As is fairly common for Japanese movies, the title My Neighbors the Yamadas is slightly misleading, since we never see the family from a neighbor’s viewpoint. Rather, we see the daily life of an “average” family from the inside, initially introduced by the elementary school daughter Nonoko. There is Father, a salaryman, Mother, who stays at home with Grandmother, and the elder brother Noboru, with occasional glimpses of the family dog.
In the best shomin-geki tradition, it is loosely organized and gently humorous, dealing with the issues of a generally happy family. The biggest crisis as well as the longest sequence comes early in the movie, when Nono falls asleep and is left behind on a bench at a department store.
While the family frets in their car in a traffic jam and then rush about the store, she sensibly decides that her family has gotten lost, not her, and goes home with her “Auntie” who answers the store’s paging call. The bulk of the movie deals with very recognizable everyday family issues – who controls the remote for the TV,* “not that again” for dinner, a forgotten lunch or purse or umbrella or briefcase, missing the morning alarm, hiding the mess before a guest arrives, deciding who has to bring the snacks when everyone is watching TV, etc. Dad wants to play catch with his son, who is “too busy.” Mom has to rush back home to make sure the stove is not still on. Dad recites the shopping list in detail but forgets to go shopping on his way home. Dad has a fantasy of himself as a superhero protecting his family.
All in all, it is the kind of material seen in American sit-coms, and in the version Disney released with a casual American voice-over, we often have a feeling that we are watching any middle-class family in America before the internet years.
Nevertheless it is still set within a very Japanese world, even a bit old-fashioned based on what we see in the non-animated movies of the same date. Despite the western-style kitchen, all family life is still lived around the chabudai or the kotatsu with the family always seated on the floor. One of Mother’s worst embarrassments comes when she forgets and tracks dirt across the floor in her outdoor shoes. Mother and Grandmother go to view the cherry blossoms. The birth of the two children are depicted as the Peach Boy and Kaguya. We regularly hear the phrases used so often they might be stitched on the Japanese flag: “Work hard” and “Do your Best.”
Based on a newspaper comic strip, the movie has no plot as such. It is simply a series of vignettes about a family not going through any serious crisis, as if Family Guy had been given the story lines of Leave It to Beaver. That lack of through line may wear on some viewers, but it is framed by two very remarkable sequences about the nature of marriage itself. In a flashback to the wedding of Mother and Father, Grandmother makes a speech in which she warns that on their trip across the sea of life, it will be easy to hold onto the family when times are hard and you are all fighting together but it is when times become stable and easy that the real crises arise. In a speech at another couple’s wedding, Dad picks up the shopping list rather than his notes and is forced to ad-lib, reminding the couple to accept what is to come, whether difficult or easy, as simply the nature of life. This is rather surprisingly expressed by Father breaking into “Que sera, sera,” soon joined with his family as they fly away together with their umbrellas,
but despite being an American song pretending to be Italian it seems to express precisely what we have seen in the scenes that came before and in the attitudes expressed in so many other Japanese movies. Part Buddhist karma, part mono no aware, part just simple “go with the flow,” it expresses both the acceptance and the appreciation of the little things of life that we have just observed and experienced. This traditional attitude is underlined by the use of Japanese haiku, many by Basho, as punctuation for many of the scenes.
One of the founding partners of Studio Ghibli, Isao Takahata often (but not always) made features that looked different from what we think of as the Ghibli style defined in Miyazaki’s movies
. Though inspired by the original simple line drawings by Hisaichi Ishii in the comic strip, the animation here is even more simplified with delicate lines on a pure white background, varied only by spots of thin watercolor washes. When the washes are minimal, the thinness of the line work sometimes makes it hard to separate it from the white, especially if you view it with a TV or computer screen providing an extra glow to the white. Takahata would later maintain a similar delicacy of approach but with more use of color in his last movie Princess Kaguya, which made that film so magical. The Yamadas, however, are not magical but very real, a Crazy Family that has managed not to go crazy, just as happens with most families. The lack of a plot may be frustrating to many, but it is a reminder that the shomin-geki did not die as Japan became more “westernized” while it is by far our best available film look inside the daily life of the “modern” Japanese family.
* Disney provides a small in-joke for baseball fans — the voice of the announcer for the Yomiyuri Giants who Dad wants to watch on TV is Jon Miller, the long-time radio & TV voice of the San Francisco Giants.
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