Princess from the Moon / Kaguya / Taketori monogatari (1987)

Folklore and fairy tales are extremely difficult to bring off successfully in live-action movies, so it was a great pleasure to find Kon Ichikawa’s Princess from the Moon. It is in general much easier to maintain the folktale feeling within the artificiality of animation, and in fact the story was re-used in the much more …

Deaths in Tokimeki / Tokimeki ni shisu (1984)

Deaths in Tokimeki pushes the hit man movie about as far as it can go. Far more cryptic than A Certain Killer or Branded to Kill, it becomes a movie that fascinates by its very refusal to explain anything. A strange young man (Kenji Sawada) arrives at a tiny station in the far northwest of …

Ballad of Narayama / Narayama bushiko (1983)

Imamura’s Ballad of Narayama could not be more different from Kinoshita’s version. Where Kinoshita used a kabuki-like stage setting with realistic acting to tell the fable, Imamura opts for intense realism. This makes Imamura’s version more dramatic, at times more humorous, and more immediately powerful. In addition to dispensing with artificial scenery and moving his …

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind / Kaze no tani no Naushika (1984)

So much commentary has been written about Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, particularly since its reissue by Disney, that I had not originally intended to write about it. Nevertheless, looking for some respite from teen comedies, I decided to re-watch it after all. Rather than put together a “review” of the movie, I …

Diary of a Bride / Hanayome Nikki (1934)

Diary of a Bride has some historical interest because it was the first sound film made at Nikkatsu, but its real interest is how playfully western it seems. Hosoi and Kimuko are newlyweds, and you’ve never seen more cooing and cuddling from a married couple in Japanese movies than you will see here. Hosoi can’t …

Girl Who Leapt Through Time / Toki o kakeru shojo (1983)

Having seen the popular anime version of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006), I was hardly prepared for the surprise of Obayashi’s live-action version of 1983. Though looking like a Suzuki movie in the constant changes of visual approach, it is a gentle and sensitive portrait of the onset of teenaged love, one of …

MacArthur’s Children / Setouchi shonen yakyu dan (1984)

Most of the movies made about the Occupation after the Occupation officially ended in 1952 have looked back through the eyes of the yakuza. MacArthur’s Children, however, views the early years of the Occupation through the experience of three fifth-graders on a tiny island in the Inland Sea. It is a view in which the …

Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983)

When Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence first was released, most of its critical and public attention focused on the casting of David Bowie, or in Japan the equally famous pop music star Ryuichi Sakamoto. Now, looking back from forty years of film history, its most significant aspect quite well may be the first screen appearance of …

Amagi Pass / Amagi goe (1983)

A 14-year-old boy climbs to Amagi pass in 1940 and an old man forty years later painfully climbs five floors of stairs to hire a printer for his memoirs. Their lives come together in the story of a murder of a wandering laborer at the tunnel at the top of the trail over Amagi. The …

Geisha / Yokiro (1983)

Yokiro is the name of the geisha house in which much of the story is set. This is an enormous house, supposedly 200 geisha, in the small town of Kochi on the eastern side of Shikoku, itself the poorest of Japan’s four main islands. It is an independent geisha house, under the control of no …