Japanese film industry folk are ingrained pessimists, inclined to see the black in every rainbow. Some of this is trauma, inherited or remembered, from the 1960s and after, when earnings fell off a cliff and studios shed their human assets like a falling balloonist tossing sand bags. Things didn’t really perk up again until the early 1990s, when the multiplex building frenzy, as well as the rapid rise of the video market, brought in new audiences, talent and money.
The current production boom is even more recent, taking off in the middle of the 2000s when TV networks realised they could reap big profits by turning hit shows, manga and other properties into films. The big eyeopener was Bayside Shakedown 2 (Odoru Daisosasen 2), the 2003 sequel to a hit 1998 cop thriller that, with a take of $192 million, set an all-time box office record for a live-action domestic film.
But when I asked industry sources, toward the end of 2008, about prospects for 2009, I heard dire warnings that the boom was about to end. Production of indie films, they said, was being slashed in the wake of a declining DVD market and a bad general economy.
The doomsayers were not entirely off the mark - video software sales, including DVD rentals, fell 9.7 percent in 2009 to $3.62 billion. Also, indie distributors Movie-Eye Entertainment, Xanadeux, Wise Policy and Cine Quanon have closed up shop during the past year. Their troubles were due to various factors like overly ambitious expansion plans and acquisitions of pricey foreign films that under-performed. Domestic flops were only part of the bankruptcy equation.
But for the industry as a whole, especially the bigger players, 2009 was a wonderful year. Japanese films recorded a 56.9 percent box office share, the second year in a row they beat the foreign competition. A total of 448 domestic films were released in 2009, compared with 314 foreign. This was the highest number since 1991, when 467 local films opened.
The top-earner for the home side, with $96 million, was Rookies. This drama/comedy about a baseball team in a tough high school was based on a hit Tokyo Broadcasting System series and was made like a special episode of the show, with the same cast and staff. The same was true of Gokusen The Movie, a drama/comedy about a naïve but determined female teacher raised among tough and cuddly gangsters. (A literal translation of the title is Gangster Teacher.) Gokusen was also based on a popular TV show and assumed familiarity with the show’s world.
Of the 34 Japanese films that earned 1 billion yen (US$11 million) or more in 2009, 22, including Rookies and Gokusen, were released by Toho, the most powerful distributor and exhibitor. They usually had a TV network as a main producer. These network-made films were not all glorified TV specials. Hiroki Ryuichi’s TBS-produced April Bride (Yomei Ikkagetsu no Hanayome) was based on a true story about a young woman’s struggle with breast cancer first reported on a TV newscast and later recounted by the woman in her own memoir. It featured solid performances by Eikura Nana as the cancer-stricken heroine and Eita as her loyal-to-the-last fiancee. Also, instead of regurgitating tear-jerking formulas, Hiroki portrayed the realities of the disease with more directness and honesty than the genre norm.
Also, Inudo Isshin’s mystery Zero Focus (Zero no Shoten) may have been backed by the TV Asahi network, but its story of a woman searching desperately for her missing husband in a provincial town full of dark secrets, as well its dreamy, voluptuous 1950s period atmospherics, recall the films of Hitchcock and Sirk. It featured a career-peak performance by Nakatani Miki as an imperious society woman with a troubled past.
Too often, however, network producers are simply trying to cash in on a popular property, be it a TV show, novel or manga, by giving fans more of the same, not a stand-alone film. The shot-in-Italy suspenser Amalfi (Amalfi: Megami no Hoshu) was no exception, though it was made from an original story. Produced by the Fuji Television Network to celebrate its 50th anniversary, it adhered to formulas laid down by Fuji uber-producer Kameyama Chihiro for many of his films, including the smash hit Bayside Shakedown series. One is that, despite all the lethal weaponry, no violent deaths are ever shown. Kameyama once told me that this makes his films more acceptable for primetime TV broadcast. In other words, his films are not only frequently born on the small screen - they are also made to return there in ratings triumph, whatever the cost to credibility. When producer Ichise Takashige, best known for his work on the Ring and Grudge horror franchises, wrote in a blog post late last year that the networks are hurting Japanese films by stifling creativity and giving work to TV hacks instead of fresh, young talent, it’s hard to disagree. But when he adds that “This year will mark the burst of this ‘bubble era’ in the film industry and next year it will be devastating”, one remembers the box office failure last year of his big-budget swashbuckler Goemon - and detects sour grapes and wishful thinking. Japanese audiences have shown for years - decades, actually - that they like derivative franchise fare. It’s as though Ichise were predicting the bursting of the fast-food hamburger bubble. It’s probably not going to happen anytime soon.
In fact, many the 2009 box office leaders are animated series that have been recycling the same characters and basic story lines for years or decades. These are films like Pocket Monsters, Detective Conan, Doraemon and Crayon Shinchan.
Even so, new talents manage to break through, such as Hosoda Mamoru with his 2009 SF animation Summer Wars. This combines familiar anime themes - such as the agonies of young love and the growing power of the online world to invade the real one - in ways that are fresh, contemporary and dazzlingly imaginative. Distributed by Warner Japan, Summer Wars earned US$18 million. That was quite good considering that the film was not based on a best-selling manga or game, or directed by anime titan Miyazaki Hayao. Meanwhile, Japan’s indie film sector has been struggling. The already high barriers to getting mid-to-lowbudget films made became even higher with the 2009 recession. Also, audience tastes have been shifting from art house films - whether domestic or foreign - to more populist fare. In response, “mini-theaters” (the Japanese-English term for art houses) have been screening more of the genre pics they once scorned.
That said, the indie sector continues to turn out quality films, with “indie” broadly defined as anything outside the line-ups of the Big Three distributors: Toho, Shochiku and Toei. (Kadokawa nominally belongs among the majors, but is really a mini-major whose films rarely cross the 1 billion yen line.) One popular indie last year was Dear Doctor, Nishikawa Miwa’s finely nuanced character study of a phony doctor in a rural village. The film garnered many year-end honors, including Best Picture in the Kinema Junpo magazine’s annual critic’s poll, the oldest and most prestigious in Japan. Comedian Shofukutei Tsurube also won an armload of acting awards for his shapeshifting performance as the film’s kindly-seeming but deeply devious doctor.
Another 2009 stand-out was Negishi Kichitaro’s Villon’s Wife (Villon no Tsuma). Based on a story by Dazai Osamu, this unsparing, cathartic portrait of a troubled marriage features totally committed performances by Matsu Takako as the plucky wife and Asano Tadanobu as the alcoholic, unfaithful husband. It has also reaped awards, including a Best Director prize for Negishi at the 2009 Montreal World Film Festival.
This year is also shaping up as a good one for the Japanese film industry, especially at the top where Toho and its media partners dwell. Toho plans to releases thirty films in 2010, including several potential blockbusters - that is, films expected to gross fifty billion yen (US$56 million) or more. One is the third outing in the Fuji TV Bayside Shakedown series about a cheeky detective, played by Oda Yuji, who battles bad guys and police bureaucracy with the aid of lovably oddball co-workers. Toho will release in July, at the peak of the summer movie-going season. Also looking to rake in the yen, starting in September, is the third entry in Fuji’s Umizaru series about elite divers in the Japanese Coast Guard.
The previous film grossed US$80 million in 2006.
Both films, however, will face stiff competition from Arrietty Borrows Everything (Karigurashi no Arrietty), Studio Ghibli’s latest feature animation. Ghibli veteran Yonebayashi Hiromasa is directing, while studio maestro Miyazaki Hayaois scripting and supervising this fantasy based on the Mary Norton children’s classic The Borrowers. The last Ghibli animation inspired by a foreign children’s book and made without Miyazaki at the helm, Tales of Earthsea (Gedo Senki, 2006), was a formulaic disappointment. Have lessons been learned?
Finally, coming up in December, is Space Battleship Yamato. Yamazaki Takashi’s live-action version of the iconic 1970s Matsumoto Leiji anime space opera. The star is Kimura Takuya, a pop singer/TV talent who also headlined Yamada Yoji’s much-acclaimed samurai drama Love And Honor (Bushi no Ichibun, 2006). Huge expectations are being placed on the film, the Japanese industry’s Avatar. After establishing himself as CGI wizard for the Shirogumi effects house, Yamazaki directed the SF films Juvenile (2000) and Returner (2002). Creatively and commercially, the results were underwhelming. But he’s progressed considerably since. His 2005 nostalgic postwar drama Always - Sunset On Third Street (Always - San-chome no Yuhi) and its 2007 follow-up were much-beloved hits.
Also highly anticipated, abroad as well as at home, is Outrage, Kitano Takeshi’s first gangster film since Brother in 2000. Set for a fall release, the film promises a return to violent and entertaining form after several self-indulgent outings. Kitano plays a low-ranking gang boss charged with doing the dirty work of his superiors. The cast list reads like a Who’s Who of Japanese male character actors, including Miura Tomokazu, Kase Ryo and Kunimura Jun.
What would a year in Japanese films be without something new from Miike Takashi? Once the industry bad boy, who churned out taboo-challenging low-budget films almost by the month, Miike has since slowed his pace and become a mainstream hit maker. His first film this year, opening on May 1, is Zebraman 2, a follow-up to his hit 2004 action comedy. Aikawa Sho returns as Zebraman and Kudo Kankuro as the film’s scriptwriter, but the story unfolds in a futuristic 2025. With Miike at the helm, though, the film won’t be the usual SF outing.His second film, due out this autumn, is the samurai swashbuckler13 Assassins (13-nin no Shikaku). Yakusho Koji stars in this reworking of a 1963 Kudo Eiichi film about assassins hired to kill the brother of the Shogun. A fun time for all, possibly, though Miike’s last venture into sword action, the 2007 Sukiyaki Western Django was over-produced and self-indulgent.
The year has already got off to strong start with Ototo (Younger Brother), Yamada Yoji’s first contemporary drama in nearly a decade. Shofukutei Tsurube and Yoshinaga Sayuri, who also appeared in Yamada’s WW2 drama Kabei: Our Mother (Kabei, 2008), reunite as a ne’er-do-well brother and an older sister who can’t stop worrying about him. This is the same brother-sister relationship as in Yamada’s 48-episode Tora-san series, in which the peddler hero also avoided anything resembling responsibility. In Ototo, however, Yamada avoids that series’ sentimentality while delivering a solid emotional punch. A box office hit in Japan following its January 30 release, it was screened as the closing film of the Berlin Film Festival.
Opening the same day was Golden Slumber, Nakamura Yoshihiro’s thriller about a delivery guy (Sakai Makoto) framed as the killer in a successful plot to assassinate the prime minister. As is usual with Nakamura, director of last year’s Udine-screened Fish Story, the story takes clever twists, though the feeling of uplift at the end is earned, not contrived.
Indie filmmakers are also springing surprises, such Miura Daisuke with his new comedy Boys On The Run.
Though his hero is a common type - a virginal salesman (Mineta Kazunobu) who obsesses over a cute colleague - Miura films his misadventures with dry humor, mixed with down-and-dirty realism, from the sex scenes to the climactic fisticuffs between the salesman and a romantic rival. Miura also has a unique, off-kilter sense of timing that nonetheless hits the comic gong precisely.
The current Japanese film boom may well fade - no boom lasts forever - but with talents like Miura around at least we’ll go down laughing.
Mark Shilling