a cheeky, fast-paced
drama of espionage and intrigue in prewar China starring
Oda Yuji - Japan’s Tom Cruise. Coming soon is Hirayama
Hideyuki’s Makai Tensho, a CG-studded period drama featuring
Kubozuka Yosuke.
Meanwhile, Shochiku has released Takita Yojiro’s When the
Last Sword Is Drawn, a samurai drama set in the chaotic
closing days of the Edo period. Nakai Kiichi plays a poor
warrior with a starving family to support - and thus a ferocious
desire to earn money and stay alive. He clashes with
a stiff-necked, short-tempered senior from his elite samurai
unit - the legendary Shinsengumi, who regards him as a
groveling bumpkin - but cannot beat him in a swordfight.
The film is a TV drama writ large, but Takita’s direction
gives it a grittier, more realistic tone that it might have otherwise
had.
Also in the Shochiku line-up is Moonchild, Zeze Takehisa’s
SF fantasy. Gackt and Hyde - local pop sensations whose
stage names are a special effect in themselves - appear as
youths working out their troubled destinies in a near-future
Asian city.
One new film creating box office excitement, however, was
made on the cheap by a new director, Shimizu Takashi. It
uses little in the way of effects other than duct tape and
white make-up. Titled Ju-On The Grudge, it is a shocker
based on an oft-used premise - the angry dead take
vengeance on the living - but executed with a implacable
skill. It becomes the ultimate bad dream, with evil on the
hunt, bodies piling up, and no exit this side of the grave.
Ju-On has been purchased for a Hollywood remake by Sam
Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures. Does this herald the revival
of yet other fading genre – Japanese horror movies?
Mark Schilling