Japan Is Doomed

Swallowtail Butterfly is the third Japanese film I’ve watched for my East Asian Cinema module. (The first being Rashomon, the second being Tampopo). I think of all the films I’ve seen now (around 10), this one was my favourite one so far, so I thought I’d review it here.

I am going to be writing an essay about the role of foreigners in this film. If you’re reading this and you are a student at Sheffield doing the same essay, don’t you even think of stealing these ideas! I’ll know!

The film was made in 1996 and was directed by Shunji Iwai, who also made All About Lily Chou-Chou and Love Letter (US: When I Close My Eyes) amongst other classics. He’s a pretty famous director in Japan, and his films usually do very well in Japan, both with critics and financially. Swallowtail Butterfly grossed 2 billion yen, which is a pretty significant amount.

The film starts off with a short narrative which I think sums the whole film up quite nicely, so I’ve posted it here;

“Once upon a time, when the yen was the most powerful force in the world, the city overflowed with immigrants, like a gold rush boom town. They came in search of yen, snatching up yen. And the immigrants called the city Yentown. But the Japanese hated that name. So they referred to those yen thieves as Yentowns. It’s a bit puzzling, but “Yentown” meant both the city and the outcasts. If they worked hard, earned a pocketful of yen, and returned home, they were rich men. It sounds like a fairy tale, but it was a paradise of yen, “Yentown”. And this is the story of Yentowns in Yentown.”

It should be noted this isn’t true but it does allow Iwai to create this amazing “Yentown” sub-culture, made up of immigrants who have come to Japan. This gives Iwai free reign to shape his creation in any way he wants, whilst still making clear and relevant links to the real state of Japan. He’s pretty ruthless, too. The majority of the Japanese in the film are either clumsy and dim-witted, or incredibly ruthless and effective businessmen who can’t wait to shank you for a quick Yen.

The film’s heroine, Ageha, is an orphaned girl of Chinese descent, who’s upbringing leaves her speaking only Japanese and English. She becomes part of a ragtag bunch of outcasts, all working together to make a living. Glico, another part of the team, becomes a famous singer and as a result has to “become as Japanese as you (her bosses) want!” Everyone here has no official identity - they are outcasts pushed aside by society, yet their deeply developed characters make them a lot more realistic and like-able than their Japanese counterparts.

This film is quite slow paced, but not boring, I promise. There’s plenty of action and some pretty brutal violence, some of which is intentionally over the top to give certain characters a more surprising or unrealistic edge, all the whilst being framed in the gritty realistic Yentown setting.

This film, then, is awesome. It really is. There’s not really a weak character to let the team down, the directing is excellent and the plot, with it’s underlying themes of homogeneity and the need to diversify, are well developed. If I had to make one small gripe, it would be that this film was created entirely on hand cams, and as a result the image quality is sometimes irritatingly poor. But I think in a way that adds to the ‘dirty’ Yentown image. You certantly find yourself siding with the underdogs, and whilst this isn’t a family film it does carry a heartwarming message.

Go see this film, and stick with it. It starts off pretty good, and believe me, it just gets better and better.

Remember a week ago when I reviewed Tampopo and found it ever so slightly bizarre? Well worry not, I’ve found an even more insane film in Survive Style 5+ which features a whole host of famous actors including Tadanobu Asano (Zatoichi) and the legendary Vinnie Jones. That’s right, Vinnie’s going to Japan.

The story follows a man killing his wife, before returning home and finding she’s sitting at the table waiting for him. Every following time he manages to off her she comes back stronger and angrier, each time trying to off him before he can off her.  Woven into this tale is the story follows the tale of a family who get hold of some tickets to see a famous hypnotist (above, right) as he performs his amazing 1 Million Yen challenge - if the audience member chosen is not affected by his skills, he wins a million Yen. Sadly the father of the family succumbs to the magic and begins to believe he is a chicken. Sadly, before he can be changed back, Assassin Vinnie Jones pops up with his bumbling translator and demands to know “What is your purpose in life?” before killing the hypnotist, thus leaving the father a chicken for the rest of his life.

However, as with all these bizarre films, there’s always plenty of other storylines to follow. Yuko is a woman working for an advertising company who continually throught the film comes up with rediculous ideas for adverts. We the audience are then shown these ideas (through a curtain with “What the advert Yuko is thinking about” written on it) before cutting back to the story and Yuko giggling.

This film is great if you’re prepared to sit back and accept you’re not going to understand it. The subtitles are well written and the entire cast gives a convincing performance (even chicken man). Well worth a watch for fans of Pulp Fiction.

The second Japanese film I am studying as part of my “East Asian Cinema” module is Juzo Itami’s 1985 comedy Tampopo. (The first, Rashomon, I reviewed here) So I thought I’d treat you guys to another exciting review. So settle down and prepare yourself - this is one weird film.

The plot follows the story of Ms. Tampopo (which means Dandelion in Japanese), on her quest to reinvent her shoddy Ramen bar as the culinary epicentre of… well, Ramen. The two men in the far left of the above photo, Goro and Gun, are truck drivers who stop on their way to a delivery. There they meet Tampopo’s son who is being beaten up by his classmates. They eat at the bar and voice their dislike for her noodles, which results in a fight breaking out with one of her regulars. The next day Goro decides he’ll help Tampopo turn the place into a great eatery. I am aware this makes no sense as he just got beaten up but this film is a lot better if you don’t question it. Or use logic.

That said, it doesn’t sound so strange yet. That’s until you consider the scenes that have absoloutly no bearing on the plot whatsoever. As I’m not a film critic I’ve probably missed some of the hidden underlying meanings, but here is a rundown of a few of the more bizarre cutaways that I couldn’t find any meaning for.

If you plan to watch this film, you might want to skip over this part.

• The film opens with what looks like an LA Gangster and his mistress sitting in a cinema. He then tells the camera he hates it when people rustle sweet papers in the cinema, a point he then proves by starting a fight with someone doing just that. Later in the film he and his mistress are involved in some rather steamy action involving some cake, syrup, some live mollusc things, and later on an egg yolk. I don’t want to expand on the egg yolk because it has to be seen to be believed.
• The same gangster then later goes down to the beach (for no reaso) where he spots a girl no older than 15 catching oysters. He buys one off her and proceeds to cut his lip trying to eat it out of it’s shell, so she cuts it out for him then licks the blood off his lips whilst her family watch from the sea. Don’t ask

• Towards the end of the film the gangster is shot by an unidentified killer and, with his dying moments, explains to his distraught mistress how eating yams out of a wild boar’s intestine is divine.
• A store clerk spends a good three minutes chasing a grandmother around his supermarket as she keeps squeezing his food.
• Six businessmen all order food in a fancy restaurant. The five older members all order the same thing, the young intern then orders in fluent French, causing the other businessmen’s faces to turn bright red.
• Goro recruits the following people to help him in his quest;
  • A homeless doctor.
  • The chef of a man who’s life he saved when he ate too much food.
  • The man he had a fight with.
• A man runs home to his dying wife, with his kids crying around her. As he arrives he shouts “Don’t die! You have to live! Say something! Sing! Cook dinner! Cook our dinner!” The dying woman then gets up, makes dinner, serves it and dies in front of her family. The man’s reply? “Eat up, it’s the last meal she made.”
• A man goes to a dentist and has some work done, resulting in the doctor and two nurses reeling from a mysterious smell coming from his mouth. As he leaves, one of the nurses begins to dance even though no music is playing throughout the scene.
• In the final scene, the camera pans from Goro and Gun leaving in their truck to a woman breastfeeding a baby and the credits roll. This is the first time either the woman or the child have been in the film.

You can stop skipping now!

I warned you this film had some… odd moments. But despite that it is a hilareous film, and I 100% reccomend it to anyone who doesn’t want a “serious” film. It’s funny and weird in equal amounts. Most of the main characters are suprisingly well developed considering they are jostling for screentime with strange grandmothers and an irritable gangster. Just don’t try writing an essay on it.

Wait, that’s what I have to do. Oh dear

I’ve finalised my travel details for returning to Japan, so hang on for such exciting details as my flights and how drunk I plan to get. (Very).

Finally, happy birthday to Jamaipanese!

For various reasons, I have had to change part of my course, and will for the next semester be taking East Asian Cinema. As a result I’m going to have a handful of interesting films to talk about over the next few weeks, and where better to start than Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 classic “Rashomon”.

The film tells the story of a murder of a Samurai and the rape of his wife by a bandit. The same event is retold four different times by the Bandit, the wife, a woodcutter who witnessed the events, and by the murdered Samurai himself through a medium. Whilst not Kurosawa’s first film or his last, it is without a doubt one of the most influential pieces of work that introduced the West to Japanese cinema.

The film opens with a priest and a woodcutter sheltering from the rain an abandoned ruined shrine gate. A traveller approaches to hide from the rain, and overhears the other two discussing a “terrible story”. He asks them to expand on it. At this point we the audience become a jury as each of the four characters involved in the murder tell their version of the events, all wildly contradictory from each other.

The film itself upon watching seems overly drawn out but it is absolutely great and well worth sticking with until the end. The murderer, played by Toshiro Mifune makes an amazing crazy man - it’s truly creepy when he does his “crazy laugh”. The samurai’s wife to begin with starts off as a disappointingly typical downtrodden female role, but worry not, her particular character twist is very well done and the stereotype is cleverly flipped.

From a language point of view, the Japanese in the film is very hard to understand - I had absolutely no chance without the subtitles, and I could rarely make out more than a few words at a time. You may have more luck, but beginners and intermediates alike are going to struggle with some of the older style Japanese present. Still well worth watching though, and you can pass it off as revision! Hurrah!

I must preface this post by saying that I am not really an anime or a Manga fan at all. I’m not trying to defend some cool kid image or anything, and I’m sure there is some perfectly entertaining and legitimate stuff out there amongst the sea of nerds, I’m just not really into it. That said, I do have a soft spot for Miyazaki films. There is a reason he’s called the Japanese Disney - the films he comes out with are magic. Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke are fantastic, and I’m sure I’ll end up writing reviews about them as well someday.

Deemed by the Japan society as “The first Japanese anime anyone should watch”, Totoro tells the charming tale of two sisters who live in the countryside. Their mother is sick in hospital with some unnamed illness, so they live in a haunted house with their doting father and somewhat bizarre surrogate grandmother. Whilst her elder sister is at school, four year old Mei spots two weird, rabbit-like creatures frolicking in the grass. She charges around after them, eventually chasing them back into a giant tree in the centre of a small wood. There she meets and befriends a huge furry spirit creature, which she names Totoro. Eventually her sister meets the beast too, and between them they have plenty of lovingly animated adventures. I don’t want to go any further down the plot as the ending is heartwarming beyond belief, but it needs to be watched from a neutral point of view. What I will say is that one of the characters in the film is Catbus, which is a giant cat that serves as a bus. It’s actually quite scary…

Well, I did warn you. Anyway - this movie is incredibly warm and fuzzy. What I found most interesting about it is that it doesn’t follow your typical children’s movie plot. Whilst it does have all the main characters pulling together to solve a problem, the beauty and indeed the bulk of the film isn’t in the chase but in the build up. There’s an awful lot of character development, to the point where it’s much easier to identify with our Japanese heroines than Shrek, even from a Western perspective. The artwork is, of course, stunning. Miyazaki is renowned for his amazing style, and whilst it has developed with every film, Totoro still looks fantastic despite being nearly twenty years old.

The best element of this film for me is the soundtrack. I have to state now that I am a huge fan of composer Joe Hisaishi, who also worked on Spirited Away, amongst other things. Whilst I wouldn’t say it’s his greatest work (Spirited Away is, of course…) it is beautiful, and if you’re into your film scores or your orchestras, you could do a lot worse than pick up the orchestral soundtrack, although it’s not cheap.

Overall, I absolutely loved this film, and I am quite the critic when it comes to the silver screen. I don’t think you have to be an anime obsessive to enjoy it, because I enjoyed it and I know less about the genre than most. It’s as cute as all hell, but any film that can cause me to laugh like a four year old schoolboy is good in my books.