You've likely already heard the rumours — forget what you think you know about The Hunger Games franchise since it's pretty darned blatantly sourced from better film Battle Royale (2000).
Thing is, that's in turn based on Kōshun Takami's 1999 novel, and there's a manga series of Battle Royale that was published from 2000 to 2005, illustrated by Masayuki Taguchi.
But let's get back to the cinematic outing.
This violent, often wildly hilarious — and disturbing — gem is p'raps
not quite so obscure now, thirteen years on, as when it was first
released in Japan.
Battle Royale would've made a far more fitting obituary for its director Kinji Fukasaku
rather than its lesser sequel three years later — which in fact his son
Kenta polished off after the director's death at age 72.
You certainly couldn’t take style, content and inspiration any further a
field from Fukasaku, Sr.'s earlier adventure schlock-romp Legend Of 8 Samurai.
So clear your frazzled Hunger Games brain.
It’s a not-too-distant future.
Japan is again a fascist state. An
arbitrarily-chosen bus full of high school kids are knocked out with
sleeping gas, kidnapped, then shipped on to an isolated island — where
they’re informed by their embittered former teacher Kitano ('Beat' Takeshi Kitano) that the only way they will leave said island is by killing all their classmates — or by ending up in a body-bag themselves.
In order to enforce this mandate, each student is shackled with an exploding collar, à la Wedlock,
and Kitano punctuates the students’ plight with a well-aimed penknife
to one of the girl’s foreheads, thereby launching a battle for
self-preservation.
Not Battle Royale (バトル・ロワイアル) - I picked up that DVD a few years ago (in Australia) and it remains one of my favourites.
I'm talking about Love Exposure (愛のむきだし), a 4-hour 2008 romp directed by poet/filmmaker Sion Sono that I watched tonight thanks to the prescient people at Madman in Oz, who sent me the promo unexpectedly.
I loved it.
If you go to Wikipedia they say that it's "a 2008 Japanese movie, written and directed by Sion Sono. The film gained a considerable amount of notoriety in film festivals around the world for its four-hour duration and themes including love, family, lust, religion and the art of up-skirt photography. It won many awards and positives reviews."
Which is kind of simplistic, really.
This is a film that forces together Quentin Tarantino and Ryuhei Kitamira, a four-hour compendium of self awareness, Christianity, hip fun, tragedy, comedy and farce/flip moments that borders on the hentai (perverse) and hard knocks.
The story itself tips towards some perverted moments and blood/gore, along with cult religion, panties photography, domestic abuse, and a soundtrack that gloriously includes Beethoven's 7th Sypmphony, as also recently used to such good effect in The Fall.
The acting tour de force here comes, equally surprisingly, from Takahiro Nishijima (from J-Pop band AAA) as our hero Yu.
All up, it's a sensationally surprising and engaging flick.
Strangely, enough, too, there's a van on the beach that's a dead-ringer for a van I discovered down the Miura Peninsula (an hour or so from Tokyo) earlier this week.
The van I stumbled across in the middle of nowhere had quite obviously been retrieved from the sea, with no back-story I could find.
I took some happy snaps of said lighthouse, got sunburned, walked for several hours, and discovered some obscure fishing villages as well as a cliff-side walkway that was more dangerous than fun.
It was also crawling with those beach cockroaches I mentioned in earlier entries (Shikinejime, for instance).
The latest Doraemon movie hit cinema screens across Japan yesterday (Saturday 6th March) to much hoo-har on TV.
Nobita's Great Battle of the Mermaid King (映画ドラえもん のび太の人魚大海戦, Eiga Doraemon Nobita no Ningyo Daikaisen) will quite possibly it'll surge straight to the number one spot in box office receipts in the very first weekend or two it plays here, if previous Doraemon outings are any indication.
This isn’t some recent-hit sensation and in fact the title has a history to roll up and perish for – or at least swoon over in gob-smacked new ways - in terms of anime. It's actually the 30th feature film in the series.
Doraemon (ドラえもん) started out in manga form in the 1960s, fashioned by Fujiko Fujio – a collaborative smoke screen coined by its real creators, Hiroshi Fujimoto and Motoo Abiko.
It did the big switch to TV in 1973, promptly fizzled, then was revamped by TV Asahi six years later - with character designs by Eiichi Nakamura (of Panda! Go, Panda!notoriety).
When you add in the two dozen odd theatrical movies, you're forced to realize that the franchise continues to be a sizzling property in this country over three decades later.
Doraemon hasn’t surrendered its grip on Japanese TVs or the Japanese everyman’s psyche; I swear that every person in this place can draw his happy face and and every third salaryman or office lady uses one of the series’ theme tunes for their keitai (cell-phone) ring-tones.
There’re Doraemon clocks, pop-up toasters, slot machines, turntables, beer-dispensers, ice-blocks, chocolates, drinks, and every other (in)conceivable merchandising possibility.
It's also the country’s second-longest-running animated TV show after Sazae-san.
When I interviewed the TV series’ producer Daisuke 'Dan' Yoshikawa at TV Asahi a couple of years ago, he was at a loss to explain the somewhat miraculous ongoing popularity of the animated mechanoid feline.
“Various elements – combined - made Doraemon a successful property,” he theorized. “But I think that it’s the storyline that makes it so special.”
So what’s that story about?
Our titular character is a blue, dysfunctional mechanical cat from the future (of course) that boasts a magical, four-dimensional pouch the envy of any self-prepossessing marsupial. He’s been sent back in time to sort out Nobita, a good-for-nothing schoolboy ancestor of the people who built him, sans ears, but usually instead complete mayhem breaks out – including subtle, ingenious anime references to Hollywood cinema classics like West Side Story and The Three Musketeers.
The saga also has some serious psychological eccentricities: For starters, aside from regular panic attacks, our motorized feline suffers from an ongoing musophobia that stems back to the future – to a time in the 22nd century, when his ears were consumed by a robotic mouse.
Hapless schoolboy Nobita is not only a lousy athlete and an abysmal scholar but lazy, cowardly, and selfish to boot.
Despite Nobita’s faults, Yoshikawa believed that he’s “just like all of us! People can relate to Nobita, and his story captures a feeling everyone shares. Not all of us get 0% on tests, but we can understand that feeling.”
It’s Doraemon himself, however, who is the undoubted star of the series.
“People love that adorable, cat-like robot,” Yoshikawa confirmed.
While the TV show focus on Nobita’s bizarre everyday family life and neighbours, the movies go for a more exotic, adventurous edge but they’ve been a tad rear-visionist in recent years: Nobita’s Great Adventure Into The Underworld (2007), for instance, may have been the 27th Dora-chan feature unfurled by distributor TOHO (of Godzilla notoriety; they do on average one Doraemon flick per year) but it’s in fact a rebake of the sixth in the series - released way back in 1984.
While he’s easy to sketch, he has a trademark profile and he’s a downright cute and often hilarious character, another reason for Doraemon’s popularity had for years been the quirky vocal effort of Nobuyo Oyama who did his voice all the way from 1979 until 2005.
After such a long haul, that year a bunch of the series’ seiyuu including Oyama and Noriko Ohara (Nobita from 1979 as well as the voice of Nobita’s mum in the 1973 original series) quite understandably bowed out of the series as both people were hitting the age of 70, and made way for new blood.
The transition annoyed some long-time fans of the series but overall passed relatively painlessly for TV Asahi and the show’s producers.
“The main characters are the same,” Yoshikawa said.
Besides, voice changes and exotic locations are not the big issue here, not anywhere as appealing as Doraemon and Nobita themselves, their time traveling exploits and outrageous futuristic devices, their essentially whacked-out neighbourhood buddies and an insane overriding story arc.
These have made Doraemon a hit also in China and South Korea, yet he remains a largely unknown entity in the English-speaking world – a happenstance that I truly believe to be bordering on unforgivable ignorance.
Just look at the evidence: Our fave feline was voted “cool” by 19 votes to 10 (three people opted out ‘cos they didn’t know who Doraemon was) in a two-month poll at the highly esteemed tzelun.com website – just check out: http://tzelun.com/blog/2007/03/05/it%E2%80%99s-official-doraemon-is-cool/
By the way, we are kidding you. Really. It’s not quite as esteemed as all that.
Perhaps not quite so internationally obscure now - nine years on - as it was when it was first released in Japan, Battle Royale would have made a far more fitting final movie for director Kinji Fukasaku instead of its lesser sequel three years later... which in fact his son Kenta polished off after the director's death at age 72.
You certainly couldn’t take style, content and inspiration any further a field from Fukasaku senior's earlier action-adventure romp Legend Of 8 Samurai, nattered about in this blog two weeks ago.
So clear your frazzled silly-season brain. It’s a not-too-distant future. Japan is again a fascist state. An arbitrarily-chosen bus full of high school kids are knocked out with sleeping gas, kidnapped, then shipped on to an isolated island - where they’re informed by their embittered former teacher Kitano ('Beat' Takeshi Kitano) that the only way they will leave said island is by killing all their classmates – or by ending up in a body-bag themselves.
In order to enforce this mandate, each student is shackled with an exploding collar, à la Wedlock, and Kitano punctuates the students’ plight with a well-aimed penknife to one of the girl’s foreheads, thereby launching a battle for self-preservation.
Shuja (Tatsuya Fujiwara, more recently the star in the live-action Death Note franchise) and Noriko (Aki Maeda; she’s appeared in both Gamera and Godzilla movies, did the voice of Yuki in the Studio Ghibli anime The Cat Returns, and teamed up last year with Kiichi Nakai in Samurai Gangsters) team up, then are later aided and abetted by mysterious transfer student Kawada (Taro Yamamoto, who appeared in Seijun Suzuki's musical romp Princess Raccoon (2005), with Hiroko Yakushimaru from Legend Of 8 Samurai).
There’re some hilarious acting histrionics and amateur execution techniques along the way, and the true stand-outs are Takako (played by Chiaki Kuriyama, a.k.a. Gogo Yubari in Kill Bill: Vol. 1), Yuko Miyamura (who does the hyperactive and chillingly genki Training Video Girl, and previously voiced Asuka Langley Sohryu in the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion) and – of course - Takeshi Kitano.
While he previously popped up in a not-so-memorable English language role in the Keanu Reeves vehicle Johnny Mnemonic (1995), Kitano was outstanding in his own movies Sonatine (1993), Hana-bi (1997), and Zatoichi (2003). Here the actor underpins the rancorous teacher - with a 'pen' chance for revenge - with a whimsical ease and blasé humour that’s gloriously disturbing.
