When the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan (Eiren), announces the annual figures for the Japanese film industry at the end of January, the media focuses on the latest box-office trends. But what has remained constant, sometimes over decades, is equally striking.
One constant is the way the local film industry dominates its foreign, mainly Hollywood, rivals. In 2015, domestic films claimed a market share of 55.4 per cent, the eighth straight win for the home team, and the ninth in the last decade.
Various reasons have been advanced for Hollywood’s decline in Japan, beginning with a shortage of blockbuster series that can reliably bring in the fans. The last time foreign films took a majority market share was 2007, the year that new installments of the Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter and Spider-Man series led the annual box-office rankings. All three have either ended (Harry Potter) or gone on hiatus. Replacements have simply not measured up.
Another reason is the Japanese audience’s lack of interest in Hollywood’s superhero spectacles and comedies. Avengers: Age of Ultron, a Marvel comic movie that earned US$455 million in the US and nearly US$1.4 billion worldwide, made a solid but hardly spectacular US$28.5 million in Japan in 2015 – and it was at the top of the so-called amekomi (“American Comics”) genre heap.
Meanwhile, only two Hollywood comedies – Ted 2 and Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb – were among the 22 foreign films to earn one billion yen (US$8.8 million) or more in 2015. The former owed much of its popularity to the perceived cuteness of its foul-mouthed title hero.
Another constant is the Toho’s overwhelming box-office lead over its domestic competition. Films released by this powerhouse producer, distributor, and exhibitor regularly fill the annual box-office top ten for local releases. In 2015, eight of the 10 highest-earning Japanese films were from the Toho line-up, as were 29 of the 38 making one billion yen or more.
Toho’s 800-pound-gorilla status is largely due to a major factor in the rise of the Japanese films since the turn of the millennium. That is, the so-called “production committees” – consortiums of media companies assembled to make and promote films – have got better at targeting and attracting the core young adult audience, whose default choice at the multiplex used to be Hollywood movies.
The preferred distribution and exhibition partner for these production committees has long been Toho, which operates the country’s largest theater chain in the best urban and suburban locations. In other words, as the production-committee grows in box office clout, so does Toho.
Toho multiplexes also show Hollywood films, but as indicated by the life-size statue of Godzilla looming over the roof of the Toho Shinjuku building in Tokyo’s Kabukicho entertainment district, the company is also strongly committed to pushing its own product – beginning with its iconic fire-breathing monster.
Product has changed from the slump of the 1980s and early 1990s, when the entire Japanese film industry seemed to be trundling downhill to oblivion. Once commonly seen as trashy entertainment for kids and teenagers, or lugubrious period pieces for the middle-aged and elderly, Japanese commercial films are now mostly units of multi-platform franchises that typically begin as best-selling novels, manga or games aimed at fairly wide demographic. Perhaps not the four quadrants (men/women/young/not-so-young) that Hollywood films now routinely target, but close enough.
By the time a film is gets a green light, a large and enthusiastic fan base is usually in place. With this support, the production committee can invest in eye-popping effects and other pricey production values with a reasonable expectation of recouping their costs.
The exceptions are usually films by celebrity directors like Mitani Koki or Kitano Takeshi. These are essentially brands in and of themselves, with the director and his all-star cast flogging the film in a range of major media. But the franchises tend to earn more consistently for longer periods, making it hard for indie auteurs, even ones with a string of festival prizes under their belt, to break into the charmed commercial film circle. There’s no longer a lot of room at the top.
Miike Takashi made the move from cult king to box office champion more than a decade ago. He has never looked back, reeling off hit after hit. His rise as an industry power has not hurt his festival appeal. Cannes still calls for Yakuza Apocalypse, a frenetic genre mash-up that, without Miike’s name attached, would probably be playing the fantastic festival circuit, not the world’s premier film event. But his 2015 melodrama The Lion Standing in the Wind got thumbs down from foreign festival programmers, despite earning a healthy US$10 million in Japan.
A more recent arrival in the ranks of commercial film directors is Sono Sion, whose Shinjuku Swan made US$12 million for distributor Sony Pictures Entertainment Japan last year. It also screened at festivals in Turin, Montreal, and elsewhere. Sono is currently working on a sequel, based on the bestselling Wakui Ken comic about an unemployed guy who ends up as a street scout recruiting women for the sex industry in Shinjuku, Tokyo’s biggest entertainment district.
Sono’s next film to be released in Japan will be Whispering Star, a SF/fantasy featuring Sono’s wife and muse Kagurazaka Megumi as an inter-galactic cyborg delivery girl. Premiering at last year’s Toronto Film Festival, the film is charmingly retro in everything from its crisp black-and-white photography to the vacuum tube and other the 20th Century technology installed in the heroine’s space ship, which looks like an old-fashioned Japanese-style house. At the same time, Whispering Star is minimalistic to an extreme, making it more art than pop entertainment
Hiroki Ryuichi is another director who goes back and forth between the commercial and indie worlds. His teen romantic drama Strobe Edge earned a solid $20 million in 2015, with young fans of the Sakisaka Io manga that was its source material boosting the box office.
Hiroki’s Kabukicho Love Hotel was better received on the festival circuit. It was an ensemble drama about couples checking into to the title hot-bed establishment, as well as its jaded manager (Sometani Shota). Opening in Japan in January 2015, it was also an indie hit, and its warm reception at Toronto, Udine, and other overseas festivals was repeated at home. The local media, however, focused on Maeda Atsuko, a famous pop singer (AKB48) turned actress. Hiroki often works with up-and-coming young actresses, and inevitably inspires a career-defining performance.
Among the latest of his protégés is Arimura Kasumi, who stars in Hiroki’s Natsumi’s Firefly as a fledgling photographer who, on a trip to the mountains, encounters an unusual family with dark secrets. Her breakthrough role was as an under-achieving high-school girl in Doi Nobuhiro’s Flying Colours who, inspired by an unconventional cram school teacher, decides to test for admission to an elite university. This zero-to-hero story of academic effort, based on a true story, was a surprise hit last year, making US$25 million.
In terms of box office clout, Miike, Sono, Hiroki, Doi and nearly every other maker of live-action Japanese films cannot compete with anime. In 2015, eight of the 20 highest-earning domestic films were animated, including the number one, Yo-Kai Watch the Movie: The Secret is Created, Nyan!, which took US$69 million. An animation for children based on a popular role-playing game made for the Nintendo 3DS, Yo-Kai Watch is part of a franchise that now encompasses games, manga, TV anime and two animated features.
Number two was The Boy and The Beast, Hosoda Mamoru’s fantasy about an orphaned boy who slips from modern-day Shibuya into a parallel world populated by human-animal ‘beasts,’ including a big, bearish warrior who makes the boy his disciple. A mix of wacky buddy comedy and earnest coming-of-age drama, the film earned US$52 million. Hosoda was hailed as the heir of retired animation maestro Miyazaki Hayao, whose films regularly swept awards, and out-earned the Hollywood competition.
All of the above-mentioned constants, beginning with Toho’s dominance at the box office, promise to hold through the current year. Though Hosoda will not release a new film in 2016, two quickly rising animators with a Miyazaki connection will. One is Academy-Award-winning Dutch animator Michaël Dudok de Wit, who is making The Red Turtle, his first feature animation, produced by a consortium of French companies and Studio Ghibli, Miyazaki’s creative home for three decades. Release is set for September.
The other is Shinkai Makoto, who has often been labelled a “new Miyazaki” for an imaginative scope and attention to visual detail that recall the master’s, though Shinkai’s lush style and favorite theme of young love are distinctively his own. Toho will release his latest, Your Name?, in mid-July – a peak school holiday slot Toho long reserved for the latest Miyazaki. The story is about a teenage girl from the countryside and a teenage boy from the city who mysteriously find themselves with the bodies of the opposite sex.
Can these and other new animated films make Miyazaki-like numbers, including the all-time Japanese box-office record of 30 billion yen (US$271 million) set in 2001 by his coming-of-age fantasy Spirited Away? The chances of this are slim, but even Miyazaki himself needed several tries before finally hitting the box office heights with Kiki’s Delivery Service in 1989.
Among likely live-action blockbusters this year is Miike’s Terra Formars, an SF actioner based on a hit manga about a group of Japanese sent to battle giant cockroaches on Mars. Warner Bros. Japan will release the film on April 29 during the Golden Week holiday.
Another big movie for the same period is I Am Hero, Sato Shinsuke’s apocalyptic disaster epic about a mysterious virus that infects Japan, causing victims to becoming superhumanly strong and aggressive – something like zombies on steroids. Based on Hanazawa Kengo’s bestselling comic, the film will hit theaters on April 23, with Toho distributing.
Abroad, the mostly hotly anticipated new Japanese film this year is Godzilla Resurgence, a reboot of the famous Toho monster series after a 12-year hiatus. Higuchi Shinji (Attack on Titan duology) and Anno Hideaki (Evangelion anime series) are co-directing, with Anno serving as scriptwriter, and Higuchi handling effects. Godzilla Resurgence will be the 29th Godzilla film since the 1954 original – and the first not to use the man-in-suit techniques developed by tokusatsu (special effects) master Tsuburya Eiji. Instead, Higuchi and his team are reportedly filming a suit, minus a human actor, against a green screen. Toho will release the film in Japan on July 29.
These big-budget commercial films suck up nearly all the local media oxygen, leaving little left for the many films, both fiction and documentary, falling into the indie category. The exceptions are films invited to the three major world festivals – Cannes, Venice and Berlin – and those that win an Oscar nomination.
One director who covers both commercial and indie bases is Kore’eda Hirokazu, whose family dramas have found themselves in the Cannes competition and the domestic top-ten chart. His latest is After the Storm (Umi yorimo Mada Fukaku), about a family torn apart by divorce. The former husband (Abe Hiroshi) and wife (Maki Yoko), and their 11-year-old son, reunite in the apartment of the ex-husband’s elderly mother (Kiki Kirin) and wait out the storm of the title. Gaga will release on May 21, when any Cannes buzz will be at its peak.
Most indie directors get neither foreign kudos nor lines at the theatre ticket window. Such was the fate of veteran Take Masaharu until 100 Yen Love, a gritty boxing drama starring Ando Sakura as a 32-year-old slacker who tries to turn around her miserable existence by becoming a professional pugilist. Widely screened abroad, including at last year’s Udine FEFF with both Take and Ando in attendance, the film went on to become Japan’s latest nominee for a Best Foreign-Language Oscar. It didn’t make the cut for the final five, but has earned many domestic honors, including Japan Academy Prize nominations for best picture, best director (Take) and best actress (Ando).
Still, for every 100 Yen Love, many worthy indie films (and many not so worthy) barely register a blip either domestically or internationally. Uchida Eiji’s black comedy Lowlife Love (Gesu no Ai) is about a maker of one such film, who is desperately trying, years later, to make another. Played by versatile character actor Shibukawa Kiyohiko, the director is the ‘lowlife’ of the title, who runs an acting school seemingly so he can sexually harass his female students. But he also has a sincere (or if you’re not feeling charitable, perverse) dedication to the cinema, even as he makes porn to survive.
For all the dirt the film digs up on the indie film world based, Uchida claims, on true-life stories, Lowlife Love ends on a wry note of hope. If the down-and-out, but never defeated, hero can keep trying, so can Japan’s entire industry, can’t it?
Mark Schilling