Hana and Alice / Hana to Arisu (2004)

Occasionally, my random walk through the Japanese movies of the current century will turn up two movies about the same subject made at about the same time, so it is not all that much of a surprise that the teenaged friendship of Hana to Arisu immediately reminds us of the friendship of the teenaged Kamikaze …

Kamikaze Girls (2004)

I'm not sure if I've ever come across a movie that takes such a deep dive into pop culture as Kamikaze Girls. In description, it seems like a movie that requires its own dictionary, but in practice it is an absolutely delightful, inventive, and even in subtitles a hilarious comedy about opposites attracting and the …

Casshern (2004)

Sometimes we come across a movie of such significance or uniqueness that, despite its many flaws, it should at least be mentioned in any look at Japanese film and culture. It was only a matter of time before the turn of the century nostalgia for old manga and anime, the spread of CGI, and the …

Hidden Blade / Kakushi ken: Oni no tsume (2004)

Hidden Blade revisits the end of the samurai era when western concepts are beginning to penetrate into the more remote areas of the country. Based on stories by Shuhei Fujisawa, whose work was also used for Twilight Samurai, and once again directed by Yoji Yamada, the story also concerns an impoverished samurai who is ordered …

Drive / Doraibu (2002)

As it happens, drive is one thing the hero of Drive does not have. He does have a company car which he drives with absolute obedience to the rules, as he does everything else in his life. Every day at 11:00, Asakura times a stop at a red light outside a bank so he can …

Dororo (2007)

Manga has been a constant source of inspiration for Japanese movie-makers, long before the American deep dive into the Marvel universe. Red Shadow had brought a 21st century live-action feel to the work of one of the godfathers of the manga, Mitsuteru Yokoyama. Dororo takes a similar live-action approach to one of the most inventive …

Red Shadow / Akakage (2002)

Akakage is both a homage to and a playful send-up of Japan's film past. Based on the Kamen no ninja Akakage characters made famous in the sixties by Mitsuteru Yokoyama (often considered alongside Osamu Tezuka as one of the founders of the modern manga), the live action movie buys into the absurdities of the ninja …

Choice of Hercules / Totsunyuseyo! Asama Sanso jiken (2002)

The Asama-Sanso Incident in 1972 was the most dramatic and shocking public event in Japan between the war and the Sarin gas attacks in the Tokyo subway in 1995. The remnants of a radical group calling themselves the United Red Army, one of many groups around the world at about the same time that helped …

Dolls / Dorozu (2002)

I had not originally intended to write about Takeshi Kitano's Dolls, since it had wide international release and has been often discussed by other writers. However, after I have now seen hundreds of other Japanese movies, the film seems to take on a different significance than when I first saw it. Dolls was not the …

Blue Spring / Aoi haru (2001)

Blue Spring takes us inside a boys' high school in the last weeks before graduation, and it is unlike any Japanese school we have seen on film. The first thing we see is an adult desperately running away across the school playing field, with a gang of boys chasing after. The hallways, toilets, and stairways …