Japanese film industry veterans have long been pessimists and nostalgists. Much time has been spent lamenting the demise of the industry’s Golden Age - broadly defined, from the 1930s to the 1970s - while prophesying doom. Today, nostalgia is still around, as demonstrated by the spate of films based on fondly remembered anime from the 1960s and early 1970s. But pessimism is in retreat, although it will never entirely die, unless we witness the second coming of Kurosawa and the 70 percent market share.
Numbers are one reason. In 2004 the Japanese box office totalled $2.048 billion on 170 million admissions - a new record. Boosted by Miyazaki Hayao’s new animation Howl’s Moving Castle, Japanese films accounted for US$767.5 million of this total, for a 37.5% share - the highest since Miyazaki’s Spirited Away lifted it to 39.0% in 2001. This figure was achieved in the face of not only the new Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings films, but the surprise success of The Last Samurai, which topped the foreign film box office with $133 million. Also, Howl’s did not open until November 20 - four months after the usual July release date for Miyazaki blockbusters. Even so it earned US$194 million for the year and is expected approach the US$296 million all-time record set by Miyazaki’s previous film, Spirited Away.
The number of Japanese films released also rose, to 310 -the highest total since 1986. Twenty grossed Y1.0 billion (US$9.7 million) or more, the standard measure of a commercial hit in the Japanese market. Just as more Japanese baseball players are succeeding in the US Major Leagues, more Japanese films are holding their own with Hollywood at the local multiplex.
Original new talents also emerged in 2004, including Kiriya Kazuaki (Casshern), Yuasa Masaaki (Mind Game) and Tada Taku and Sekiguchi Gen (Survival Style+5). Also, several veterans released their strongest films ever, including Sai Yoichi with Blood and Bones (Chi to Hone) and Kore-eda Hirokazu with Nobody Knows (Dare mo Shiranai).
The most highly acclaimed film of the year was Kore-eda’s Nobody Knows, which topped the prestigious Kinema Junpo critics poll and scooped several domestic Best Picture awards. Based on a real incident and infused with Kore-eda’s documentary sensibility, this drama depicts the lives of four children, each with a different father, who are abandoned by their terminally irresponsible mother. The oldest boy (Yagira Yuya) tries to keep this unusual family unit intact, but over the weeks and months, the children’s world unravels. Not a tear jerker, Dare Mo Shiranai is rather a patiently observed, discreetly filmed look at the realities of being young, alone and anonymous in an indifferent society. Kore-eda is now working on a period drama, his first.
As already noted, Howl’s Moving Castle was the year’s biggest commercial success. Based on an eponymous novel by Diana Wynne Jones, the film marked a departure for Miyazaki in not only its source material - he usually prefers to develop his own story ideas - but its love story and its shojo manga-esque hero - a temperamental, charismatic wizard named Howl. Even so, Howl’s is characteristically Miyazaki in its lovingly detailed faux European world and engagingly odd characters, including a testy flame called Calcifer and a mute bouncing scarecrow. Most of all, Miyazaki’s genius for creating moments of dream-like magic is still very much in evidence.
Following Howl’s on the domestic box office chart was Yukisada Isao’s Crying Out Love, in the Center of the World (Sekai no Chushin de Ai o Sakebu). Its US$82.5 million gross was huge for a non-animated Japanese film, especially one not based on a hit TV show. It came along at the right time, when the hit Korean TV drama Winter Sonata had launched a craze for all things Korean, as well so-called "junai" (pure love) dramas about star-crossed couples - a category the film fitted perfectly.
While respecting the ancient Japanese convention that such dramas must end in sighs and tears, Yukisada injects a modern, MTV sensibility into his story-telling. He makes his camera a hand-held reflector of his characters’ turbulent emotions. Also, instead the usual linear plot structure, the film jumps back and forth between the hero’s troubled present and his love-stricken youth - a narrative strategy that not only adds depth to the central story of teenage love and loss, but widens the film’s demographic appeal. Whether you were fourteen or forty, Crying Out had something for you, although it helped to be a Japanese woman of a certain age, familiar with its period references.
Doi Nobuhiro’s Be with You, a drama that followed Crying Out in the domestic box office rankings, with a gross of US$47 million, also had plenty of junai, but zero Eros. A woman, a year dead, returns in the flesh to her husband and young son, but remembers nothing of her previous life and has to learn to love them all over again. The hankies come out from scene one.
Veteran Sai Yoichi took a different approach to melodrama in Quill, a film based on a true story about a seeing-eye dog who changes the life of a depressed sightless man. Instead of relentlessly wringing audience tears, he made a surprisingly insightful and dry-eyed look at the interaction between man and dog. Quill (the title is the name of the canine hero) became the biggest hit of the year for the Shochiku studio and gave Sai, better known to the general public as a bearish, gruffly witty TV celebrity, new box office clout.
Sai’s next film, Blood and Bones (Chi to Hone) was more of a critical than commercial success, winning several domestic awards, including the Mainichi Concours Best Japanese Film prize. Featuring a career-peak performance by Kitano Takeshi, Blood and Bones is an unsparing, unsentimental look at the life of a monster - a Korean man (Kitano), who becomes a family patriarch and successful businessman in early post-war Japan, but bullies and betrays everyone around him. An ethnic Korean himself, Sai knows his hero and his world inside out. He makes his story both compelling and appalling. Playing the hero, Kitano dominates the screen with chill efficiency and force. Leading a strong supporting cast is Suzuki Kyoka, who sheds her "pure" image in a gutsy performance as the hero’s brutally abused wife.
Another box office success was Swing Girls, director Yaguchi Shinobu’s follow-up to his 2001 zero-to-hero comedy Waterboys. This time, instead of teenage boys taking up synchro swimming, a class of teenage girls takes up swing jazz. Rather than run though the same changes, however, Yaguchi comes up with fresh licks that make it a delight. The girls, who start knowing nothing about jazz (other than it’s better than a boring summer school math class) learn by fits and starts that are funny, touching and instructive. When they finally learn to swing, you know exactly how they did it - because you’ve followed their musical progress every stumbling step of the way. The film’s young actresses, most of whom were as musically clueless as their characters when production started, play their own instruments with passion, energy and passable chops.
Celebrating youthful passion from radically a different angle was Nakajima Tetsuya’s Kamikaze Girls (Shimotsuma Monogatari). Nakajima has fun with his two fashionista heroines - one into biker leathers (Tsuchiya Anna), the other into pink and frills (Fukada Kyoko). But in telling the story of how they become unlikely friends and allies, he goes beyond easy laughs to explore, with sensitivity and depth, their characters, backgrounds and the conformist pressures they battle. Fukada and Tsuchiya enthusiastically trash their super-idol images in bringing them to vivid, unstereotypical life. The film made Kinema Junpo’s Best Ten list, while Tsuchiya won several Best Newcomer awards.
To the surprise of no one, animation dominated the 2004 box office chart for Japanese films, with nine making the top twenty, led by Howl’s Moving Castle. In addition to new instalments in Pokemon, Doraemon and other long-running series, anime masters Otomo Katsuhiro and Oshii Mamoru released much-anticipated films. Otomo’s $24 million Steamboy, a Jules Verne-ish yarn set in 19th - century London, failed to connect with younger audiences, who were less taken than Otomo and his backers had hoped with its meticulously imagined retro future, including steam-driven tanks and planes.
Oshii had better luck with Innocence, a loose sequel to his dark futuristic classic Ghost in the Shell (Kokaku Kidotai, 1995). It screened in competition at Cannes - a first for a Japanese animation - though critics were divided between those fascinated by the film’s philosophical musings and its traditional Japanesque aesthetics and those who found it an incomprehensible, leaden-paced bore. In Japan legions of Oshii’s anime otaku fans came - but the uninitiated stayed away.
The biggest advance on the anime technical front, however, was made by Aramaki Shinji’s Appleseed, which used off-the-shelf motion capture technology to create a fluid 3-D look, on a tiny (by Hollywood standards) $3 million budget. The story, about a woman warrior’s battle to uncover the truth about a seemingly paradisical future city, was all-too familiar, however - and other than create a few eye-popping action sequences, Aramaki and his team kept to standard genre tropes.
Though 2-D in look, Yuasa Masaaki’s debut feature Mind Game was far more adventurous thematically and stylistically. A pathetic young loser goes on a wild, careening ride that take him from a violent encounter with yakuza in an Osaka yakitoriya (a shop that serves meat on a stick) to the belly of a whale, with a stop-off in Heaven as conceived by the Mad Hatter. On the way he discovers a new sexual confidence and a voracious appetite for life. Brilliantly unhinged in its imaginative flights, charged with exuberant eroticism and earthy Kansai humour, it was to most Japanese animation what extreme skiing is to a schuss down the bunny slope.
Equally ambitious, if far more grandiose, was Kiriya Kazuaki’s Casshern. An in-demand music video director best known in Japan as the husband of pop diva Utada Hikaru, Kiriya may have based his debut feature on an obscure 1970s anime, but it revives the spirit of the great silent era folies de grandeur. Think Metropolis, but with digitally generated robot armies and an aesthetic inspired by Futurist art and early Soviet propaganda posters. The story, about rebel mutants on the rampage in an Orwellian alternative future, may be an operatic hodgepodge, but Kiriya’s vision has a nightmarish beauty and force.
Abroad, the most saleable Japanese genre after animation is horror, with two remakes of J Horror hits, The Ring and The Grudge, passing the US$100 million mark in the US. In Japan, however, only one J Horror film, cult master Miike Takashi’s One Missed Call (Chakushin Ari), made the 2004 domestic box office top twenty, grossing US$14.6 million. Inspired by the Korean hit The Phone, One Missed Call centres its story on a familiar ghost-in-the-machine gimmick: mobile messages that predict the owner’s death and turn out to have a supernatural source. In its third act, however, the film enters Miike World - a place where logic takes a holiday and the bizarre rules.
The sequel, One Missed Call 2 (Chakushin Ari 2), was directed by TV veteran Tsukamoto Renpei, who made little pretence to Miike-esque originality. The only really new twist is the Taiwan locations where much of the action unfolds. The film, however, delivers its shocks with a force and persistence that gets under the skin, while creating the illusion of conviction that gives the better J Horror films much of their power.
Ichise Takashige, the producer of the Japanese originals of The Ring and The Grudge, released a pair of shockers, Tsuruta Norio’s Premonition (Yogen) and Ochiai Masayuki’s Infection (Kansen), with the aim of replicating the box office success of The Ring (Ringu) and The Spiral (Rasen), the double bill that launched the J Horror boom in 1998. Set in a hospital of horrors, where a patient dies in explosions of disgusting fluids - and disappears into the ventilating system, Infection is like an X-Files episodes that goes off the rails, lurching from the faintly possible to the utterly strange.
Premonition is less straight-up horror than a what-if fantasy about a "newspaper" that foretells the reader’s inevitably dire future - and dissolves into the air. In the third act, the film begins to resemble an acid trip gone wrong, as time, space and the hero’s troubled mind dissolve.
Equally mind bending, but far funnier is Survival Style+5. This comedy by scriptwriter Tada Taku and director Sekiguchi Gen, a pair known for their award-winning TV ads, takes five story lines that seem to exist in parallel universes and weaves them into a surreal, slapstick, upbeat comedy. The moral seems to be that love conquers all, even death and the laws of physics. Asano Tadanobu stars as the bemused husband of a murdered - but undead - wife, who takes out her rage by forcing him to eat an enormous breakfast and then beating him to a pulp.
Only one made period swashbuckler made the Japanese box office top twenty for 2004: NIN x NIN The Ninja Star Hattori (NIN x NIN Ninja Hattori-kun), a live-action version of the popular Ninja Hattori-kun comic for kids. In 2005, however, several new films hope to revive the fading samurai genre. This shows that the Japanese film industry is no longer content to play the demographic edges (period films and comedies for older viewers, anime for the kiddies) or do low-ball remake deals with Hollywood producers. Instead, it wants to do what the Korean film industry has done so successfully: go head-to-head with Hollywood in its local market, while creating a boom for its films abroad.