The Great Yokai War: Guardians (2021)

directed by Takashi Miike

Japan

118 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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After enjoying Takashi Miike's first reboot of/tribute to the Yokai Monsters series, I definitely wanted to check out the second, which at the time I watched it was still very new. Neither of these movies seem particularly well-known outside of Japan, so I didn't know what I was getting into. Immediately, it became very apparent that where the previous movie had only a handful of moments that felt a little too sinister for a young audience, Guardians is wholly for the kids. If I didn't already know that Miike directed this, I would have had no idea; save for some of the humor, there's no trace of the director of Visitor Q and Audition here. Which is good - to be that versatile is an asset for any creator. But to me as a fan of Miike as a horror director first and foremost, it's surprising.

So the thing about this movie is that it kicks ass. I'm going to apologize right here and now for not viewing it objectively, because my unshakable opinion is that this movie kicks ass. I'm able to recognize that it has many flaws, and with a certain mindset it could be slightly embarrassing and overwrought. But I still think it's aces. The tone of it is pure, classic children's adventure story: like the first film, it's a coming-of-age thing, but with more emphasis on themes of protecting your family and being kind above all else. I haven't seen a movie this untaintedly joyful in a long time (and again, this is coming from the guy whose episode of Masters of Horror got banned for being too freaky). Saccharine, censored, cautious children's media is a dime a dozen, but it's rare to see something with a message about caring and trying to be a good person that's executed and written this well.

In classic fantasy movie fashion, our protagonist is a little boy who finds out he comes from a powerful lineage, going back a thousand years to his ancestor, Watanabe no Tsuna, an accomplished yōkai fighter. His bloodline grants him powers that can help him fulfill his destiny, but he needs to learn some courage first. Like in the first film, the main character's initial encounter with yōkai after finding out he has the ability to see them when most people don't is pure gold. There's an incredible variety of yōkai, from the humanoid to the weird, and I never get tired of seeing them all assembled in such masses that I couldn't possibly register every single one of them even if I paused the movie and stared at it for a while. In a funnier moment, the yōkai of Japan assemble other "yōkai" from across the world at a yōkai summit (a "Yammit") to ask for their assistance, and honestly, I'm obsessed with the idea that Pennywise is a yōkai. Many of the same creatures from the last movie are in it again, but as this seems to have little to do with its predecessor, they have a slightly different appearance and characterization. There are also more oni, who serve as kind of antagonistic figures, but they're less cut-and-dry Bad Guys than they are obstacles for the main character to figure out how to help and apply his philosophy of relentless goodness to.

The real antagonist isn't even an antagonist either. This movie, in more ways than one, ditches the good/evil dichotomy so inherent in modern Western interpretations of folklore and replaces it with something more nuanced, something that asks the viewer to take more than a few moments to judge a character. The threat that the main character, Kei, is called upon to face is a gigantic human/crustacean ghost hybrid that is in the process of rolling its way across Japan, directly through Tokyo, in an attempt to go back to the unspeakably ancient sea it remembers as its home. It has no ill intent, but it is born of grudges, an assemblage of unfulfilled dreams and a deep longing that causes it to coalesce, like a pearl by way of irritation. This is not an evil monster that has to be destroyed, this is an aching, homesick being.

At every stop, even though he gets a cool sword and then another, cooler sword, Kei faces his opponents with an eye towards understanding them and getting on their level rather than defeating them outright. Everything and everyone around him is as scheming and underhanded as usual, but he evades all of that by simply going through life asking what he can do to help. When his kitsune companion and their party are betrayed by a yōkai-oni double agent, and a horde of oni outnumber them by several orders of magnitude, he does not want to fight them, because "We don't fight friends of our friends". His initial reaction to the arrival of a huge number of enemies is not fear, in fact, but gladness to see that his two-timing new friend has other friends outside of his cell phone.

I don't even hate the CGI. There's much more of it than in the previous film, and it's much more noticeable, but the costumes still manage to take center stage. And like I said, it kicks ass. There are just so many moments in this where I was thinking "oh my god, yes". This movie is awesome in the way that a ten-year-old boy might use the word. Awesoooome!!!! as in radical, as in a cool skateboard trick, as in saving the city whilst being in the fifth grade. I loved every moment where this movie went over the top. I love the lengthy musical number at the end. I love Daimajin (yes, Daimajin) being swayed by the power of brotherly love. I love the tiny sideplot about the yuki-onna having a big old crush on Inugami Gyōbu, even though she's a creature of the cold and he's fiery and hot. I love the army of tanuki. This is a good movie because I liked it. It has problems but I'm too busy liking it to talk about them. Sorry.

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.

Legend of the Cat Monster / Reibyo Densetsu (1983)

directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi

Japan

95 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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I watched this without subtitles when it was uploaded to the internet for the first time in September, and said to myself that if anybody ever fansubbed it, I would watch it again and give it the proper review it deserves, but I didn't seriously expect that to happen... until it did. I can't even express how happy I am that this film, which I had been searching for for ages, is finally available online and easy to find. It gives me hope that other obscure films I'm after will eventually see the light of day too. After a second viewing with more context, I'm bumping my rating up from four to five stars because I truly can't find anything wrong with this film at all.

I think Nobuhiko Obayashi is probably at his best when he's making movies about movies. A good portion of his works involve elements of metafiction, and when he uses that to talk about cinema and the role of film in our lives and in our memories, his usual style becomes a reflection on the nature of fiction and memory itself that is really inimitable. This is a movie all about how cinema works to freeze a moment in time so that we can go back to it over and over, living in it forever if we want to - to our detriment, ultimately, if we lose ourselves in it. But it's also about how seductive it is to lose ourselves in it.

The story of the film is about a scenario writer, Ryohei, who attaches himself to a film studio that was once magnificent but now is just plugging along, riding the wave of its earlier success for as long as it can - which doesn't seem to be able to last. It is also about a once-famous, now reclusive actress who has gone into seclusion on a private island she owns, along with the director who made her career. Once the studio gets wind that she's still living there and learns that somehow she remains unnaturally young, stuck the way she looked at the height of her career and subsequent disappearance from the public eye, they see a scoop, a way to take advantage of her one last time. They send Ryohei to the island - which he doesn't do against his will, it should be noted; he falls as quickly in love with the actress as the studio execs do with the idea of the paycheck she could bring in - where initially he's regarded as just one of many tourists who come seeking a glimpse of the forever starlet, but eventually is taken in by her personally after they meet in a dreamlike chance encounter at a restaurant and she gives him a necklace.

The film itself echoes the themes that its story presents. A lot of the actors in it are actually people who were active in Japan's film industry during its golden age, and at the time of its release had been acting (many of them together) for thirty years or more. There's people in this who you will definitely recognize if you've seen pretty much any Toho film ever, and casting them changes this from just a movie about filmmaking to something that has an element of truth. (I really love when Makoto Satō shows up inexplicably dressed like a cowboy.) Possibly the most important casting choice was Wakaba Irie playing the starlet and Takako Irie, her real-life mother, playing the older version of herself. The elder Irie did a stint of bakeneko films early on in her career, and her/her daughter's role in this film is an actress who also made a name playing in bakeneko film. Wakaba Irie is quite striking and looks remarkably like her mother, so having the two of them switch roles depending on the scene creates an effect that is almost uncanny.

So like I said, the main theme of this is the deep sense of nostalgia that cinema fosters in us. The actress Ryuzoji exits her role in society to forever play a role alone on her island, to forever be who she was at that one moment, in her best film. She's obsessed with a man from her past, her co-star, who left to become a Hollywood actor and whose leaving she could never fully accept - this is why she takes in Ryohei, the writer; his resemblance to her former lover (they are both played by the same actor) means she can't let him go either, and draws him into the pocket of frozen time she's created on the island. The film studio itself is also a place where time acts strangely: clocks stop, everyone who lives around it seems arrested in a perpetual single moment. Almost everybody who works there except for Ryohei is dressed anachronistically or just strangely. Legend of the Cat Monster is full of in-between spaces created by the influence of filmmaking on the world around it, places where everything stays the same and you can revisit it as many times as you like. But while a film may never age, the viewer inevitably will. The idyllic, pastoral feeling of the first half of this film comes up harshly against the realization that the second half introduces - that a person cannot exist forever in the same moment of time - but it's never without melancholy, a feeling that even though being stuck in the past hurts us in the long run, doesn't the hurt feel good, a little bit?

Ryohei, before he becomes ensnared in the actress' aura, is also in love with his coworker Yoko, who eventually follows him to the island to try to break through whatever's drawn him there. She is rebuked, physically, from the actress and director's home, chased off the island, because she represents the re-starting of time: A younger woman, a woman living in the modern world, moving forward, can't be tolerated. She reminds everyone too much that they're aging and will eventually be replaced by a new generation. This is also brought up, but not cast in such a negative light, by a small boy hanging around with a tiny camera, playing director - he says he's the director, and he is the director. He's the generation that will grow up to become new directors, new filmmakers, doing everything over again but with a fresh eye. The breaking of the spell by Yoko has disastrous consequences for nearly everyone involved who is unable to overcome the cognitive dissonance of having her there. When we finally see what Ryohei spent all this time writing, the screenplay that's supposed to make him, and all it is is pages and pages of him writing his own name over and over, desperately trying to remember who he is while Ryuzoji desperately tries to make him into the man she wishes he was... there's something so potent about that.

I'm having a much harder time talking about this film than I thought I would because I'm trying to assume no real familiarity with Obayashi and his particular style on the reader's part. I can tell you that I love this movie and it means a lot to me and it's one of my favorites of his and it makes me sad in a very specific way, but I can't really tell you why, because everyone experiences a film differently. All I can do is recommend it to everyone, and maybe you'll get what I got out of it, maybe not. But I think that everyone can understand that feeling of (sometimes painful) nostalgia that comes with watching an old film and recognizing an era that is gone forever for you now. It doesn't even have to be a fictional film, it can be a home movie. This is more about how the act of capturing something on camera places it in a different register in our minds, one where it exists forever in that one moment. The addition of a fictional storyline to that creates an end product that is forever slightly better than reality - something we can never quite go back to, no matter how much we try.