The Great Yokai War (2005)

directed by Takashi Miike

Japan

124 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I watched all of the original Yokai Monsters films throughout October 2022 and loved pretty much all of them to some degree, but never ended up reviewing any for some reason or another, so I wanted to give it a go for this one.

The inimitable Takashi Miike's celebration of the Yokai Monsters series and the film studio that produced it doesn't have much to do with the older movies directly, which is fine, because none of them have anything to do with each other either. This film is set up as kind of a coming-of-age story, taking place during the hazy, liminal time of summer vacation, when the boundary between reality and fantasy feels flimsy. Our main character, Tadashi, is bitten by a kirin during a festival and therefore chosen to be the "Kirin Rider", whose responsibilities, according to local legend, involve various feats of strength and triumphs against other local folkloric creatures. But it turns out he also has to do a whole lot more than that. If you know anything about Miike, you probably know him for his tendency towards extreme gore and absurd situations - really, as a director he's so unique that summing him up that way doesn't even scratch the surface - but this is a bit more subdued for him, though with a lot of the tricks he usually employs still recognizable. 

What this feels like is a love letter to growing up in Japan as a horror fan, and I'm talking pre-Ringu and Ju-on days, before that was all that Japanese horror was associated with. I'm very hesitant to call this kind of film and indeed Yokai Monsters as a whole "horror" at all, because even though they depict things that are eerie and weird, they don't have any association with horror in terms of the Western conception of it as a cohesive genre. Yōkai themselves are so isolated as a concept that I don't really feel comfortable lumping them in with general monsters and creepy-crawlies like your Draculas and your werewolves and whatnot. If you're not familiar with these creatures, nothing will be explained to you in The Great Yokai War - this is a movie that assumes prior understanding. Due to the protagonist being a young child, some context is given to him along the way, but as a viewer you just have to roll with it. And it also name-drops other things that a young person who was really into the macabre and strange would be familiar with, like GeGeGe no Kitarō, for example, and the fact that the main villain is none other than Yasunori Kato (you know, that guy).

I absolutely love the way the whole tone of the film changes when Tadashi starts making his way up the mountain and encounters all of the yōkai. There is no firm delineation between the realistic, mundane life he's familiar with and the world of myth, but you can tell that somewhere along the way a boundary is crossed. In the city, where everyone is moving on with their lives and no longer paying attention to legends, the kirin has to be puppeted by two people, a depiction of itself. Up the mountain, the kirin just is. In the city the man wears a mask, up the mountain the man is what he really is.

Besides having to save his wandering grandpa, Tadashi also ends up (along with an immense number of yōkai who, aside from the main crew, seem to mostly just be there for the party) having to maybe-not-technically "save" the whole of Tokyo from Kato's weaponized rage and bitterness. In an enormous complex of factory stacks and industrial buildings situated on the back of a flying, salamander-like creature, itself the size of a city, Kato is harnessing the negative energy from all the things the people of Tokyo throw away without a second thought. This is why the city is not wholly "saved" at the end: it goes through a reckoning, is mostly destroyed, but the message is that maybe it needed to be knocked down a couple of pegs, that people had to be reminded to care a little bit more... but not the way Kato wanted.

There's something I also really love about the way Kato is ultimately undone by a single bean coming into contact with his big evil cauldron in which he made his big evil scrap metal creatures. For all of his power and planning, for everything he constructed and put into motion, one tiny element of the traditional, of the remembered, of the story that is continuing on, was enough to destroy him. Just one bean representing everything he wanted to hurry up and forget ruined all of his evil schemes.

This is altogether pretty light on story, it's mostly something you watch if you're an effects nerd like me, but it's still got an important message about care and responsibility. The ending is surprisingly dour, but I liked this because it serves as a final reminder to us, the viewers, of what can happen if we don't have respect for the world around us. I'm looking forward to the more recent sequel and hope it only expands on what this film began.