Mamoru Hosoda’s Summer Wars is an animated feature film that bridges the fairly wide gap between Miyazaki’s brand of sentimentality and William Gibson’s cyber warfare. The result of that odd pairing is a family film that is visually inventive and surprisingly satisfying.
The story revolves around Kenji Koiso, a high schooler who works part time in a virtual world known as OZ. A combination of Facebook, Second Life, and corporate shopping and finance, Oz is very important to the real world of the film. Kenji is a math wiz and social introvert, but he jumps at the chance to work for his pretty friend Natsuki over the course of a brief trip. It’s only after they arrive at Natsuki’s great grandmother’s home (which is more like a Japanese feudal estate) that she reveals the reason why she hired him. She needs him to pretend to be her boyfriend to satisfy her great grandmother on her 90th birthday.
Over the course of the film, we meet Natsuki’s large extended family and are charmed by their love for their aging relative. Grandma is charming too. She’s clearly a curmudgeon who’s the family leader and when she speaks, everyone jumps. This is the portion of the film that most reminded me of Miyazaki’s work. The family dynamic is complex and believable and the look of these segments is clearly in the style of Studio Ghibli. This is high-end feature animation and it looks fantastic. I found myself invested in these characters in a way that is unusual for an animated film.
The real world events work dramatically, but a big chunk of the action takes place in the virtual world. Kenji gets an email with some random code that he deciphers. Soon afterward, OZ begins to fail due to an AI incursion that Kenji may have actually opened the door for. The design of OZ is critical to the success of the film, and I found my own skepticism rearing its head from time to time during the segments that took place there. OZ is supposed to be an advanced version of Second Life wherein many of the world’s organizations and corporations conduct business with individuals via their avatars. It looks like an anime festival gone haywire. There is no ground plane, so everything basically floats about in a white null space that is populated with thousands of bizarre avatars. In the center there’s a sort of death star of cuteness that serves as the core of the world on top of which many different worlds have taken root. The virtual environment is interesting because of the plethora of disparate design elements evident there, but I had a hard time understanding the relationships that the different spaces represent. It’s a given that a visual representation of a virtual space is a difficult nut to crack, but since this particular space isn’t just a representation of data but is also the user interface that people supposedly use day in and day out, I found it severely lacking in clarity. If anything in this movie gets short shrift, it is this design. While the variety present in the avatar designs is interesting, it strains credulity to imagine that there wouldn’t be some kind of overriding architecture that would restrict the designs to its own look and feel. I mean, you don’t see Xbox or Wii avatars that look like characters in Final Fantasy, do you? No, they exist as variations on a theme and, above all, are all the same scale. The avatars in OZ seem to exist without limitations and that makes for a very sloppy world.
At a certain point, you either accept OZ as it is, or you don’t. I eventually did, but it was with a grain of salt. In the end, the movie is much more satisfying if you do accept things as they are so it was worth the effort. The story really is more about what’s happening in the real world, anyway, and it’s refreshing that there is no real bad guy in all of this. The AI that is taking over OZ is wreaking havoc in the real world, but there’s no malevolence at work. Even the creator of the AI had no bad intentions. It’s just a runaway program that must be stopped before it causes harm to people in the real world.
Yes, the plot stretched credulity to the breaking point, but if you can accept the conceits of this story there is a rich emotional payoff to be had. This is the rare family film that has something for everybody. Recommended.
Hirokazu Koreeda wowed me with his 2008 film, Still Walking, so I decided to check out some of his other work. First up is Hana, the film Koreeda made prior to Still Walking, and in it I see very little of what made Still Walking such a masterpiece. That’s both good and bad. I had hoped that the two films would be very different, but I had also hoped both would be equally entertaining. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case.
Hana starts out well enough. A young samurai, nicknamed Soza, is living in an Edo shantytown in 1702 while looking to avenge the death of his father. The trouble is that he’s not experienced in swordplay or killing and he really would rather teach writing skills to the locals than look for a fight.
Junichi Okada’s Soza is a charmingly conflicted character. He spends much of his time with the eight year old son of a widow he enjoys the company of. As a sort of surrogate father, he excels, but as a samurai, he is a failure. The film works when Soza remains at the hub of all the local activity (and there’s a lot going on), but when the story strays too far away from his dilemma, it becomes tedious. There are too many characters and subplots and the film runs on at least 20 minutes too long. A good editing job could work wonders but might also ruin the intricate web of events at the film’s climax. As it is, by the time I got to the ending, I couldn’t have cared less. That’s a shame for a film that gets so much right.
The tone is lighthearted most of the time and there are many big laughs throughout. A quick edit could turn this into a genuine comedy, but it could also turn it into a tragedy. Perspective is something Koreeda has excess of so I wonder if he simply couldn’t see the forest for the trees this time around. There is a funny, moving, sweet story at the core of this work but I felt like it was often obscured. The only other film that I’ve felt similarly about was Takeshi Kitano’s Zatoichi reboot. The characters are well-developed and interesting, the performances are very good, the art direction is beautiful, and the cinematography is superb. The elements just never gel into a cohesive whole due to a screenplay that seems to be trying to cover too much ground.
If you’re a fan of Koreeda’s, you’ll probably enjoy Hana for its little successes. If not, I wouldn’t recommend it.
The first feature film from director Masahiro Ando, Sword of the Stranger, gets a lot of things right. Unfortunately, originality isn’t one of those things, but this is still a beautifully rendered animated film with a lot going for it.
The story is fairly simple. A Japanese boy named Kotaro is fleeing a group of Chinese warriors in Sengoku period Japan. He runs into a ronin with no name who ends up in the boy’s employ. The characters are all interesting, but the boy is a little bit difficult to like. He’s abrasive and belligerent. Those might be bizarre choices for a protagonist, but it does make him more interesting than your standard waif. His personality is tempered by that of his dog, Tobimaru, who absolutely steals the show.
There are bad guys and sword fights and a plot to make the Chinese emperor immortal, but the crux of the tale is the relationship between Kotaro and No Name. As such, it’s an interesting story, but one that depends on subtlety to relay the performances. Unfortunately, subtlety isn’t animation’s strong suit. I imagine that the exact same script rendered in live action with excellent actors would carry more weight. The Japanese voice actors here do a good job (I didn’t listen to the English voice track) and the animation is top-notch Ghibli-quality stuff, but at the end of the day the faces either work or they don’t. Here, they don’t relay quite enough information to give the story the emotional weight it deserves. So how to make up for that? The music.
Naoki Sato’s score is simply beautiful. He makes wonderful choices regarding the underlying emotions of each scene and his melodies are hummable and moving. I can think of no better choice for this project. I liked the music so much that I’m considering purchasing the score. When’s the last time you felt that way about an anime? So many Japanese composers mimic western scores, but Sato creates something that’s both original and faithful to western film traditions. It’s a real treat.
As I mentioned before, the cel-style animation is gorgeous. I had forgotten how much I liked painted backgrounds since I see them so rarely these days. While there are some CGI elements, this is mostly hand-crafted animation and it shows. I know there are people who think that animation doesn’t really benefit from the high-def treatment, but I couldn’t disagree more. I bought the Blu Ray of this feature and the visuals scream in HD!
The animators at work here are true artists and it really shows most clearly during the fight sequences. Most anime sword fights are more style than substance, but the fights here are “shot” and cut just like the best live action features. They are exciting and stressful to watch when our heroes are losing.
All in all, this is a very good animated feature. So good, in fact, that my disappointment stems from the fact that I hold it up to the best live action features like the Lord of the Rings. That’s where it falls a little short, but not for lack of trying. It’s just that animated performances can never quite contain all the subtleties of a live actor’s performance, not even when a real actor’s performance is motion captured. Still, it’s a testament to the beauty of this film that I even consider the performances of its animated characters. Recommended.
With a title like Geisha Assassin (or Geisha Vs. Ninjas,the original title), expectations are certainly lowered from the get-go, but I had a glimmer of hope that this movie would at the very least be fun to watch; a guilty pleasure, if you will. Well, if you find much pleasure here, you should certainly feel guilty about it.
The story is absurdly simple. A geisha is trying to kill a samurai who killed her father. Said samurai has put a bunch of fighters between them. Ready? Fight! Seriously, that’s pretty much it. If you enjoy watching a friend play Soul Caliber on easy difficulty, you might enjoy this. Personally, I’d rather play along but my Xbox controller didn’t seem to affect the outcome of these fights at all! With practically zero information on the characters until the third or fourth fight, this movie isn’t so much a story as it is a reel for the fight choreographer.
Director Go Ohara was previously an action director for films like OneChanbara, and it shows. That’s basically all there is to this movie — fights. That said, the fights are well done with the exception of too much wire work. If you’ve seen one flying ninja, you’ve seen them all. I think such flights of fancy take the edge off sword combat scenes as they take the action into the realm of fantasy wherein heroes rarely fail.
Scenic elements are gorgeous since they’re all real places, but, sadly, most are shot at night with bad lighting. I imagine this choice was made to hide power lines and other modern elements in the background, but it does a disservice to the one thing this movie has going for it – its locations.
To add insult to injury, the transfer is the worst. Shot on video, with bad lighting, this movie wasn’t super attractive to begin with, but this transfer doesn’t do it any favors. Every problem in the book is present here – greyed out blacks, jaggies, stuttering, compression artifacts… I could go on, but there’s little point. This movie looks BAD.
Sound doesn’t fare any better. Sword clashes sound like a single sound effect played over and over and over. I’ve seen Power Rangers episodes with better sound design. Thankfully there’s no dubbing and the original Japanese language track is intact, but that’s the nicest thing I can say about the audio.
Look, I’m going to stop here. I feel like I’m wasting letters. Even though this is currently available on Netflix streaming, it isn’t worth the paltry 78 minutes of your time it takes to watch it. Not recommended for anyone.
Much like Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill, Still Walking is hard to describe in a single logline. While it is a family drama that unfolds mostly during the anniversary of the death of the family’s eldest son, that’s a little like saying that the Big Chill takes place at a funeral. It’s really about the extended family dynamic, all the subtle ways in which the family unit is changing, and also the ways in which the family’s values are being retained. It’s a complex film, but it is a joy to watch.
I really felt like I was a fly on the wall of Grandma’s house. Writer-director Hirokazu Kareeda keeps the camera mostly static, allowing his actors to play out most scenes in long and medium shots, coming in for the close ups only when absolutely necessary. He exhibits a deft touch that doesn’t so much point us to his conclusions about the characters, but instead allows us to slowly accumulate impressions until we form our own conclusions. Proof of his mastery is the fact that, in the end, I think my conclusions were exactly the ones he wanted me to have.
Every performance here is pitch perfect. I have to wonder how close these actors were to the characters they were portraying. There’s very little “acting” seen onscreen here. I hesitate to single any one member of the cast out as they all deserve accolades as an efficient and convincing ensemble.
Settings are realistic and efficient but they’re also thrilling to see as an outsider of Japanese culture. I felt like I was getting a real look into the lives of regular Japanese people — something rarely seen in Japanese cinema outside that country. As such, I also got the feeling that our differences really amount to the trappings and not so much to the people. If there is an ultimate message here, I think it’s that people will be people, regardless of their generations, countries, jobs, or economic statuses.
If there is any fault to be given the picture, it’s that it’s a little bit difficult to get into at first. Kareeda doesn’t feel the need to give us all the information about everyone up front, so at first it can feel a little like eavesdropping on a family argument at the next table over. But I was amazed by how I felt like I knew these people intimately by the time the movie was over. I think that’s due to the fact that we’re given tiny bits and pieces along the way in much the same way we get to know our real world friends and family. As soon as it was over, I felt compelled to go back and watch the movie again. I was amazed by just how much more I liked the beginning of the film on the second viewing after I’d really “met” the characters.
This film is currently available via Netflix streaming and is highly recommended.
The Japanese sure do like reboots. For whatever reason, they seem to accept them much more readily than US audiences do, although we’re really getting on the bandwagon these days with a new take on Spiderman right on the heels of a dismal Broadway overproduction and a trilogy of films, only one of which was worth a second viewing. The Zatoichi series is even bigger than Spiderman in Japan, of course, so it’s no big surprise that filmmakers have been coming up with new takes on the blind swordsman since the demise of the original Ichi, Shintaro Katsu in 1997. Takeshi Kitano’s film was a fun excursion in chanbara from the Japanese funny man, and I think it was accepted largely because it was so different. Kitano was definitely trying not to be Katsu’s Ichi. Then came the female version, simply titled Ichi, which, while beautiful to watch, was somewhat overplayed by all involved. Now, we have Zatoichi: The Last, the 2010 film by Junji Sakamoto.
I’m not sure what Sakamoto and the screenwriter(s), who aren’t credited on IMDB, had in mind here, but the result is a mess. I believe there’s an okay film in there somewhere, but the final edit leaves a lot to be desired. We begin with a married Ichi declaring that he’s off to his final fight, only to have his wife killed in a mishap. Instead of seeking revenge, he returns to his childhood home only to sort of become involved in a village dispute with an evil oyabun. While the latter plot will be familiar to anyone who’s seen even a single Z film from the past, the whole wife angle changes the character considerably. Instead of being a wandering masseur, he is now a broken family man. After his loss, Ichi becomes depressed and withdrawn. To say this film is humorless is an understatement. Sadly, it’s also saddled with a narrative that’s strangely difficult to follow in this cut. Since Ichi is no longer cast as a man of action, we don’t get much of a chance to root for him in this overly long exercise in tedium.
I don’t really get the title, since it seems that this script may have originally been conceived as an origin story of sorts. If it had been that, I could see where it could have succeeded. Just imagine the story of a young, married, Ichi who works for the yakuza as an assassin, then gives up that life only to have his family ripped away. In his search for revenge he could have emerged from his cocoon of pain with a better understanding of himself and a desire to change his ways and help to defend others. Ichi is born and strides off into the sunset to become Shintaro Katsu’s generous and helpful blind masseur of old. It’s too bad they didn’t go this way. It might have given this film a backbone. Instead we just get cinematic pablum that has some of the trappings of the old Zatoichi films but none of the heart.
The problems with the script are exacerbated by the bizarre portrayal of Ichi by Shingo Katori of the boy band, SMAP. I could care less about his background if he were either an excellent actor or perfect for the role of Ichi, but alas he is neither. I never thought of Ichi as a handsome young man that’s a clumsy hack with a sword, but that’s the Ichi we’re given here. It’s almost as if Katori couldn’t handle the combat training so they tried to cut around his inabilities. Okay, fair enough, but why does he look like he straining on the toilet in every single closeup? He’s simply trying way too hard for this to have been crafted into a decent performance. Every time he was stumbling and sliding around I found myself wishing for the cool, confident demeanor of Katsu’s Ichi.
The cinematography here is the one place where this film exceeds the originals, but that’s largely a factor of technological advances and bigger budgets. Technically, ZTL is excellent, but so are Battlefield Earth and Waterworld.
If you’re curious about this film, give it a spin. I expect most won’t make it through the first hour. Instead, I’d recommend going back and experiencing the Katsu series of films from the very beginning. If you want something more modern, the Takeshi Kitano version is very good too. Unfortunately, Zatoichi: The Last is not recommended.
After watching Lady Snowblood 2, it’s fairly easy to see why there was never a Lady Snowblood 3. It isn’t that the film is terrible. It’s just that it’s fairly bland AND it isn’t much like the first movie. I believe the first film was intended to end with Yuki’s death and greed made the studio choose to have her inexplicably resurrected at the end.
This film begins with the oddly casual butchering of a group of pursuers as Yuki (AKA Lady Snowblood) walks along a forest path. There’s a little exposition provided by a narrator and we’re off. Trouble is, there isn’t much to get Yuki worked up, unless she’s pissed off about the terrible narration that was tacked onto her film. In the first movie, she’s out to avenge her parents who died unjustly. That’s a pretty good motivator and one we, as an audience, can fully get behind. But now that they’re avenged, what is there to do?
In LS2, Yuki is captured and threatened with execution for the murders she’s committed, but her execution is stayed by a crooked Meiji-era politico who wants her to act as an assassin for him. Yuki eventually agrees to the undercover mission, but her motives are never clear. She eventually goes over to the other side, but only after being discovered trying to fulfill the mission she was given. Huh? Like in all bad plots, the characters in this film just jump around according to the screenwriters wishes and none of their motivations seem to come from within. It really felt like Yuki was shoehorned into some other movie about Meiji era politics.
Production values are all over the map. For a movie made in 1974, this certainly looks too much like a 60s Hammer picture. Director Toshiya Fujita is once again too fond of his wide angled lens. Many of the shots have characters positioned at the edges of the frame. They fall completely out of focus even when they’re delivering dialog! I realize this wasn’t a big budget movie, but that’s inexcusable.
Scenery is excellent, as is usually the case in these sorts of Japanese films. There’s so many cool locations that sets are mostly restricted to interiors. The shinto shrine is especially cool to see, but I wonder who was charged with cleaning all the blood up after filming was completed. Did the priests know that was what they were signing up for?
Makeup effects are atrocious. The rivers of blood are that Hammer horror opaque red of the 60s. Facial appliances appear to have been sculpted out of modelling clay the day of the shoot. In one shot, a man’s cheek is cut during an interrogation. While the actor tries to force the knife into the cheek appliance, you can see that the solid appliance is just glued to his cheek. Yikes! A couple of eye-gougings look better than that, but it’s often easier to make the big effects look real.
Sound doesn’t fare much better. The monaural soundtrack is dominated by hideous 70s music. Yes, I know it was the trend at the time, but it really did hinder my enjoyment of the film.
While there are some memorable fight sequences (the final fight at the shrine was especially good), I doubt I’ll ever want to see this one again. Not recommended.
I took a little time off from my pursuit of Zatoichi completion, and what better way to return than with the excellent Zatoichi #9? Adventures of Zatoichi (1964) is one of the best of the Z films I’ve seen. Not only is it a great entry in the series, but it’s also good enough to be a successful standalone film that newcomers to the franchise could embrace without knowing anything else about Ichi.
Directed with the subtle skills only an experienced director like Kimiyoshi Yasuda could bring to the table, Z9 is a delight on every level. I only wish that Yasuda had directed more entries in the series as his were always top notch. This film is even better than some of his others due to a very fine script by Shozaburo Asai. I’m not entirely certain how many of the screen stories really originated with the novels of Kan Shimozawa. My understanding is that Master Ichi is little more than a side character in his novel(s) so I doubt that very many of the film stories are directly attributable to Shimozawa. Nevertheless, he’s credited with “story” on most, if not all, of the movies. I’m sure that credit was a contractual point (film credits rarely reflect the real world work done) but it denigrates the real contributions made by writers like Asai. In this film, he crafts a cunning tale that winds thread after thread into a tapestry of plot points that eventually come together in a very satisfying way.
The film begins with Ichi, once again agreeing to do a favor for someone. You might think he’d figure out that these favors always end badly, but then we’d never have these great screen adventures, would we? Ichi’s willingness to help others even when he has an inkling that it will come to no good, is simply a big part of the character. He always wants to help, despite his blindness.
Once he’s at his destination, a small village governed by a corrupt overlord and his just as corrupt intendant, Ichi finds himself in the middle of a tangled web of revenge-seekers and opportunists just before the new year holiday. The new year celebration is the biggest holiday in Japan, largely due to the Shinto focus on purity and renewal, so it’s also the focus of many business people trying to make a buck, much like Christmas in the US.
The plot here isn’t all that different from the other Z films. What’s different is the clarity with which it’s presented and the care that’s taken to make the pacing work. Sword fights are few, but when they do occur they have much greater impact both on the characters and the story at hand. Eliminating some of the swordplay gives us more time to spend with Master Ichi and we’re actually given a small glimpse of his past. It isn’t much, but it’s moving and it makes us root for his success even more than usual.
The characters here are all masterfully developed even though their scripted lines may be minimal. I always felt like I knew who everyone was as I was watching. In some Z films, traffic control becomes an issue, but in Z9 the large cast of characters is well managed and no one is given short shrift. As always, Shintaro Katsu renders an amazing performance that’s helped by a script that actually gives him things to do.
The only down side to this movie is the literal darkness of some of the scenes. One of the more spectacular fights happens in moonlight and is practically wasted. I don’t know if this is the fault of a poor transfer or the fault of DP Shozo Honda, but since Honda shot 22 films in his career, I tend to blame the transfer.
Also of note is the music in Z9. Taichiro Kosugi’s score is wonderful, accenting the inner feelings of Ichi at all the key plot points. This may sound like a little thing, but it wasn’t always grasped by Japanese filmmakers. They often mimicked American and European film scores (and still do for that matter) without truly understanding the emotional underpinnings of European classical music. Kosugi was obviously an exception and I wish he’d been employed on other Z films. Sadly, this stands as his only Zatoichi score. I can only imagine the heights to which other films in the series could have soared with his contributions.
Overall, this is an exceptional film and possibly the best of the series (I’ll let you know once I’ve seen them all). Very highly recommended (and currently available on Hulu).
Toshiya Fujita’s 1973 film adaptation of the manga by Kazuo Koike is a real treat, but looking back on it now I can see how old school it must have seemed in the early seventies. Much like Hammer’s horror films, these sorts of pictures were becoming less and less relevant. And just like Hammer’s films, this 1973 production looks remarkably similar to the Zatoichi films that were made a decade before this one. Strange how quickly film technique and technology advanced during the early sixties, only to stagnate until George Lucas forced the issue in 1977.
While there are plenty of interesting visual ideas here, very few of them are presented well. The camera work is absolutely clumsy. Much of the film is shot using extreme wide angle lenses (I think – I’m no lens expert) that make pans looks positively psychedelic and characters at the edges of the screen look stretched. I’m sure that Fujita wanted widescreen, but this is no way to go about it. Oh, and speaking of psychedelic, there are a few weird, hippie, music cues that are hilarious. thank the kami these aren’t present throughout or they would have ruined the film completely.
It sounds like I hated it, huh? Well, I didn’t. In fact, I like Lady Snowblood quite a lot. For those who’ve never heard of it, the plot is pretty basic. A woman who’s been wronged on just about every level dies right after childbirth. The child is raised with one mission – to exact revenge for the wrongs done to her mother. She is trained by a Shinto priest (who’s hilariously referred to as the reverend in the subtitles) to be an efficient killer, then she sets out to get the job done by any means necessary. Sound familiar? It should. It’s the movie Kill Bill was based on. This isn’t as uber-produced as Kill Bill, but as revenge pictures go, it’s pretty good. There were obviously ambitions at work here that the budget couldn’t live up to, but the scenes in the snow really stand out. The visual motif of falling snow works wonderfully well and really wasn’t improved upon in the O-ren Ishii segment in Kill Bill. Many have speculated that Tanrantino’s O-ren IS Yuki, but I think it’s obvious that Yuki’s traits are evenly distributed between O-ren and the Bride in that version of the story, and make no mistake – it’s the exact same story, just finessed a little bit.
Much like O-ren’s back story, there are segments in Lady Snowblood that were just too hideously expensive to produce, so they’re presented in pseudo-storyboards and manga-style frames. While this does get the story points across, it’s an enormous Fail for this picture. If ever there were a movie that could stand a straight up reboot, it’s this one. Maybe Takeshi Kitano will remake it and play Yuki himself. For better or worse, I wouldn’t put it past him.
The performances here are all top notch, with some wonderful stunt work from the lovely Meiko Kaji as the title character (AKA-Yuki). She fights most often with a shikome-zui (single-edged cane sword) that is very similar to that of Zatoichi except for the fact that hers is hidden inside the handle of her paper parasol. Her fighting style is very similar to Zatoichi’s as well, which presses the question – was the character of Yuki essentially a female copy of Zatoichi or was it simply necessary for them to have similar swords since both had to keep their swords hidden at all times?
The disc is by AnimEigo and the transfer is okay. Nothing to write home about but nothing much to complain about either. The audio is the original monaural and it’s presented as well as can be expected for such material. Basically, the presentation didn’t wow me, but it didn’t get in the way either. There are no extras on the disc unless you count the handful of trailers. While I’m glad that someone stepped up and released this film (and its sequel), I wish that that someone had been Criterion. Maybe the source material isn’t up to their artistic standards. Whatever. I’m happy to be able to see these films at all. Recommended.
Like most Zatoichi movies, this one begins with Ichi hoofing it, hence the title. The original title in Japanese is literally translated as Zatoichi Fight This Week. That makes sense because of the big fight that’s arranged at the end of the film, but “On the Road?” That could refer to every single Zatoichi film out there. It’s a pity because, while these films are distinguishable, they are often hard to keep separate in my mind. Part of that is due to the generic English titling.
In this installment, Ichi has been invited to a yakuza boss’ home for an undisclosed reason. Since the messenger is providing for excellent food and quality lodging along the way, Ichi accepts. He doesn’t know that the boss wants to hire him as a mercenary to help him win a battle with a rival gang.
Before they reach their destination, Ichi and the yakuza messenger stumble onto a scene where a group of swordsmen are hunting down a man and a young woman. They kill the man but the girl manages to escape. As you may know by now if you’ve watched many of these films, when people die around Ichi, they often proclaim a dying wish so he’ll be honor-bound to oblige them. In this case, Ichi’s asked to help the girl get home to Edo.
The situation quickly gets complicated and, eventually, both gang leaders try to hire Ichi, using the girl as a pawn to persuade him. The whole situation builds until the final battle when Ichi solves the problem in his own, very satisfying, way.
I don’t usually delve deeply into plot details, but in this case I have because there’s little else to distinguish this entry from others in the series. There is one brief moment involving a dragonfly that approaches the level of visual poetry, but other than that, this is fairly straightforward storytelling. That’s not to say that the film isn’t enjoyable. It is. It’s just missing that extra layer of content that a master director like Takuzo Tanaka would have included. Kimiyoshi Yasuda directs On The Road, among several other Ichi films, and his direction is very zen in its simplicity. That’s not a terrible thing, but when the preceding film was a visually striking as it was, it makes this one seem somewhat simple. I am particularly fond of Yasuda’s direction of the Kaiju classic, Daimajin, so I’ll be looking forward to his subsequent attempts with Ichi.
Performances here are all crystal clear. I sometimes feel like the screenwriters are unsure what Ichi’s motivations are. In this film, he seems somewhat wishy washy in his convictions. He’s as much motivated by a good meal as he is by his desire to do the right thing. In the best of these films, Ichi stands firmly on the side of right, defending those who can’t defend themselves. Here, he just seems a little more self-serving.
This installment is definitely above average for a Zatoichi film, but I recommend it only if you find that you enjoy the series. If you’re only going to watch a couple of Ichi’s adventures, there are better ones to be had.
