SF IndieFest: Yokai Daisenso

The plot of Yokai Daisenso revolves around Tadashi, a ten-year-old boy who's forced to move from Tokyo to a small village after his parent's divorce. After having apocalyptic dreams about Tokyo in ruin, he attends a village festival, where he's chosen as Kirin Rider, defender of justice and peace. When strange mechanical creatures begin attacking the village and his grandfather goes missing, Tadashi is obliged to fulfill his duty and head to nearby Goblin Mountain. There, he'll meet the Tengu who has been safeguarding the Kirin Rider's magic sword, and then use it to defeat the evil wizard Kato. Kato has been combining the spirits of yokai (ghosts and monsters) with discarded objects to create an army wrathful mechanical monsters, all angry at being thrown away and wanting to take revenge on the wasteful people of Osaka and Tokyo.

What's not immediately apparent in that plot synopsis is the wide range of influences that went into this movie. Miike's version is described as a remake of a 1968 film (which we haven't yet seen, but have on order) about monsters from Japanese folklore battling a European vampire. The ecological message of the movie will sound familiar to anyone who's seen a Studio Ghibli film, but it also has roots in Japanese folklore about tsukumogami — also, it doesn't take itself anywhere nearly as seriously as a Ghibli movie.

The yokai themselves are all taken from folklore, based on the interpretations of cartoonist Shigeru Mizuki (who served as a production consultant and is honored in the film by a sequence in which Tadashi visits a Mizuki museum to learn more about goblins). Most of the monsters are costumes and puppets — with some CGI, in particular for the rokurokubi — and come across as homages to Japanese super-hero monster series (as with Miike's Zebraman); Westerners (or at least this westerner) are likely to see it as "Power Rangers" and "Ultraman" on a higher budget. Other creatures, like the Tanuki who head to Tokyo screaming "party! party!", are shown in their storefront statue incarnations instead of as "real" animals. And the mechanical monsters are created with stop-motion animation, making them seem unreal but familiar, as if they're paying homage not to folklore but to decades of science fiction movies.

This review of The Great Yokai War from Kaiju Shakedown mentions that when the film was first announced, it was hyped as "Japan's answer to The Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter movies." It's not, but we don't see that as a failure on the part of the filmmakers — in fact, we have a hard time believing that anyone involved in the production of the movie took such claims seriously. What the movie does have in common with Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings is that they're "big" stories told just for the sake of enjoying a "big" story, movies made by people who love the movies they grew up with.

If we can make some very broad cultural generalizations here: Americans enjoy having a safety buffer of ironic detachment from our "art," always conscious of the dividing line between high-brow and low-brow, and eager to separate what we watch into the category of "guilty pleasure" and the genuinely good and meaningful. Based on what we've seen imported from their pop culture, the Japanese do a better job of doing away with that distinction — camp and slapstick humor mix with environmental and social commentary; action and horror sequences can go from over-the-top to subtle not just in the same film, but in the same scene. We like to picture this foreign culture full of people who just don't understand how weird and absurd their stuff is, and how it's ripe for parody. But more often than not, they understand exactly how absurd it is, and how it's just plain fun as well. The parody is built in.

And as a result, The Great Yokai War is filled with product placement for Kirin Beer to the degree that it's actually a minor plot point, but it's done with scenes that parody the idea of product placement. The cute and lovable yokai that Tadashi befriends in the movie is exploited for all its family-friendly cuddly qualities, and also parodies the Pikachu phenomenon by being frequently beaten and tortured. (And still, it somehow doesn't come across as a shallow, predictable attempt to be Godzilla vs. Bambi-style "edgy"). Grandfather's quote about azuki beans parodies the idea of the wisdom of elders and reverence for tradition. A warning in the middle of Tadashi's plane flight makes fun of the fact that this is a "kid's movie." Much of the climactic finale is filmed in the style of a Japanese commercial. And the conclusion makes a surprisingly subtle comment about growing up and the loss of childhood wonder.

And in the end, it works. For all the grandeur and budget of movies like The Chronicles of Narnia or Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, they seem distant and ostentatious, too concerned with the dividing lines between spectacle, action, comic relief, and plot, instead of just relaxing and telling a fun story. The Great Yokai War is more proof that "family friendly" doesn't necessarily have to mean "safe, boring, and conventional." And it proved to us that we shouldn't judge a director's entire body of work based on one film; the only thing that Audition and The Great Yokai War have in common is that whether you love it or hate it, you won't forget it.

Finally, we'd like to draw readers' attention to our favorite website of the moment, The Obakemono Project. Local artist SH Morgan combines an online encyclopedia of Japanese folk monsters, providing background information, alternative names, and a terrific illustration of each.

Image from The Great Yokai War at the SF IndieFest site