After several years of boom, Japanese films finally had a bust in 2011. The Japanese box office plunged 18 per cent to US$2.34 billion last year, while admissions fell 17 per cent to 145 million. Total earnings for Japanese films slid 16 per cent to US$1.29 billion; for foreign films 20 per cent to US$1.06 billion. For the fourth year in a row the home team led in market share, with 55 per cent.
One major cause of the drop was the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, which left nearly 20,000 dead and missing, mainly in the northern Tohoku region, and caused the meltdown of three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Structural damage and transportation disruptions shuttered theatres in wide swaths of the country for weeks, though the predicted power blackouts never materialised during the peak summer season, allowing a return to normal operation for theater owners.
Another problem was a lack of blockbusters, both domestic and foreign. A total of 54 films passed the ¥1 billion (US$13 million) box office mark, traditionally considered the measure of a hit in Japan, in 2011, but only eight earned more than ¥4 billion yen (US$52 billion), compared with 11 in 2010. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 led the box office rankings with US$124 million, while the Studio Ghibli animation From Up on Poppy Hill was the highest-earning Japanese film with US$77 million.
Once-foolproof formulas, such as melodramas about happy young couples torn apart by terminal illnesses, found less success with jaded audiences. Also, 3D packed far less box office punch than when Avatar was sweeping all before it.
Meanwhile, filmmakers at all levels, from acknowledged hit-makers to struggling newcomers, adjusted to the changed post-disaster climate. Veteran Yoji Yamada suspended pre-production on his retelling of the Yasujiro Ozu classic Tokyo Monogatari (Tokyo Story) after March 11, saying that he intended to rewrite the script to reflect post-disaster realities. Meanwhile, other directors, such as Sion Sono with Himizu and Ryuichi Hiroki with River, finished their films as planned but changed their stories to include disaster-related themes and scenes.
Documentary filmmakers also took cameras and crews to Tohoku soon after March 11. By October the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival was able to present a section of 29 disaster-themed documentaries. Among the most controversial was 311 by veteran documentarians Mori Tatsuya, Yasuoka Takaharu, Watai Takeharu and Matsubayashi Yoju, who were criticized for trying to film corpses in the tsunami zone. That same month the Tokyo International Film Festival screened three disaster-related films, including Masahiro Kobayashi's Women on the Edge, a drama about three estranged sisters who reunite and theatrically fight in their family's home in Kesennuma, Miyagi Prefecture -- not far from where the director's own home was swept away by the tsunami.
The Japanese films garnering local honours had nothing to do with the disaster whatsoever. The Hochi sports newspaper, whose annual film prizes serve as harbingers for the awards season, named as its Best Picture Rebirth, an over-wrought Izuru Narushima melodrama based on a best-selling novel about a woman (Hiromi Nagasaku) who kidnaps a baby girl and raises it as her own until her arrest. Mao Inoue stars as the girl, now an adult, who tries to uncover the secrets of her past.
Meanwhile, the Yokohama Film Festival, another awards bellwether, bestowed its Best Picture prize on Someday, a Junji Sakamoto ensemble comedy starring Yoshio Harada, who died shortly after its July opening. A powerful, distinctive performer, Harada appeared in everything from Nikkatsu New Action programmers in the early 1970s to films by leading independent directors, often playing life-force rebels of various sorts.
The winner of the local industry’s most prestigious award, the Best One prize given by Kinema Junpo magazine’s critics’ poll, was Post Card, a WW2 drama that was the swan song of 99-year-old director Kaneto Shindo. The film begins as a black comedy, with the spunky, much-put-upon heroine (Shinobu Otake) sending two successive husbands to meaningless war deaths. But it also delivers a heart-felt, if theatrically stylized, protest against war’s insanity, all the more powerful for its autobiographical echoes. Post Card was also selected as Japan’s nominee for the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award, but did not make the final five.
Prolific provocateur Sion Sono, whose extreme films take aim at everything from PC taboos to Christian symbols, has recently garnered more major festivals invitations that any of his peers, as well as becoming a widely recognized name among Asian cinephiles.
His shocker Cold Fish screened in competition at the Venice Film Festival in 2010, where it received generally good notices. In Japan, however, it mostly got the cold shoulder in the 2011 awards race, save for veteran character actor Denden, who received a Japan Academy Best Supporting Actor nomination for his performance as a piranha of a fish store owner who devours his rivals with an avid relish and hardly a flicker or remorse.
Also, Guilty of Romance, Sono’s exploration of the dark side of the sexual imagination, screened in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes last year, while Himizu, his portrait of a violently dysfunctional family, set against the backdrop of the March 11 disaster, was selected for the Venice competition. Despite this oversea attention, Sono himself got a mixed reception domestically: the Japan Academy Awards didn’t even nominate him for Best Director honors, though the Hochi sports newspaper named him Best Director in its annual film awards.
Also screening at Venice last year was Takashi Miike’s Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai, a period swashbuckler based on the 1962 Masaki Kobayashi classic Harakiri. Miike brought his own brand of pathos and violence to this tale of a ronin (masterless samurai) (Ebizo Ichikawa) who asks a powerful clan for permission to commit seppuku (ritual suicide) on its grounds – for reasons he later reveals, to the clan’s regret. In Japan, however, the film received an indifferent reception from critics and fans, who preferred Miike in his wilder, crazier moods, as in Thirteen Assassins, his hyper-violent reworking of another samurai classic that was a box office hit in 2010.
One film that unexpectedly hit the sweet spot with both Japanese critics and fans last year was Love Strikes!, Hitoshi One’s dramady about a 29-year-old otaku (nerd) (Mirai Moriyama) who suddenly and unexpectedly finds himself attractive to women. Though based on a hit manga and TV series, the film is a cleverly conceived stand-alone overflowing with sexual and comic energy. Love Strikes! appeared on several Best Ten lists, including Kinema Junpo’s, while earning nearly US$30 million.
This year is already shaping up as a better one at the box office, with fans flocking to see Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible 4 over the New Year’s holiday, driving it past the US$65 million mark. They also packed theatres for Always: Sunset on Third Street 3, the third installment in Takashi Yamazaki’s hit series of nostalgic dramas set in a tightly knit neighborhood during Japan’s post-war boom. Set in 1964, the year of the Tokyo Olympics, the story held few surprises (there was even a spoiler of sorts in the film’s Norman Rockwell-esque poster), but Always 3 opened in January at slightly higher numbers than the previous entry, which finished with US$59 million in 2007.
Another film drawing fans early in the year was Robo-G, Shinobu Yaguchi’s comedy about an elderly man, played by local rock’n’roll legend Mickey Curtis, who finds a new purpose, as well as problems, impersonating a humanoid robot for a bumbling research team when their real ‘bot goes on the blink. It was the rare original project among Japanese commercial films, which are nearly always based on a hit manga, novel, TV show or other sure-bet franchise, but Yaguchi is a proven hit-maker responsible for such box office successes as Happy Flight, Swing Girls and Waterboys.
For the rest of the year, the major distributors have added the usual mix of kiddie anime series, teen romantic dramas and other box-office-tested genres to their line-ups. Among the standouts are We Were There, a two-part romantic drama starring Yuriko Yoshitaka and Tomu Ikuta as constantly quarreling high school lovers who reunite seven years after graduation. Distributor Toho opened the first part on March 17 and the second on April 21, gambling that the unusually short time between releases (most multi-part Japanese films are spaced by six months or more) would encourage more interest among the teenaged girls who were the target audience. Or perhaps Toho was more worried about their supposedly short attention spans.
Also on Toho’s line-up is Themae Romae, a comedy based on a best-selling manga about a failing Roman bath designer (Hiroshi Abe) who travels through time to modern-day Japan – and becomes inspired by the local bath culture. Release is set for the late April/early May Golden Week holiday season.
Yet another set-in-Italy film from Toho is Hotaru no Hikari, a romantic comedy about a lazy woman (Haruka Ayase) who is dragooned by her newlywed husband into a trip to Rome – and finds herself transformed by the experience. It is set to open in late June, when many Japanese are planning trips abroad – and may find some travel hints in the heroine’s adventures.
These hardly are the first Japanese films to be shot in Italy: Amalfi: Rewards of the Goddess, a cheesy 2009 thriller starring Yuji Oda as an intrepid Japanese diplomat, was partly filmed on the Amalfi Coast. Its box office success evidently encouraged producers to venture to Italy again for Thermae and Hotaru.
But for foreign J-film fans, bigger news is the release of Ace Attorney, a Takashi Miike comedy/thriller based on a popular Capcom video game. Going right up the edge of parody and beyond, Miike gives his own highly stylized spin to the game’s futuristic world of legal battle, with the back-and-forth rhythm of a two-player video game. The film received its world premiere at this year’s Rotterdam festival, just prior to its February Japan bow.
Among the most highly anticipated films of the summer is The Wolf Children Rain and Snow, the new animation by Mamoru Hosoda, whose SF/fantasy Summer Wars was both a critical and commercial hit in 2009. Born to a human mother and a wolf-man father, the two title children can transform in wolves -- and may well gobble up the competition in the absence of rival Studio Ghibli.
September will see the opening of Insight into the Universe, Yojiro Takita’s long-awaited follow-up to his 2008 Oscar-winning drama Departures. Boy-band-singer-turned-actor Junichi Okada stars as Yasui Santetsu, a real-life 17th-century master of shogi (a Japanese version of chess) and astronomer who took on the formidable task of devising a new calendar for Japan.
Also on the horizon is Attack on Titan, Tetsuya Nakashima’s live-action sci-fi epic focusing on the survivors of an attack on earth by human-devouring giants. Nakashima’s previous film, the 2010 mystery/thriller Confessions, was selected as Japan’s entry for the foreign language Oscar race, among many other honors, while being widely screened abroad. Called the “most expensive Japanese film ever made” by Nakashima himself, Attack on Titan will hit theatres in 2013.
Mark Schilling