Tag Archives: Japanese

Saturday Short, Shorts

SATURDAY SHORT: FIND THE TRUTH (2015)

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Police are in search of the Newspaper Bandit who has been spotted in the backstreets of Nakano.

360 film is a more immersive film style which allows viewers to look around while the film is playing out. For those who are new to it, the experience itself could be considered quite weird. However, it has taken a while for one to surface that was just weird enough to fit alongside the rest of the short films we’ve highlighted here.

If this is your first time watching a 360 film, be sure to follow the instructions at the beginning, or it may not work properly.

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: THE HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS (2001)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Kenji Sawada, Keiko Matsuzaka, Shinji Takeda, Naomi Nishida,

PLOT: The Katakuri clan retires to a remote mountain area to run a bed and breakfast, but the place seems cursed, as every guest who stays there dies.

Still from The Happiness of the Karakuris (2001)
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: They don’t come any closer to making the List on the first ballot than Katakuris. The only thing that holds it back is a dreadful unevenness, combined with the fact that there are already so many Takashi Miike films either already on the List of the 366 Weirdest Movies Ever Made or still out there in contention.

COMMENTS: The Happiness of the Katakuris begins with a four-minute scene, which has nothing to do with the rest of the movie, in which a claymation imp rises from a woman’s soup, falls in love with her heart-shaped uvula, and flies away with it. Unlike the serious and searing Audition, where the director springs the weirdness on an unsuspecting audience in a blistering last act, Miike does not allow anyone here to complain of stealth weirdness. After this bizarro prologue, the story about clan of hoteliers who break out into song whenever their guests die seems refreshingly sane and conventional.

The movie settles down into a narrative after that introduction as we meet the Katakuris: a patriarch and matriarch still very much in love, a feisty grandpa, a son with anger-management issues, and a desperate-for-romance daughter and her love child (who serves as the film’s narrator). The characters are well-drawn and likable, but ill-starred, as the location of their bed and breakfast proves too remote for foot traffic (and also too near an active volcano). When they finally do get a paying customer, he’s only checked in to commit a gruesome suicide (also the occasion for the film’s first musical number). The songs are definitely Karakuris’ high points; the dancers aren’t professionals, but neither that fact nor the unfamiliarity of the language to non-Japanese speakers impedes Miike’s imaginative stagings, which are decorated with simple special effects and colorful, kaleidoscopic green-screen backgrounds. The most memorable moments are a matrimonial fantasy that sends the bride spinning through space with her dashing half-Japanese sailor groom; a disco-ball love ballad between Masao and Terue with the cheesy production values of a 1980s K-tel records commercial; the final number, a direct parody of The Sound of Music; and any time the corpses peek out of their graves and try to dance along.

It may seem strange to criticize a project this deliberately loose and goofy for its aimlessness, but it really is a weakness in this case. Katakuris has energy, but lacks focus. It never decides whether the semi-serious family drama or mordant black comedy is most important, and the claymation action interludes just knock it farther off its axis. There isn’t much of a conclusion, just a series of incidents that eventually fizzle out. It’s much better in its parts, especially the musical numbers, then it is as a whole. But those parts are strange enough to make it a hard-to-forget oddity.

The Happiness of the Katakuris is actually a remake of a Jee-woon Kim’s (non-musical) Korean black comedy The Quiet Family. Miike made it the same year as Visitor Q, an even blacker comedy which also deals with the theme of a “happy” Japanese family. Arrow Video just released a 2-DVD or 1 Blu-ray special edition of the film, although most of the extra features appeared to be recycled from the 2003 Eastern Star DVD release.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“As weird movie openings go, this one’s in a class of its own. The rest of Miike’s musical extravaganza isn’t exactly your usual collection of song and dance numbers either.”–Mark Stevens, BBC (contemporaneous)

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: R100 (2013)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Lindsay Hayward

PLOT: A Japanese furniture salesman pays a secret bondage society so that dominatrixes will attack him at random times in public, but things go too far when they start showing up at his work and home.

Still from R100 (2013)
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: By the end, after a relatively conventional beginning, R100 has gone from a one-joke lashing to full-fledged absurdist pummeling. This black sex comedy is demented enough to make the List, but we do wonder whether one of Matsumoto’s other movies might better represent his weird movie legacy.

COMMENTS:The first half of R100 is rather ordinary. Relatively so: most people would consider a movie where a man’s date kicks him in the face at dinner, and where a dominatrix stands beside him and smashes each course of sushi the mortified chef places before him, very strange indeed. R100 begins its life almost as a drama, doling out hints of backstory about our masochistic salaryman, who struggles as a single parent of a young boy with a wife in a coma. The movie eschews the chance to explore his psychology, however; we never gain any insight as to how ritualized pain and humiliation helps him deal with his problems. Instead, R100 spirals off into crazier and crazier directions, as the dominatrix attacks he’s contracted for intensify, start to interrupt his normal life, and threaten the one thing he loves more than a good beating from a merciless leather-clad mistress: his child.

The public attacks on our hero get repetitive, as if R100 doesn’t know how it wants to develop its premise. Then, in the middle of the film, Matsumoto springs a number of oddities and radical tone shifts. There are metamovie interludes which explain the movie’s title: we are watching the work of a 100-year-old director who considers this material inappropriate for anyone younger than himself (thus R100—restricted to those over 100 years of age). The main narrative takes a turn into B-movie territory when our hero is forced to turn against the bondage club after an botched session with the “Queen of Saliva.” You know the movie is completely off the rails by the time the ridiculous “Queen of Gobbling” shows up (and when the film’s producers debate cutting her out of the movie). The climax, which features our formerly meek hero lobbing grenades at an army of dominatrices commanded by a foul-mouthed blond Amazon stuffed into a tight rubber teddy, seems like it could have been choreographed by a team consisting of , and Mel Brooks. And the coda takes the weirdness to the next generation.

The way R100 starts out off-kilter and slides into greater and greater absurdity will thrill many who view the film as a simple comedy. It’s enjoyable enough on that level, but there were hints of depth in the character and themes that were never explored, and this is something of a missed opportunity. Masochism is easily stated as a philosophy—from pain comes pleasure—but it’s nearly impossible for an outsider to comprehend this most counterintuitive of fetishes. Maybe that’s why Matsumoto depicts it as an incomprehensible enigma. Or maybe you just have to reach the century mark to get it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…connoisseurs of weird, twisted sex comedy will revel in its transgressive, audacious mischief.“–Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star-Tribune (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by purplefig, who said it was “weird in that wonderfully insightful weird way only japanese cinema can deliver..” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules

CAPSULE: ID (2005)

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Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Kimihiko Hasegawa, Kei Fujiwara

PLOT: A man awakens in a woods and wanders into an urban pig farm where he observes examples of human cruelty and perversion.

Still from Id (2005)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The confusing presentation and slapstick black comedy undercuts Id‘s serious spiritual themes. Id goes totally nutso at the end, even by its own loose standards of sanity, and the movie doesn’t hang together even by the forgiving parameters of its own weirdness.

COMMENTS: Id‘s confusing, fractured storyline may take more than one viewing to work out (and you’ll probably never be 100% satisfied). On the other hand, the movie seems to have a clear thematic purpose, though it’s developed in a sloppy fashion. The movie’s theme is stated up front and seems simple and noble: “Amida Buddha’s sacred vow is that all be granted salvation… not only the good and wise but even those most depraved by sin and lust will be shown compassion.” There is a complication, however; to take advantage of Amida Buddha’s offer, you must invoke his name. Beasts, being dumb and mute, can’t do this; and neither can our protagonist, a nameless and (initially) mute man we meet see waking up in a forest, listening to dueling voiceovers. This man grabs a harmonica and wanders onto a nearby urban pig farm where he observes absurd examples of “most depraved sin and lust.”

So far, so good; it seems like a clean enough setup for a story of sin and salvation, a meditation on the thin line between the human and the bestial. Of course, things get far more confused than that. Soon enough we are introduced to another, similarly lost, character, a raggedy detective searching for the “master of murder” who may be responsible for local serial killings. The pig farm and its nearby environs supply plenty of subplots, including three slapstick farmhands who jerk about the farm like Keystone Kops, a bullied nine-year-old boy (played by an adult), and a cult proselytizer who miraculously survived a family massacre. The already odd vignettes are further peppered with hallucinations, including some very crude stop-motion animation and shots of a papier-mache pig’s head spouting blood. Somehow, by the end we descend into a hellish slaughterhouse hung with bloody plastic sheeting for a long and gory confrontation with a transformed “humanhog.” And what are we to make of the frequent references to the “id well,” an idea seemingly taken from Freudian psychology that has only a strained connection to the film’s Buddhist ideology?

The idea that “those most depraved by sin and lust will be shown compassion” provides an excuse to show graphic examples of sin and lust, which test our capacity for compassion to its fullest. Among other immoral sights, we get an entire chapter devoted to Peeping Toms (who pull on metallic springs in the place of genitals) and a “comic” transvestite rape. The absurdist elements of the salacious scenes seem to work against the movie’s main theme, however; if Amida Buddha forgives the worst human transgressions, then why the need to make them funny? If he would forgive real Peeping Toms, why does Id feel compelled to make their crimes look silly? It’s symptomatic of the movie’s unsure tone. Id won’t commit to being a black comedy, a serious psycho-spiritual rumination, or a surreal nightmare, but keeps changing its strategy every few minutes, hoping something will stick. It’s a shame, because there seems to be the seed of a promising idea buried somewhere in this film, if only the director could decide how to cultivate it.

Writer/director Kei Fujiwara collaborated with on 1989’s Certified Weird classic Tetsuo: The Iron Man, where she played the female lead as well as providing the costume design and assisting in the camerawork. Id is her second feature in a proposed trilogy; the first, Organ, appeared in 1996, so the third installment is due about now, if it’s ever going to be made.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A lot of viewers might not even finish it, let alone desire a second (or third) serving of the outrageously weird, spicy dish.”–Dejan Ognjanovic, Temple of Ghoul (DVD)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Radu.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Canonically Weird (The List)

199. CAT SOUP (2001)

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Nekojiru-so

“Many animators participated in the creation of Nekojiru-so, but I wonder how many of the animators fully understood the concept and manifested that understanding in the animation. When Yuasa and I explained things during animation meetings, we really didn’t understand it ourselves either.”–Tatsuo Satō, Cat Soup director, DVD commentary

RecommendedWeirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Tatsuo Satō

FEATURING: Not applicable (the film is animated with no dialogue)

PLOT: After nearly drowning in a bathtub, a young anthropomorphic cat sees his sick older sister being led away by a purple figure, follows it, and engages in a tug of war in which he recovers part of her body. He then returns home where he finds the sister still ill and convalescing, and gives her the part he recovered from the purple figure. She recovers from her sickness, and the pair embark on a series surreal adventures throughout the cartoon cosmos, although the sister is only half-alive until they eventually locate a mystical flower that restores her.

Still from Cat Soup (2001)
BACKGROUND:

  • Cat Soup is based on a series of manga by the artist Nekojiru (a pseudonym that actually translates as “cat soup”). Although Nekojiru’s stories were also dreamlike, they were more structured than this adaptation, and little of Cat Soup is taken directly from her works. Nekojiru committed suicide in 1998.
  • Technically, the Japanese title translates as something like “Cat Soup Flower.”
  • Director Tatsuo Satō specializes in television anime and has directed episodes of “Martian Successor Nadesico,” “Ninja Scroll: The Series,” and “Bodacious Space Pirates.”
  • Co-writer also produced and was the animation director; he has since directed his own feature (2004’s Mind Game) and several shorts and TV episodes, while continuing to work as an animator on other projects.
  • Because it was an OVA (“Original Video Animation” in anime parlance, meaning direct-to-DVD with no theatrical release), Cat Soup was not eligible to compete in many film festivals, although it did take honors at a few (including recognition as Fantasia’s Best Short Film of 2001).

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Choosing a single image from Cat Soup, which is a 30-minute barrage of insane, enchanting, and frequently disturbing visions made by animators who had been freed from almost any constraints on what they were allowed to imagine, is a tall task. We selected a still from the scene which literally enacts the title. Making this “cat soup” involves dressing up in mouse dominatrix gear and chopping up the yummy kitties with a giant pair of scissors.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: In some ways I envy the reviewer who was the first to get to Cat Soup and dub it “Hello Kitty on acid.” (Although I actually haven’t been able to track down the critic who first said that; perhaps the description is so obvious that everyone just assumes someone else came up with it before they did). I think a better description, perhaps, would be “Hello Kitty goes to Hell,” because the acidic hallucinations here all occur in the context of cat spirits wandering a weird world halfway between life and death, a place where God appears as a carnival magician and cuts planets in half and slurps their molten cores like soup. The brisk 30 minute runtime is the perfect length for this nearly plot-free pageant of morbid feline surrealism, which hits your surreal receptors hard, but doesn’t last so long you build up a tolerance to the insanity.


English-language DVD trailer for Cat Soup

COMMENTS: Cat Soup is a short feature that flummoxes even anime Continue reading 199. CAT SOUP (2001) →