Crab Goalkeeper (2006)

directed by Minoru Kawasaki

Japan

80 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Happy Marine Day.

I made a mistake by going into this film thinking I knew what it would be like. I would have watched it sooner, but I had a preconceived notion of it according to Kawasaki's other "animal with job" movies and, while I do like those, some of them get a little tiresome when the jokes fail to land. But Crab Goalkeeper is so much more than an "animal with a job" movie. It's an often fairly brutal assessment of the value society places on ability to work as a measure of personal worth, but at the same time it's also a testament to the power of being genuinely kind in the face of a world that is too quick to leave people behind. I am dead serious when I say that you could apply Marxist praxis to this movie if you tried hard enough.

We begin the movie with a giant crab washing up on a beach, being kicked and hit with sticks by several boys. Our main(-ish) human character Shinichi rescues the crab, takes it back to his home, and teaches it to speak - in secret at first, but you can only hide a big, beautiful crab for so long. Shinichi's parents are constantly squabbling about the kinds of issues adults have: money, usually; it seems to be all they talk about, and it prevents them from seeing each other as real people. All they are is bodies who either can or can't, will or won't, make money. After Shinichi's parents discover the crab, their immediate thought is to sell it. His father even recounts a story of how his own father cooked and ate a pet chicken he had while describing how he fully intends to do the same thing to Shinichi's crab for money. The crab is never - can never - simply be a crab. Humans are only capable of viewing the crab as a commodity, not as a friend, not as a living, feeling being. In this way the crab is not only an example of the way capitalism makes us all cogs in the machine but perhaps, specifically, a spotlight on the unfair treatment of immigrants: if you wash up on our shore, you'd better make yourself useful.

One of the most interesting and unexpected things about this movie is its treatment of women. The crab, being automatically marginalized due to its appearance, ends up in contact with a lot of people who are equally marginalized in society - mostly sex workers. The film never, ever objectifies these women or presents them as anything other than people doing a job - a job that, because of their gender, leaves them specifically open to violence and exploitation. This the crab also experiences: it has the ability to generate foam when it's thirsty, so it's forced to work in a bubble bath brothel. All it wants to do is make enough money that it can go home and see its family, but it's forced to use its body to the point of exhaustion because its body - its ability to produce foam, its rich crab miso - is its only value.

I would be remiss not to mention that the crab itself has agency in all of this. The crab's personality is extremely childlike, and as has been demonstrated time and again, often the best way to point out the cruelty of the world in fiction is by making a character who is totally innocent be forced to navigate a harsh reality that has no intention of being kind to them. The crab, no matter what happens to it, is completely earnest in its zeal for life and its love of the people around it. The crab is totally accepting: it understands that Etsuko, the woman it befriends as she's about to kill herself after getting scammed out of all her money multiple times, is not stupid, just naive - something like itself. The crab demonstrates that it is worth giving people the grace we wish we'd be given ourselves. And it's not that the crab does all of this on purpose: it's born with this kindness by virtue of not having been corrupted by the caprices of human society. When Etsuko gets scammed again after the crab gives her several million yen that it made to repay her debts, it doesn't think twice about whether or not to help her. It doesn't judge. The crab is a better person than most people.

I was expecting some kind of humor out of this, but honestly, aside from the situational comedy of watching a giant crab who can only walk sideways get itself into trouble, there's very little about this that I would call funny. Okay, one thing was funny: the way they didn't edit out the rubbery, squeaky noises the crab suit made every time it moved. Other than that, I really just loved this for what it says about the inherent worth of a being outside of their ability to participate in capitalism and for how pure and good the crab was. Hiroshi Fujioka is also there, I guess.

Cinema.