“Nobuhiko Obayashi was a director often dismissed as someone whose works are “ultimately less than meets the eye.” The purpose of this piece is to argue otherwise. On the contrary, Obayashi’s experimental aesthetics often served to illuminate the recurring themes of his works. They are frequently concerned with childhood, nostalgia, memories, reflexivity, the Second World War in Japan, innocence, and the destruction of innocence. Each of his films, even the failures, contains a sense of discovery, with his trademark opening card ‘A Movie’ being both pointed and wonderfully open. When he died in 2020, he left an extensive, restless, and utterly singular body of work, built over a career spanning more than 60 years, traversing multiple genres and media. He directed roughly 43 features, 10 shorts, and, by his own estimate, 2000 television commercials. Despite such eclecticism, each of his works remains, in some form, distinctly an ‘Obayashi’ film. His death has given closure to his vast videography, and one can now stand back and appreciate the shape of his career, which is something I will aim to outline and explore in this Great Directors piece.
“Nobuhiko Obayashi was born in 1938 in Onomichi, a port city in the Hiroshima prefecture. His father was a doctor, his mother a professor of tea ceremonies. As part of the “particular generation born between the years 1935-1940”, Obayashi’s early childhood was spent against the backdrop of WWII. Like many from this generation, he was too young to grasp fully the complexities of war, yet old enough to be able to remember its immense consequences. This context would go on to greatly inform much of his work, with his films often exploring innocence and growth amidst an approaching destructive force of some sort- one that is usually acknowledged, but only ever vaguely understood by his characters.
“Creating his own hand-made animation films from the age of six, he displayed a natural propensity for the medium early on. This creativity would carry over to his time in university, where he would make his first short film, E no Naka no Shoujo (The Girl in the Picture), in 1958.
“At the time, Obayashi’s next career decision must have seemed like a terrible artistic betrayal: he became a director of commercials for Dentsu, a large advertising company. Fellow avant-garde filmmakers, such as Yoichi Takabayashi and Takahiko Imura, had previously refused offers from Dentsu, seeing commercials as an ideological opposite to their personal films. Unable to resist the attraction of being given bigger budgets and being able to use more professional equipment, Obayashi essentially sold himself out. In doing so, he made what was perhaps the best and most vital decision of his career, with his time in the advertising industry helping to perfect both his signature style and efficiency. A “stylistic innovator in the advertising field”, Obayashi’s prolific filmmaking career can be traced back to this period, during which he created over 2000 commercials, sometimes working at the pace of one a day. He made them as personal films- albeit ones which happened to be sponsored, and featured Hollywood stars. His Mandom commercial, starring Charles Bronson, no less, is typical Obayashi, with its hyperactive editing and playful, surreal use of sound, splicing gunshot sounds with images of Bronson applying the deodorant. Aside from Confession (1968), a curious, pop-culture-influenced deconstruction of filmmaking, Obayashi would largely stick to making commercials for the next ten years.
“The circumstances surrounding Obayashi’s first feature-length film, House, are almost as extraordinary as the resulting film itself. Those who directed films for TOHO had to gradually work their way up the studio ladder before doing so, often working as assistant directors for years. Therefore, it was virtually unheard of when they hired Obayashi to direct this movie. Equally unheard of, and indicative of the desperation within Japan’s movie industry at the time, was vice-president Isao Matsuoka’s request to him to produce his own “completely incomprehensible script”, as the studio was “tired of losing money on completely comprehensible films”. These unique conditions led to one of the most striking feature-length debuts in cinema. Doubling down on Matsuoka’s request, Obayashi’s psychedelic horror film is stylistically eclectic, unpredictable, and unquantifiable. House’s generic core concept, revolving around seven girls who visit a possessed house, only to be eaten by it one by one, is rendered revelatory by Obayashi’s relentless, fast-paced onslaught of colourful filmic techniques. It is by far his most popular work outside Japan, receiving a significant cult following due to its manic energy and sheer creative, surreal imagery, being memorably described by Chuck Stevens as “a modern masterpiece of le cinema du WTF?!”.
“The 1980s would prove to be Obayashi’s most commercially successful decade. While he ‘branched out in a more commercial direction’11 in this decade, it was also his most adventurous period. He produced 15 feature-length films and two made-for-TV movies, hardly making the same film twice. While this would result in a few miscalculations, the work he put out had a strikingly high success ratio.
“As evidenced, Obayashi’s work is far from hollow. Moreover, in charting his career, one can see a strong argument in favour of him having largely retained his streak of experimentalism, from his early shorts through to his last film. Labyrinth’s manic, shifting visuals make it seem less like the work of a dying man, and more a work by someone who could keep making films over several more decades. Through his prolific and eclectic nature, Obayashi has been both utterly restless while also being sentimental and nostalgic. This tension is what informs so many of his best works, with many of his characters clinging on to a past which is rapidly slipping away. In Wales, we have a word: ‘Hiraeth’. It roughly translates as a longing for a home to which one cannot return to, a grief for a lost place. Regardless of the varying quality in his films, the primary recurring element is the unspoken, painful understanding amongst his characters that the past cannot be lived in. This also reflects Obayashi’s own feelings, as seen through his relationship with Onomichi, the childhood city he had long left, but frequently found himself returning to for so many of his films.
“It is impossible to separate a discussion of Obayashi’s themes from his aesthetics; for the two are intrinsically tied together. It is the particular use of imagery and editing that makes an Obayashi film an Obayashi film. Largely working within studio systems throughout his career, he would often take generic narratives and render them original and striking. Even in his more restrained works, one will find moments of heightened style, which often appear abruptly, eliciting new meanings through his witty aesthetic play. In viewing his body of work, despite its many flaws, one ultimately gains an appreciation for the cinematic medium as a whole- how it can convey abstract, unspoken emotions which may not always be entirely expressible in the novel. While there is an increasing amount being written on Obayashi, he is still largely omitted from wider discussions, and many of his best films remain largely unavailable. In tracing his career and body of work, I hope that I have established a case for Obayashi as a singular, fascinating director, ripe for wider discovery in the West.”
Hal Young, Senses of Cinema
NOTEBOOK: Your works feature a lot of wordplay. Is that something you do often and think about?
NOBUHIKO OBAYASHI: It’s not so much wordplay but playing with sound. It’s very interesting to me that when you deconstruct words into sounds and then rebuild them you get a different word. They’re different words but they share the same roots. They become different meanings. Punning is a linguistic practice in lateral thinking, even though humans often think longitudinally. When you think longitudinally, you are in pursuit of meaning. When you think laterally, you remove meaning and use sounds. When you do that you, in fact, see the details better. The words begin to reveal themselves. My one hobby in life is to read the encyclopedia.
NOTEBOOK: Your idea about punning seems to suggest a sense of discovery by experimentation. I’ve read that you make a lot of changes to your script while shooting.
OBAYASHI: If I shot my film a year ago and if I were to finish that film exactly as I intended during that time, my film will only be a reflection of myself a year ago. Both the world and I have changed a lot in a year. The work I make should express that change. If you do that, last year’s work can become next year’s work. If it doesn’t lead to tomorrow, there’s no use in discussing the past or in working on something today.
Besides, if what Prime Minister Abe says changes so much over the course of a year, I would lose if I’m not changing as well.
NOTEBOOK: When I look at your abundant use of green screens in your films, I think about the fact that a lot of time-spaces are existing in one frame.
OBAYASHI: That’s an insightful thought. Most people would think that if I’m going to go through all that trouble with the special effects, I should just shoot it properly on location.
NOTEBOOK: Yet, you deliberately greenscreen.
OBAYASHI: I use green screens all over the place because I think that the composite that I do today would be different from the one I would have done a year ago. A new reality arises from using footage from last year in the compositing process today. In my films, I connect frames, rather than shots.
NOTEBOOK: Where does your distinct film language and style come from?
OBAYASHI: Ultimately, what is important is that a person’s life is the one life that the person has to live. In my life, the most important thing is that I was a military boy during the war. I believed that if Japan lost the war, an adult will be kind enough to kill me. If Japan lost, we were supposed to kill ourselves. But at seven years old, the idea of holding a sword and stabbing my own body felt frightening and I couldn’t figure out how we were supposed to die. The old man next door who used to tell me out of kindness, that he’ll help me by decapitating me if Japan loses, was already running around town shouting “peace!” as soon as the war was over.
Adults always lie. That’s what my generation learned. What was righteous yesterday in Japan changed overnight to say that the Americans were correct. We were told overnight that Japan’s sense of justice was wrong. So how do we continue to live? My generation could not become part of the wartime, the pre-war, nor the post-war generation. We were told that Japan will disappear if we lost, but the Great Empire of Japan continued to remain. I was a second grader when Japan lost and for two years after that my school remained being the “National School.” At the National School, it said at the beginning of our textbooks that the school nurtured children who would bravely die for the Great Japanese Empire. You would think a school like this would disappear after the war, but it remained for two more years. Japan is a very strange country.
NOTEBOOK: And you believe that you don’t belong in the pre-war, wartime, or post-war generation?
OBAYASHI: I think it’s true about all those who were born between 1935–40. Shuji Terayama is a really good example. He wrote a very famous tanka poem about how there is no more motherland worthy of exchange for his life. After the war, it would have been easy if we had all died, but nobody would kill us. The adults in Japan betrayed us and we stayed alive. And once we were living, we were tasked with creating peace. But never had there been a Japan that was tasked with creating peace. We were the first generation. And so our generation tried to work hard at it with no foundation to rely on. Terayama too. He made movies, wrote plays and became a cultural critic. By the end of his life, he committed to being a critic. He spent most of the last five years of his life writing political commentary in newspapers.
NOTEBOOK: Your films also seem to have become more politically vocal recently. Though, reflecting back on Hausu, your political bent was always there.
OBAYASHI: That’s where the mystery and intrigue of my films lie. Hanagatami is the best example. I wanted to make it 40 years ago but nobody cared about it. At the time, there were movies like Jaws and the idea was that if Toho studios hired someone like me who had been making popular television commercials, more people would come and see Japanese movies. And so I brought up Hanagatami and showed them the script. They said that studio contract film directors make films like these and they asked, “do you have a film that’s similar to sharks attacking humans?” And so I consulted my daughter Chigumi and Hausu was born.
That said, the script for Hausu and Hanagatami are actually the same. Takako Tokiwa’s role is called Keiko Ema. In Hausu, the new stepmother was called Ryoko Ema. They’re the same.
It was then that I learned about genre as a filmmaker. I learned that if I change the genre, I can still make a movie with the same theme. What might not be of interest as an art film can be made a big hit if it’s horror. I decided then that I will make a lot of different movies about the same theme.
I finally got a hold of my main theme with Casting Blossoms to the Sky. That’s because 3/11 happened. For those who experienced losing the war, 3/11 was a do-over. I thought that no longer will the Japanese think materialistically or conveniently. I thought we will learn to be compassionate and work together. I thought we were going to be okay and so I made Casting Blossoms to the Sky and three years later, Seven Weeks. I thought the Japanese will cast away nuclear power plants and will move to a better direction, but sadly the government doesn’t move that way. And the one reason is because without war, they can’t feed themselves. It’s the military industrial complex. So, of course, the government won’t stop a war.
NOTEBOOK: So you were optimistic about Japan’s change when you made Seven Weeks but by the time you made Hanagatami you no longer felt that way?
OBAYASHI: I wasn’t conscious of it at the time but after I finished making Hanagatami, I had an opportunity to re-watch Seven Weeks and I thought, “Oh, I was already suspicious when I made Seven Weeks.” I think if you watch Seven Weeks and Hanagatami together, you can understand my philosophy.
NOTEBOOK: Do you feel that your philosophy has gained more specificity in your more recent films?
OBAYASHI: The reason that the dialogue in Hanagatami continued to change was because I kept feeling that I had been betrayed again and again. At the same time, my dear friend Isao Takahata died. He died of lung cancer which is the same thing that I have. It was incredibly sad for me.
Like myself, Takahata did not make films about losing the war. He decided to make a record of his experiences of the war. Grave of the Fireflies is exactly this. When you re-watch it today, you understand very well that it is a story set after the war. It’s not set during the war. It’s a story of remembering the war, after the war. Grave of the Fireflies is a story of a brother’s egoism that killed his little sister. That’s what Takahata meant to express, but everyone read the film as a movie about a brother trying his best to save his little sister. Takahata used to always say that “I did not intend to make such an righteous film.” My generation understands this very well.
Takahata used to say to me, “Obayashi, how careless we were. We didn’t think that Japan will become a country that would go to war again. I had made films thinking so, but how careless we were.” And with that, he made Princess Kaguya. When you watch that film today, you see that the film has no conclusion. If anything, that film is saying that there is no such thing as a polarity that says war is bad and peace is good. Rather, that those who make war and those who make peace are one and the same people. Both are Princess Kaguya. So you have to make the decision yourself. Think for yourself about whether you want to make money or start wars or whether you would rather have peace even if it means to starve by trying. He pitched a big question mark at us.
I don’t optimistically believe in happy endings. Watch a sci-fi movie and they all conclude with the end of the world. Humans predict somewhere that with prosperity comes extinction. It’s just about when that will happen. When I first saw 2001: A Space Odyssey, I thought that the earth still has a long time to go, but it’s only been half a century and we’re already at a place of uncertainty. Children of war have always had a sense of resignation towards peace. Humans have to eat, after all, and in order to eat, there is no peace. But it is the movies that proved that humans are capable of imagining peace. It’s in the happy endings.
In the 20th century, humans brought military technology into the fight and accelerated us much closer to the end. The movies are part of this technology. Movies are different in that way from art that came before. It’s a destructive art. And to believe in happy endings using a destructive art is basically an act of desperation.
What’s important is how long you can make that happy ending continue. If you’re only concerned with it lasting your own life time, happiness is only about eating decadently and becoming famous. Many creators are this way.
What matters is to be concerned about how long your will can continue to be felt even to a few people beyond your death. Akira Kurosawa told me that if he had 400 more years, he could make the world a happy place, but he was 80 at the time and as a man close to death he said that he did not have enough time. He said, “Obayashi, how old are you now? 50! That means you have at least another 30 years. If you have 30 more years, you can do more work towards this world and if you can’t make it there, your children and grandchildren will continue it and when it’s my 400th anniversary, when your great grandchildren are making films, there will be no wars. I believe this. So you have to continue my task.” That was his will to me. The last thing he said to me was “Obayashi, only you would understand that I have finally become an amateur filmmaker. After I quit Toho, I became an amateur filmmaker. How great it is to be able to honestly make movies with all my might about the things I truly believe in.” The movie he made then was an anti-nuclear film. He didn’t make those at Toho.
In the last 100 years we’ve hit the point where there is no winner and loser. During the war there were winners and losers and so in a way war no longer exists today. Now, we’re just fighting to prevent whoever presses the button first. Trump can press the button anytime. What a world we’re living in. If anyone asks whether it’s faster for Trump to press the button or for me to make films that would bring people together—of course it’s faster to press the button. But to live is to think “I’ll make 30 films in the time it takes for Trump to reach that button.” That’s the job of an artist.
House Q&A – Japan Society
Nobuhiko Obayashi: A Conversation – JAPAN CUTS 2020
My video introduction to THE DISCARNATES for cinephobe.tv:
Watch it here: https://www.instagram.com/tv/CVWJmMxjprM/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet
Exploring Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Filmography
Exploring Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Filmography Part 2 – Shorts, Commercials and Unfound Features
Interview with Arthur Johnson – Actor in Nobuhiko Obayashi’s The Drifting Classroom
Nobuhiko Obayashi commercials
Nobuhiko Obayshi Retrospective/Review – 1984-1987 – The Early Golden Era
Nobuhiko Obayashi – My Favourite Film Director
19 of 71 films
EMOTION
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Obayashi first came to prominence as a figure in the experimental film scene of Japan in the 1960s with short films screened on campuses and in event halls. Emotion is the most elaborate of these. It lives up to the “experimental” label: half the credits are in French, half the narration is in English; jump cuts abound, the picture dips in and out of color, and there are multiple peaks behind the camera to look at the group of friends Obayashi made the film with. What scraps of the plot there are concern girls from the sea, sadomasochist parents, and Dracula, but the narrative isn’t even close to the first priority here. Emotion isn’t the most distinctive of Obayashi’s films; the world of experimental filmmaking abounds with shorts of the same aesthetic and thematic preoccupations. But even at this stage in his career, Obayashi’s glee at working with film is evident. – Kevin
HOUSE
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“Just as Sissy Spacek’s prom night is so impossibly saccharine that it could only be the prelude to a bloodbath, House’s youthful naivety prefigures its eventual carnage deliciously.
“House’s twisted fairytale quality is further heightened by its storybook aesthetic and playful visual approach. Obayashi’s background in advertising shines through here, his compositions often possessing a boldly graphic pop-art quality. Utilising techniques as diverse as stop-motion, hand-drawn animation, picture-in-picture and liberal use of nascent chroma key effects, House’s visual flare is dizzying.
“The editing is equally exuberant, whether it’s the rapid-fire cutting as Kung Fu leaps into action, or the endlessly inventive scene transitions, which lead the film to unfold with the eerie grace of a haunted pop-up book. It’s as if Obayashi couldn’t stand to have even a single perfunctory cut or image in his film, and the sheer hyperactivity of his technique effectively anticipates the ‘MTV aesthetic’ – a fusion of avant-garde experimentalism and commercial slickness – four years before MTV hit the airwaves.“ — Sarah Cleary
THE VISITOR IN THE EYE
Watch full film here: http://rarefilmm.com/2021/10/hitomi-no-naka-no-houmonsha-1977/
“Ōbayashi’s adaptation of the manga called Black Jack (and his medical adventures?) which, to be honest, must not be the hottest type of Japanese shit except for a couple of hardcore weebs. Not sure if I absolutely needed to see a movie with this character, but It’s a complete delight to see Jô Shishido (Branded to Kill) in the role of Dr. Burakku Jakku, trying to solve the puzzle involving blinded eyes and lost love.
“The Visitor in the Eye must definitely be one of the weirdest family adventures I’ve witnessed, drawing charm from Saturday morning cartoons with a lighthearted yet strangely dramatic anime-like atmosphere, eventually turning into a more serious suspense film. Based on my own experiences, the film first took me back to the days of Inspector Gadget, then to the mystery flicks of the 50s & 60s and finally, the core of classic Ōbayashi cinema with grandiose emotions.
“Can this enigma be cracked? The story of the film filled my head with nonsense, yet Ōbayashi seemingly easily delivers satisfyingly with his imagery and feelings. It’s surprising but then again isn’t, that even the more unremarkable works from the master can be this satisfying, pure and sensational, something the most could hardly imagine. That finale – I mean, woah. I wish Ōbayashi’s filmography would never end.“ — joakin dreams of peace
THE ADVENTURES OF KOSUKE KINDAICHI
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“ADHD: The Movie. There’s more inventiveness in any five-minute stretch of this than in your average yearly Academy Awards Best Picture crop, but in the end I can only rate my own enjoyment and I was low-key annoyed by this pretty much the whole time.” — Lukas Foerster
SCHOOL IN THE CROSSHAIRS
Watch full film here: http://rarefilmm.com/2020/11/nerawareta-gakuen-1981/
“School in the Crosshairs centres around Yuka Mitamura, ordinary highschool girl who one day discovers she has superpower – the ability to manipulate the events at her own will. After the special skills gets activated, strange demon from Venus interrupts the everyday life as he wants to persuade her to be his companion. As Yuki refuses, the demon sends his messenger to impose new, strict, almost fascist rules at school. From now on the only after school special will be suspicious cram school.
“School in the Crosshairs‘ narrative doesn’t stand out among well-known high school fantasy horrors about teenage girls with superpowers, but shot in 1981 Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s film is a true precursor of such subgenre. Yuka Mitamura came way before such icons as Buffy Summers from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) or Misa Kuroi from Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness (1995). Nevertheless, as it was 1980s, Yuki’s story is not that grim and drastic and School in the Crosshairs villain seem more like David Bowie in the Labyrinth (1986, dir. Jim Henson) – all dressed up, glamorous, wearing heavy make up but at the same time disturbing and puzzling. Just like the movie itself, he is flashy, magnificent, extravagant, but cannot endure the huge gaps in the film narrative, lack of continuity. His sudden appearance seems awkward and unmotivated, leaving the feeling of satisfaction and confusion at the same time. School in the Crosshairs is a model guilty pleasure movie after all.“ — Maja Korbecka
TENKOSEI
Watch full film here: http://rarefilmm.com/2019/09/tenkosei-1982/
“I Are You, You Am Me (also known as both Tenkōsei and Exchange Students) blew me away with its quiet charms. In terms of visuals, it’s far more restrained than any Ōbayashi film I’ve seen—though it still features some of his signature flourishes. The story, though science-fiction, is low key and, on paper, silly. Yet, it packs a weighty emotional impact that I never saw coming. I never would have thought a scene of a guy serenely pissing would bring a tear to my eye.
“A huge part of what makes this so lovely is the Onomichi setting. I’ve been there a couple of times, and it could well be my favourite place I’ve visited in Japan. It is beautiful, built for cinema, and Obayashi captures it with such a sense of longing and nostalgia. The gorgeous hilly vistas peppered with temples and shrines, the crusty old shotengai (which has barely changed a bit), the sounds of summer, trains clacking by, a street cat waiting for a pat, a monkey darting through the frame, little kids walking by in masks, fireworks colouring the sky. You can really tell this is Obayashi’s hometown and just how much he loves it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film that captures the joy of a Japanese summer as accurately and sweetly as this.
“Calming settings aside, this is a story in the traditionally ridiculous genre of the body-swap with a teenage boy and girl trading places. Though there’s plenty of bawdy “OH SHIT I HAVE A [insert surprise genitalia here]” moments, this is an oddly melancholic and existential take on the theme. It explores body and gender roles in a uniquely Japanese way with several very powerful moments. A sequence where our two leads find themselves hanging out with a bunch of drunken salarymen at a quiet inn is so wonderful as the pair stare into each other’s (their own) faces, hand-in-hand, seeing themselves for the first time. The film’s ending is really affecting. My partner came in and only saw the last five minutes and couldn’t take her eyes off the screen.” — Dave Jackson
SAMURAI KIDS
Excerpt
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“Bound for the Fields was a complex and thoughtful look back on childhood; Samurai Kids really is a kids’ movie. The basic plot is a familiar one: a young boy from a dysfunctional family encounters a magical being who changes his life for the better. The magical being in this case is a river spirit in the form of a tiny, broken old samurai, bound for oblivion in the waves of the ocean. Most of the laughs in the film come from his friendship with the family cat and his conflicts with a local crow, but while he’s busy with the animals, there are adolescent insecurities, generational divides, and an ecology message to contend with. Samurai Kids isn’t going to win any awards for outstanding child acting. Like The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, its careful pacing can be tough, especially around the middle where it seems that the various family and fantasy conflicts will never come together. But it’s worth it to press on into the third act, where everything gels into an exciting, hilarious, and sweet finale. And Godzilla fans should keep an eye out for a posthumous cameo by director Ishiro Honda, a friend of Obayashi’s, as the deceased grandfather.” – Kevin
KENYA BOY
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“109 minutes of absolutely and completely mad Ōbayashi kino (taking place during World War II of course), even by Ōbayashi’s standards. Starring Kazuko from The Little Girl Who Conquered Time and everyone’s favourite dumbass hero Shounen Keniya, Kenya Boy mainly shows how perfectly our maestro’s style translates into anime and the unique, dangerous & spectacular eye Mr. Drifting Hausu has for riveting flashes of absurdity. Not one for the ages or the secret predecessor for Hanagatami (although this too was co-written by Chiho Katsura), but surely so, so much insane fun.
“If you take a look at MAL, you can feel the crippling hate of the weebs, which of course isn’t surprising as how could they know any better? Only people like us, the true connoisseurs of cinema, could understand the brilliance of such elegantly action-packed art extravaganza. I don’t want to spoil any juicy details from the film, so just watch Kenya Boy and be astonished!” – Joakim Dreams of Peace
BOUND FOR THE FIELDS, THE MOUNTAIN AND THE SEACOAST
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“The war is absent but only just so. All that’s missing is one cut, sometimes maybe just a tilt. The nearness of the war affects everyone, transforming games into war games and society into a keystone cop comedy. Everyone’s sliding and rafting towards it, talking about it, singing about it … and still, war’s not here. Being on the brink of war without getting there means being on the brink of madness without the possibility of a release, however gruesome. The world has already been invaded by violence, but without the accompanying structure provided by war. For now, violence is pure rupture, impulse without form. Films like this often tend do get on my nerves. Farcical, vitalist mayhem intent on selling me on the primal richness of life in the face of devastation… That’s why I have a hard time with a lot of Imamura, and BOUND FOR THE FIELDS clearly takes some of its cues from this tradition. At the same time, though, Obayashi never ceases to be a pop-filmmaker first and foremost, which is especially evident in his loving recreation of (1910s more than 1920s) slapstick aesthetics. Also, once again he kind of inserts himself into the narrative, as a young boy who, like in LONELY HEART, explores the world with the help of a pair of binoculars. What he offers is, in the end, not a treatise on man’s eternal nature, but a perspective on a world.” — Lukas Foerster
HIS MOTORBIKE, HER ISLAND
Watch full film here: http://rarefilmm.com/2020/11/kare-no-ootobai-kanojo-no-shima-1986/
“Director Nobuhiko Obayashi’s insistence to shoot the romantic sequences and the more important moments of the film in monochrome, which bends into colour, functions like memory. We want to remember certain memories as perfect, as cinematic as possible. It doesn’t matter if that’s how they actually happened, because the memory of how we remembered it is definitive. A picture can lie, because it can’t mutate or evolve with time, but memory bends to context and emotion. It can have jump-cuts, moments where music swells, and sequences where the world only belongs to you. The road is kind of like that too. You can soundtrack it to whatever music you’d like in your car or on your bike or in your heart. Each passing town or house or inch of pavement can open up a new chapter in your life. You don’t even have to know where you’re going, because the road will point you in the right direction. When Ko and Miyo start riding motorbikes together they drift apart when one takes a new intersection, but always circle back to one another when the road meets again. They swerve in and out of one another on completely abandoned highways. It may have not happened like that exactly, but film isn’t a place for realism and neither is memory. They dart back and forth between one another like a metaphor for two people truly in love. She was him. He was her. They both lived behind the wind, pulled into one image. Even if life has a way of pulling someone out of perfection and into a back-highway of desolation you can still rest easy knowing that you and perfection will always be back then. In Clint Eastwood’s, A Perfect World (1993), there’s a short monologue about cars being time machines. Everything in front of you is the future, and everything in that rear-view mirror is the past. Maybe this is why we make movies about cars, about motorbikes, about love.” — Willow Catelyn Maclay
THE DRIFTING CLASSROOM
Watch full film here: http://rarefilmm.com/2018/09/hyoryu-kyoshitsu-1987/
“After directing one emotionally charged masterpiece after the other throughout 1985 and 1986 Obayashi deservedly changes gear with this one, a perfectly fine SFX children film. The matte painting and back projection work is, once again, on another level and the idea of playing Chopin to keep the giant bugs away is basically Obayashi in a nutshell.
“I’m not quite so sure about the shaky cam stuff and some of the interior scenes, parts of this look really murky, to the point of suggesting a botched digital transfer. The “intercultural” aspects might be slightly cringy too at times but in the end this is once again warm and lively enough to easily triumph over these kinds of petty objections.” — Lukas Foerster
LONELY HEART
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“This poor kid. He’s the son of a priest, pines for a girl he looks at through a telephoto lens in a camera with no film. His mom keeps barging in on him while he’s looking at porn and masturbating, but they both take it in stride (OK, the movie just hints at this by having him look at art photo books and stroking his telephoto lens while cradled in his lap, but I know what they meant). He’s floundering, and so is his mom, who doesn’t know what to do with him. And that’s when the ghost mime girl shows up. Miss Lonely plays like live action anime, the supporting characters all overly broad caricatures come to life: the principal whose parrot learns a song about swinging balls, the teacher who keeps losing her dress, the boys who backflip constantly and eat chocolate. But then there are these other scenes – like when he is trying to learn Chopin on the piano: because his mother wants him to learn piano, and because the girl he’s looking at from afar plays it. And behind him, his father beats a prayer drum. At first, his practice and his father’s drum are discordant. Slowly, they become syncopated. There’s a lot to unpack, there. I don’t think I could’ve imagined that a movie about an adorable ghost mime would actually be so complicated and involving.” – threepenny
BEIJING WATERMELON
Watch full film here: http://rarefilmm.com/2020/11/pekin-no-suika-1989/
“Beijing Watermelon seems to be eavesdropping on life as it focuses on a green-grocer (Bengal) and his family, who live behind their store in a pleasant city not far from Tokyo. The film brims over with the enviable pleasures of a bustling, noisy communal existence, a sense of extended family, in which a long day’s work is topped with a few rounds at the neighborhood bar. A bit of intimate Old Japan has survived in the face of impersonal skyscrapers and supermarkets. Into this tightly knit, thoroughly homogenous world comes a Chinese student (Wu Yue) who cannot afford the grocer’s produce. “That’s they way it is,” the grocer shrugs, but very quickly this kindly man has substituted his obsession with playing the horses with easing the economic hardships of a succession of Chinese students. Obayashi’s various writers, working from an actual incident, have provided him with material rich in possibilities that would unexpectedly take on a whole new meaning with Tian An Men Square. We’re pleasantly lulled into thinking we’re watching a variation on a sentimental Tora-san when gradually the grocer commences to endanger his business, his marriage and finally his health with his compulsive generosity to the Chinese. We’re being made uncomfortably aware of the need to consider the limits of friendship and goodwill and their consequences when very shortly thereafter the film abruptly evolves into one of the most surprising and powerful evocations of the implications of the Tian An Men Square Massacre. Obayashi’s warmth and populist sentiment’s bring to mind the films of Frank Capra. Bengal and Masako Motai, who plays the grocer’s sturdy, long-suffering wife, are terrific. Beijing Watermelon (Times-rated Family), a treasure of wry, telling observations, is an eloquent commentary on the magic of the cinema itself.” — Kevin Thomas
RUSSIAN LULLABIES
full film
“Cool experiment! Ōbayashi’s editing here is completely off the wall, and it being paired with all of this beautiful, genuine footage of people living and loving just like the characters in his fiction is really quite moving to watch. Seeing Ōbayashi continue to tie the past, present, and future together into one nostalgic, optimistic whole through these lullabies with real peoples’ lives instead of his own characters is really nice to see. Shows how far his vast love for humanity and their stories really stretched. A bit too short and a bit too low-quality for me to really fall in love with, but I’m really glad this exists :)“ — Carol Jackson
ASHITA
Watch full film here: http://rarefilmm.com/2021/08/ashita-1995/
“Another testament to Obayashi’s astonishing ability to turn what would be the most sentimental of stories into something really quite moving. The premise is a full three-hankie affair; after a number of people die in a boat accident, their loved ones receive a message three months later telling them to meet them at a certain location at 12 midnight. The ensuing meeting is something of a final goodbye, a last moment of closure that we all would want from an unexpected death. Yet Obayashi turns this into heartwarming drama because of his natural affinity for the transitory nature of time. Lonely Hearts, Rocking Horsemen and Discarnates (which I have to watch during October) all treat the past as present, and Goodbye for Tomorrow makes this literal by having the dead come to visit the living from their watery grave. Multiple sheets of time are coalescing in the same place, with the dead looking as if nothing has happened. And the moments between the living and the dead are extremely touching for their simple, direct emotionality. Some get what they want, some make their peace, and one is bitterly heartbroken. It is profoundly moving, and the fact that Obayashi is able to keep this all going for two hours and twenty minutes and for the pace to never slacken is a credit to his directorial ability. The editing is far less frenetic than the earlier films, but if anything, that helps; the emotions come through far better this way.” — Ethan Lyon
CASTING BLOSSOMS TO THE SKY
“The first film in Japanese writer-director Nobuhiko Obayashi’s war trilogy is a dizzying bend of fact and fiction—to watch it is to get sucked into a whirlwind of narrative and historical information. An opening title card modestly introduces CASTING BLOSSOMS TO THE SKY as “a movie essay,” but it’s much more than that, as Obayashi integrates made-up stories so fluidly into historical accounts that the film is ultimately unclassifiable. It centers on a female reporter named Reiko (Yasuko Matsuyuki), who travels to the town of Nagaoka in central Japan at the invitation of an ex-boyfriend she hasn’t seen in almost two decades. He wants her to report on the production of a historical drama written by one of his high school students, but Reiko’s curiosity leads her—and, by extension, the filmmakers—to investigate myriad aspects of Nagaoka’s past. Principally, Reiko learns how the town became the site of a famous annual fireworks display and how Nagaoka suffered through numerous wars. Few people outside of Japan know that the U.S. Army dropped nearly 1,000 tons of bombs on Nagaoka shortly before the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; while the latter events quickly overshadowed the former, the destruction of Nagaoka was so sweeping that the reconstruction of the town took years. CASTING BLOSSOMS argues that Nagaoka (and possibly all of Japan) still hasn’t recovered from the spiritual damage wrecked by WWII and the events leading up to it, but that art can serve as a palliative for lasting historical trauma. The film practically opens with a quote from the artist Kiyoshi Yamashita: “If people made pretty fireworks instead of bombs, there wouldn’t have been any wars.” This line serves as the organizing center for the centrifugal structure, which moves unpredictably between interpersonal drama, history lessons, and documentary segments. (Even the title is a play on the Japanese word for fireworks, hana-bi, which literally means “sky flowers.”) Many of the film’s insights don’t become evident until after the it ends, however; Obayashi’s editing—rooted in his beginnings as an experimental filmmaker and avid fan of Jean-Luc Godard—is so rapid and at times disorienting that it’s almost hard to believe the filmmaker was in his 70s when he made this.“ — Ben Sachs
SEVEN WEEKS
“I’d seen only one of Nobuhiko Obayashi’s films before embarking on the three, two-hour-plus tomes that comprise his war trilogy. HOUSE (1977), the film I’d seen prior, is nearly a surrealist horror classic at this point; one watches it and is struck by the utter singularity of Obayashi’s kaleidoscopic vision. It’s no wonder, then, that a comparable sensibility demarcates this awe-inspiringly ambitious triptych, of which SEVEN WEEKS, based on the novel by Koji Hasegawa and crowd-funded in part by inhabitants of where it takes place, is the second entry. A series of disparate-yet-connected, narrative-based annals, the films mimic the complicated history of Japan during and after WWII through a mosaic-like approach that resembles the harshly assembled tessellations of an indomitable nation’s long-since and no-so-distant past. SEVEN WEEKS does so through the death of an elderly doctor with a penchant for painting; after his death, his family gathers to partake in a Buddhist ceremony that involves memorializing the dead every seven days over a period of 49 days in total. The surviving family members run the gamut from the doctor’s sister to several grandchildren and even a great-grandchild, a feisty young girl who imbues the film with the childlike awe that distinguishes Obayashi’s work. Also present is a beautiful, mysterious woman who is—or is at least thought to be—the doctor’s nurse. She lingers around the family as they likewise reminisce over their dearly departed’s life, the history of the region they’re in—Ashibetsu, in the Hokkaido Prefecture, a seemingly unremarkable town pervaded by tentatively recalled dreams and nightmares, as well as a now-defunct amusement park called Canadian World—and their own modest narratives. The nurse, a ghost-like figure who gently haunts the film as she does the deceased’s family, may be the young woman whom the doctor had known during the war or, more likely, the young woman’s specter; she apparently died under traumatic circumstances many years before, during an attack by the Russians. Mystifying flashbacks suggest the doctor as well as his friend were in love with the young woman. In his essay on HOUSE for the Criterion Collection, critic Chuck Stephens writes that Obayashi’s “sensibility [was] steeped in a romanticism far more Truffaut than Godard,” the latter of whom Obayashi especially admired but whose political fervor Obayashi eschewed for something more romantic. The suggestion of a love triangle and the presence of an almost sphinx-like object of attraction (though here conferred more sentimentally) recall Truffaut’s classic JULES AND JIM. The influence of the French New Wave is also felt, as in the other entries in the trilogy, through the film’s vigorous editing and the utilization of childhood and young adulthood as a metaphor for both existential growth and, ultimately, spiritual and even physical death. Obayashi examines a country beleaguered by intense ground warfare (including the use of nuclear bombs, which cloak the trilogy as the bomb’s plume does its target) and more recent ecological catastrophes as if reflecting on a traumatic childhood, the scars of which are constantly felt even if healed on the surface. The director, however, doesn’t hold back in bringing such trauma to the forefront; with a background rooted in experimental cinema and advertising, it’s what’s being seen—which in these three films is everything, as each is filled to the brim with myriad threads and throughlines—that matters. In taking one man’s life and looking back on it, Obayashi conveys not just literal history but the sense of history, which itself is a lifetime of places and their people and with which reckoning is needed for its ghosts to finally be at peace.” — Kathleen Sachs
HANAGATAMI
trailer
“HANAGATAMI pulses with the color red. It runs from images of lipstick stains to rose petals to toy fish, but two related forms dominate this film: blood and the Japanese flag. The final part of Obayashi’s war trilogy, it takes place in the seaside town of Karatsu in the spring of 1941, as Japan prepares to amp up its military operations. Although it’s based on a 1937 novella by Kazuo Don, the film describes a generation that was sacrificed to World War II. The teenage Toshihiko (Shunsuke Kobuza) moves to Karatsu, where his aunt takes care of a cousin, Kira (Keishi Nagatsuka), who suffers from tuberculosis. He quickly befriends other students as well as a few adults and becomes involved in the community; unfortunately, he’s arrived at the moment when boys and men were expected to serve in the army. Even his long-haired, communist school teacher shaves his head and joins up. Obayahsi marshals an exciting array of filmmaking techniques: horizontal wipes, hand-drawn animation, obvious green-screen backdrops. From HOUSE on, his work consistently identified with youth and took delight in fantasy, generally without recourse to expensive special effects. By the time he made HANAGATAMI, Obayahi had long since given up any lingering naturalism, using colors saturated to the point of distortion to create an uncanny sterility. Drawing on Japanese theater, his films luxuriated in artificiality. But Obayashi never used style to distance the spectator from his characters, instead advancing an eccentric identification with their struggles. HANAGATAMI was the first film he made after he received a diagnosis of terminal lung cancer, and he expected it to be his last one. (He lived long enough to end his body of work with LABYRINTH OF CINEMA [2019], an anguished, idealistic meditation on the same theme of Japan at war.) His presentation of characters as phantoms revived temporarily feels tempered by the director’s own impending mortality, turning this into the testament of an elderly man who outlived almost all of his peers.” — Steve Erickson
LABYRINTH OF CINEMA
trailer
“The first half of the film, in which Obayashi’s green screen effects and hyperactive editing are oppressive, is a challenge to get through, and the first time I watched the film it soured my connection to the second half. But I chose to give Labyrinth of Cinema a second try, and it was revelatory. Knowing that things would settle down a bit in the second half made it easier to relax and enjoy the whimsy of his visual style. In the second half, his tone becomes more elegiac, and the three men are confronted with the lives cut short by Japan’s quest for domination in WWII. The film culminates in the transported men’s rush to save the three actresses and their acting company from certain death, as they’re planning on putting on a play in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.
“Obayashi has been preoccupied with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in other films, and even House has some sly references to the tragedies, but the emotional heft isn’t diminished at all. There’s a hint of optimism that arises at the conclusion when his narrator says that movies can change the world. Films aren’t the best or most effective way to solve the problems of society, but they are a way to lay out a vision for a brighter future and to visualize ways in which we can evolve. Movies can’t do the heavy lifting, but they can point toward new options. There won’t be any more major statements from Obayashi, but with Labyrinth of Cinema, he’s made an effective case for the pacifism that animated his art for so many years.” — Brian Marks
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p.s. Hey. This weekend the blog has the great pleasure of hosting the above guest-post by the esteemed critic, music- and filmmaker and longtime d.l. Steve Erickson, and, luckily for us, he has chosen the films of the wild and amazing director Nobuhiko Obayashi — best known out west for the deliriously wonderful film ‘Hausu’ aka ‘House’ — as his template. It’s an incredible body of work, and Steve has given it a fascinating full treatment, so explore and enjoy, everyone. And do say something reactive to Mr. Erickson in your comments this weekend so he’ll know his generous work was not for naught, thank you! And thank you a ton, Steve. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Oh, gosh, thanks. Interesting: your handwriting style. That does mean something, and I’m forgetting what it is, but it’s a very good something about you. I hope your love’s mute button doesn’t have an unmute function because I need the former badly at the moment. Love asking Hate out on a hot date and then drugging and fistfucking him to the elbow, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Welcome back to full blog visibility! I personally found IC-B very addictive. Right, you guys, or, rather, the powerful among you, are postponing almost everything over there right now from what I read. Monarchy seems like a hell of a thing.** T, You know me, always happy to overload. Whatever works, old or new. Or else finding venues that don’t need their submissions clean. I, of course, am only familiar with those kinds of places. ** Sypha, Well, I surely recommend you do read her when the space opens up. Also naturally curious about the new McCarthys. And of course the Bret. I didn’t listen to any of his podcast readings from it. Did you? No shit, about Myrtle Beach, really? I may have to put that on a future trip itinerary, although, I don’t know, hm. No, if they have like 50 courses, I’m there. Someday. ** Tosh Berman, Yes, NYRB has reprinted some of her books. My favorite, as you saw, and the one I most recommend, ‘The Present and the Past’, was reprinted in 2019 by Dover Publications and is easily gettable. ** Russ Healy, Hi, Russ. Lateness doesn’t really exist around here, so no worries. Thanks for going through the horrors. I’m obviously not a normal person, but I didn’t find ‘Salo’ hard to watch at all, but know that I think it’s only so-so and kind of dumb. Very cool about our music list alignments. That Bryars album is so great what with ‘Sinking’ on one side and ‘Jesus’ Blood …’ on the other. Wow. I agree about Phil Manzanera. I think ‘Diamond Head’ is an absolutely fantastic album, for instance. If I had put a Bowie on mine it would been ‘Low’ for sure. Thanks a lot! Great weekend to you! ** David Ehrenstein, I feel like I should be able to guess who your first-favorite is, but I can’t. ** Steve Erickson, Hi! First, thank you again for the amazing guest-post ‘in person’. I did interact with Daney just briefly. It was the translator who did most of the back and forth with him. Yes, it was his essay on ‘TDP’, which hadn’t been translated into English at that point. It’s hard to imagine that at the very least some downtown NYC performer won’t do a Rex Reed act at some point. He’s begging for it. I hope all goes well re: the interview. I’ve been eyeing that AFA series from afar with envy. ** Robert, Hi. Right? Nobody looks like that anymore. Well, as far as I know. IC-B is virtually all dialogues but it’s very, very different use of dialogue than in ‘JR’. It’s very easy to read. It’s eating candy once you get used to it and into her terse, dark, hilarious style and mindset. Yeah, I gave up on that Musil tome, not because it wasn’t pure greatness, but because I just couldn’t keep the interest/concentration after a certain point. Awesome if you can. Second half of the FMB album: noted for my impending visit. Obviously, everybody deals with death differently, but it for absolutely sure has not gotten easier for me now that it’s not just some weird, hard to believe concept anymore. ** Okay. Please be with Steve and Nobuhiko Obayashi when you’re here until at least Monday, which is when I will see you next.
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