Zatoichi’s Cane Sword, the fifteenth film in the series and the third directed by Kimiyoshi Yasuda, is a fairly straightforward Z film with a couple of exceptions. First, there are two musical numbers, one of which is performed by Master Ichi himself, and second, there is a wonderful twist ending that really works.
The story begins in the usual way. A performing troupe is going to a small village to work the New Year’s celebration. Ichi catches a ride with them and, once in the village, they learn that the local Oyabun has decided to gouge all the merchants and performers. Ichi wants to help out, so he uses his usual cunning to win at dice and he gives his winnings to the troupe so they can pay to rnt the space for their performance. Unfortunately, the local boss doesn’t take too kindly to losing at his crooked dice game so he decides to dispatch the wandering blind man. Ichi takes refuge with a drunken old blacksmith who reveals that Ichi’s cane sword is a masterwork forged by his own mentor. The old man also discovers that the sword has a tiny crack which will very likely break the blade the next time it’s used. In a touching scene, Ichi gives the blacksmith the sword as a memento of his master and as an incentive to get the old guy on the wagon, which leaves him with a stick in place of his beloved weapon.
As always happens, the crooked folks in charge eventually figure out who they’re dealing with and they come after Ichi in full force. There is yet another large battle between Ichi and a huge number of swordsmen, but this one is especially spectacular as it happens at night in the falling snow. The fight choreography is exceptional and the editing is airtight. This is a fight not to be missed.
The only downside to Z15 is its convoluted plot. The story of the blacksmith is fantastic and the usual crooked officials are as reprehensible as ever, but there are extra subplots thrown in that only serve to confuse the issues of the core plot threads. After the lean and mean quality of the plot of Zatoichi’s Pilgrimage, I was sad to see how quickly the series reverted to this ploy. That’s not to say this film isn’t good. It is. It’s very good, but I think it could have been even better if the story had been a little more focused. I would have loved to have learned more about the old blacksmith, but maybe that’s just because I’m a big fan of Japanese swords and the artisans who craft them in real life.
The look of Sekichiro Takeda’s cinematography is crisp and clear with bold colors and interesting compositions. He also shot Z14, but never returned to shoot another installment. It’s a pity because Z14 and Z15 are two of the best looking films of the series.
The music is sadly dated, sounding a bit like the producers were attempting to modernize the feel of the picture. Unfortunately, “modern” films in 1967 featured things like conga drums. I’m happy to note, however, that the music is clearly reproduced here, unlike most of the previous 14 films’ scores.
As usual, I have no gripes about the performances. Master Ichi’s duck dance reveals the true comic talent that Shintaro Katsu never completely indulged during his career. He’s just as snappy with the song and dance routine as he is with a sword. But the true standout here is Eijiro Tono who plays the old blacksmith, Senzo. What a career he had! He was in over 200 films between 1936 and 1994, including turns in Seven Samurai, Tora! Tora! Tora!, Yojimbo, and two of the Shinobi No Mono films. The blacksmith could have easily been overplayed, but Tono plays him in a way that really tugs at your heartstrings.
I prefer this particular adventure of Master Ichi’s over some of the others because his sword is at the center of the plot, but even if you’re less enamoured of the Japanese sword than I am, there’s lots to like here. Recommended.
Redline is a goofy trip back to the fantasies of school boys in America in the 1970′s. The cars are all outrageous Hot Wheels, the characters are straight out of Heavy Metal magazine, and the animation is filled with hand-drawn speed morphs and disco sparkles. It’s all recycled and it looks excellent, but it ultimately falls a little flat if, like me, you’ve seen it all before.
There’s very little story, but there’s enough here for a race movie. JP is a rockabilly driver with a retro Camaro and an alien partner who keeps selling him out to the highest bidder. He’s successful, to a degree, when his partner doesn’t force him to throw the races for money. Now he’s surprisingly made it to the once-every-five-years superbowl of racing, the Redline. This year it’s to be held illegally on Roboworld which means the cyborg military will be hunting the racers and spectators down during the event. Yes, it’s all pure idiocy, unless you’re ten years old, in which case it’s nirvana.
I’m not exaggerating when I say the cars look like Hot Wheels from the seventies. They look EXACTLY like that. So much so that I expected them to run their races on orange, plastic tracks. The visual style of the movie churned my stomach a bit, to be honest, just as those creepy indie comics of the seventies often do, but I was eventually able to accept them for what they are – throwbacks. I wonder if Japanese audiences even recognize the style. Maybe they think it’s entirely new.
The ultimate problem Redline has is unrelated to its gorgeous, hand-drawn animation. It’s the lack of clarity and momentum in a bare bones, speed-driven plot. The final race is muddy up until the last run for the finish line. Through most of it, I had no idea what the course was or where the different racers were in relation to one another. That’s unforgivable in a movie like this, and it made the last act far less effective than the race in act 1.
There’s also the by-the-numbers techno soundtrack that seems slightly out of place with the Rat Fink visuals, but it doesn work well enough to convey speed and energy during the races. I just think it could have been better integrated into the whole. What if seventies disco tracks were given the full-on techno remix treatment? There’s a lot of potential for the sound design to match the visuals and it just doesn’t happen. The sound is pretty standard fare across the board. It isn’t bad, but it could have been much more interesting.
I can’t really recommend Redline unless you’re ten years old. If you are, you’ll love every frame.
The fourteenth Zatoichi film in five years, Zatoichi’s Pilfrimage (a.k.a Zatoichi’s Ocean Voyage) is surprisingly hard to find. I didn’t realize until after I’d seen it that star Shintaro Katsu owned this particular installment outright so it wasn’t a part of most of the home video deals that were made with western companies. There are stories about fan subs and illegal masters floating around the net, but I don’t know how much of that is true. I do know, however, that this is a film worth seeking out if you’re a fan of Ichi-san and his cane sword.
The thing that sets this installment apart from the thirteen that came before is its introspective subtext paired with a streamlined plot. Ichi is questioning the fact that he’s killed an awful lot of people in his time and he seeks answers. To get them, he’s decided to go on a pilgrimage to 81 Shinto shrines. Along his way, a man named Eigoro tries to kill him. Of course Ichi dispatches him with ease, but also with a troubled conscience. Killing seems to be inevitable for him, but he must defend himself.
As it turns out, after a charming scene between Ichi and Eigoro’s horse, we learn that the man was sent in search of Ichi for the express reason that the local Oyabun wanted the man killed. This further complicates Ichi’s dilemma. Is he even acting on his own behalf when he kills if he is manipulated so easily?
The dead man’s sister, Okichi, takes Ichi in and becomes enamored of him despite the fact that Ichi killed her brother. When the Oyabun comes calling, stating that he’s taking control of the entire village, everyone except for Okichi cowers in their homes, hopeful that Ichi alone will do their dirty work for them.
This film represents another major step forward for the series. Director Kazuo Ikehiro’s touch is exactly what Ichi’s stories need and since this was his third Zatoichi picture, he’d honed his skills to a fine point. It certainly helps that the script is so crisp, as is the inventive cinematography and art direction. This is certainly one of the best looking of the first fourteen films.
Performances are at their usual high level here, but I have to single out Isao Yamagata for his turn here as the slimy, crossbow-wielding Oyabun, Tohachi. His performance is the perfect match for Shintaro Katsu’s Ichi. By the time this film was released, he was well known for Seven Samurai (among many others) and he would go on to star in Samurai Rebellion alongside Toshiro Mifune once again. Still, it’s his portrayal of the Oyabun who smells of horse manure that really takes the cake.
The overall feel of the film is distinctly western, as in from the west, but it also feels a lot like Leone’s spaghetti westerns too. Ironic since Leone used Kurosawa’s Yojimbo as the blueprint for his Man With No Name movies. What goes around comes around, as they say.
It also didn’t hurt that, as the series picked up steam at the box office, it also picked up slightly larger budgets. If this installment got more money, all of it landed on the screen where it belongs. The music once again sounds distorted and does little to enhance the proceedings, but that’s more of a transfer problem.
I can only hope that the day will come when all of these films get the refurbishment they so richly deserve, but until then, Pilgrimage stands as one of the highlights of the series. Highly recommended (if you can find it).
Bleach has been a very successful TV series in Japan, breaking out of its shonen mold to appeal to a much wider audience. So wide, in fact, that the series has spawned several feature films. Diamond Dust Rebellion (DDR), the second of these features, is better than the first, but the creators still don’t seem to get what actually makes Bleach enjoyable and they ended up making little more than a cash-in here.
For those who might not know, Bleach is the story of a high school student named Ichigo who is accidentally imbued with the powers of a spiritual warrior, Rukia, who spends her time battling Hollows – spiritual monsters who are often formed from the detritus of a life after it has ended. Rukia, a Soul Reaper and member of an elite sect known as the Soul Society, has a mission on our plane of existence to keep the Hollows at bay.
For my money, the core of Bleach is the balance between Ichigo and Rukia. When events stray far from that see-saw, as they did in the series when Rukia was held captive for an entire season, things go awry and the series becomes boring and predictable. I enjoy seeing Ichigo wrestle with his home life in the real world and his new challenges in the spiritual plane. DDR has none of this.
Almost the entire film takes place amongst the SS members and both Rukia and Ichigo are marginalized over the course of this story making this seem more like a spinoff than a Bleach movie. A Soul Society artifact has been stolen and no one knows who did it or why, blah blah blah. It’s not that it’s a bad plot per se, but it just isn’t a Bleach plot worthy of a feature. I imagine the writers were trying to produce something that wasn’t directly tied to the TV show timeline, but in the process they ended up making a Soul Society movie. I must confess, though – I never made it past season two of the show so maybe this is what the show is like now. If so, that’s very sad. I mean, seriously – who cares about these SS members? We care about Ichigo because he’s one of us! He’s our window into that world and without him, that world isn’t nearly as compelling.
The animation here is bland and the characters don’t even look like they do on the show. I thought Rukia was rendered even more poorly than the rest. I get it when a TV show cuts corners, but on a playing field that includes Sword of the Stranger and the Evangelion reboot, the bar has been set pretty high for animated features in Japan.
The DVD transfer I saw was crap and there was obviously no one at Viz Media who cared about this release, so why should you or I? Not recommended.
In 1965, Daiei Motion Picture Company came up with Gamera to compete with Toho Studio’s very popular Godzilla franchise. There are a lot of similarities, but Gamera could never seem to top the publicity machine that was Godzilla. He was always condemned to second place until, in 1995, director Shusuke Kanedo decided to resurrect the kaiju (literally – strange beast) and he actually did it right, besting the ridiculous efforts to reboot Godzilla here in the states a few years later.
Gamera: Guardian of the Universe (GGOTU) owes a lot to Steven Spielberg’s first Jurassic Park film. Not only is the overall look and feel of that film outright copied here, but the international success of JP probably opened pocketbooks in Japan when Kanedo was shopping this reboot of Gamera around. I’d never thought of it before, but JP really is just a big budget kaiju film.
There isn’t much story here. Some weird, pterodactyl-looking “birds” (they keep calling them birds in the movie despite the fact that they are clearly reptilian) are found on an island after they’ve eaten some people. These crazy birds head toward more populated areas at the same time that a mysterious atoll is found floating about in the sea. The atoll turns out to be Gamera, who heads into town to kick some serious bird ass. Yes, there are some people involved, but they fall into the same broad categories as is usual for this genre: politician, military commander, scientist, and the one kid who is involved for some reason no one quite understands. This is not great filmmaking, but it is fun.
When compared to the original 1960′s Gamera features, GGOTU stands head and shoulders above in almost every category except for the rubber suits. At the end of the day all the great computer compositing and beautiful shots (we must see the Spielberg push-in forty or fifty times in this movie) can’t hide the fact that we’re watching a couple of sweaty stuntmen in heavy rubber suits slugging it out on models of Japanese cities. Yes, the city models are really impressive, and I felt a certain, nostalgic joy in watching Gamera smash an apartment building out of anger, but at the end of the day you kinda have to put on your childhood goggles to be able to partake in all that a film like this has to offer. In some ways, the upgrades given to the other production elements make the monsters even more incredulous, at least to adults.
The blu ray of GGOTU is produced by Mill Creek Entertainment. While the picture quality is very good, the overall experience is less than stellar due to Mill Creek’s pitiful subtitles. There’s no excuse for not translating onscreen text that is vital to the story. There are many times when there are newspaper headlines and other text that the camera dwells on, but we’re left to wonder what information is being communicated. I wonder if the folks at Mill Creek even bothered to screen this before releasing it. I simply don’t understand why you’d invest in the production of a product and then just shove it out onto the market with so little care.
I have yet to watch the other two parts of this reboot trilogy, but I’m looking forward to them despite the reports that the subtitles get worse with each subsequent entry. Recommended for children and for those who are still children at heart.
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.
