The Calamari Wrestler (2004)

directed by Minoru Kawasaki

Japan

91 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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At this point I've watched quite a few of Kawasaki's films, and while not all of them hit as hard as his best ones, like Executive Koala, I do still think they're all interesting. What distinguishes these movies is Kawasaki's unwavering commitment to the bit, which extends across the board to everybody else involved, too: no matter how goofy the premise is, all of this is always played completely straight.

The Calamari Wrestler is about a man who becomes a squid. As the title implies, the film is set within the world of pro wrestling, and the squid in question is the reincarnated form of famous wrestler Kanichi Iwata, who was forced to retire at the height of his popularity by a terminal illness and returned as a squid. We meet him when he ambushes another wrestler, Koji Taguchi, poised to himself become the top wrestler in Japan, and absolutely smites him. Though it isn't an official match, Taguchi obsesses over this loss and demands to face up against Iwata fair and square.

Outside of the obvious weirdness of having the antagonist of the film be a squid (with the protagonist eventually becoming an octopus - more on that in a minute), this is basically a normal movie. Even boring. The way it manages to subvert your expectations at every turn is what makes it. If you took all the seafood out, this would be an average love story set against a pro wrestling backdrop and I would probably not care for it in the slightest. But through the addition of a wild card element - the squid - Kawasaki produces something that makes us pay attention not just to the squid itself but to the larger narrative. It makes us think more about how other stories that follow the same beats but lack squid function.

What I thought was unusual about all of this is that there's a fluidity between squid and human that essentially implies that being a squid might be better than being a human, at least if you want to be a wrestler. Iwata was only able to reincarnate as a squid under the strict supervision of an elder monk and his team of younger monks, and he can maintain squid form so long as he resists his earthly desires. He's fully able to turn back to a human - but it's an accidental thing, and framed as a mistake; when he meets his girlfriend and they get down and dirty, he returns to being a human. Suppressing desire and connection to the material realm is what grants him squidhood. The same thing eventually happens to his opponent, Taguchi: through training and self-denial, he is able to become an octopus and fight Iwata on even ground.

Topping all of this off is some seriously awesome creature design and suit acting. I was wowed by the squid suit: it's simple, just a big squid with legs and wrestling boots, but the way its face is articulated gives it a surprising level of expressiveness. Instead of having a mouth that moves when he talks, the squid has articulated eyelids, which on paper sounds weird, but when you watch it in action, it just works really well. The top of the suit also has some mobility around the brow area, so the squid can actually change his facial expressions and convey emotion. Neither of the other suits have this level of articulation.

I'm kind of conflicted about what rating to give this, because on the one hand as a love story and a story about pro wrestling - something I could not care less about, personally - this is a little boring. The only thing it's got going for it is giant seafood, but boy, what a thing that is. This kind of movie will probably only appeal to a narrow subset of the populace, and even then, I don't see it being anybody's favorite thing ever in the world. But it is pretty good.

I don't know where else to put this, but in researching this movie on Japanese Wikipedia, I found out that production was supervised by none other than Akio Jissōji. Yes, that Akio Jissōji. This Transient Life Akio Jissōji. Overseeing a movie about a wrestling squid.

The 12 Day Tale of the Monster That Died in 8 (2020)

directed by Shunji Iwai

Japan

88 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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Maybe the real covid vaccine... was... the friends we made along the way?

I put off watching this for a long time after reading a negative review or two, but it seemed like the beef a few of those negative reviewers had with it was simply not wanting to be reminded of covid lockdown, which is fair. Personally, the whole concept of this movie holds some specialness for me, because lockdown was the reason why I got into tokusatsu in the first place. I spontaneously decided, while everything was closed and I was stuck inside for several weeks, that marathonning every Godzilla movie was going to be the thing that got me through this. So a movie where people stuck inside during the lockdowns turn to telling each other stories about kaiju and aliens hits very close to my heart.

Takumi Saitoh (later of Shin Ultraman fame) plays Takumi, an out-of-work actor who buys some capsule monsters online and attempts to raise them. It's apparent from the start that this movie takes place in a world just slightly different from our own - one where kaiju and aliens actually exist, and the events depicted in shows like Ultraseven, while having taken place before most of our characters were born, are also factual. So Takumi gets his monster capsules (more like eggs, really) and documents the changes they go through over the course of several days. Other characters include a vlogger Takumi watches who's doing the same thing, with better results; Takumi's friend Non, who buys an actual alien online; Shinji Higuchi playing himself; and So Takei - who I am not familiar with - essentially playing himself as well. It's just Takumi and his buddies, basically, only they're all playing slightly fictionalized versions of themselves.

Although the film shows only a narrow slice of what the worst days of the pandemic were like for a specific section of people, it really does capture that specific feeling of being quarantined and never having gone through anything like this before and just navigating yourself and your world within the confines of your own home. A lot of people made art during lockdown. A lot of people turned inward when it was no longer viable to interact physically with the outside world. Everything and everywhere felt empty - at least for a little while; I'm under no illusion that "lockdown" was ever total and that there weren't still people who had no choice but to continue their jobs as normal under the risk of sickness and death. But certain scenes in this film, like the drone shots of a semi-vacant Tokyo and the interludes of dancers out on the deserted streets, really capture a unique pandemic emptiness that is almost unthinkable today.

This is the kind of movie that gets very close to being ridiculous, but is saved by how earnest everybody involved in it seems to be about its concept. I love this idea of being stuck indoors and starting to just make stuff up. Getting people together over Zoom and making a movie where you all pretend kaiju and aliens are real. The end message of the film is one of personal responsibility in the face of the pandemic, and how something as small as wearing a mask and staying indoors can be a heroic act. If you're not buying into this I can understand how silly it might look from the outside, with Takumi naming his capsule monsters after covid treatments and the final form his remaining capsule takes being the shape of a face mask, but something about it is so authentic that I couldn't help but vibe with it.

I wouldn't call this a spectacular movie, but the concept is interesting, and it reflects an exceptional time not just in the history of one country or group but of the entire world. I don't know about anybody else, but I kind of expected there to be a glut of media about covid, so much so that we'd all get really tired of it, but that never actually happened. Instead, the media about covid that we did get remain little slices of a shared experience that everybody processed and interpreted in their own way, and I think, even if whatever media in question is technically "bad", all of those narratives are worth thinking about.

Battle in Outer Space (1959)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

90 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I watched this several years ago when I was first getting into tokusatsu, but remembered it as really boring and never felt inclined to watch it again until I had the privilege of screening The Mysterians to a group of real actual people in meatspace. That got me wondering if this was as forgettable as I was thinking. As is usually the case, it's definitely not - plot-wise, maybe, but this is such a practical effects tour de force that if I were rating it based on that alone, it would get an easy five stars.

This is a semi-sequel to The Mysterians which is connected to the previous film through two recurring characters, Etsuko Shiraishi and Dr. Adachi, both played by different actors this time (Kyoko Anzai and Koreya Senda, respectively). None of the events of The Mysterians are recounted or flashed-back to, and whether or not this film even takes place in the same timeline is ambiguous at best, so... don't worry about it, it's a spiritual sequel. The most important thread linking the two is the basic concept that Honda was toying with, where all nations of the world come together to fight an external threat as one. He broached this subject in The Mysterians, but explores it more fully here, although in different ways. I have heard that Honda considered The Mysterians to be his favorite of his tokusatsu films - this from a director who was usually hard on himself. I do think The Mysterians is the superior film, but Battle in Outer Space definitely fleshes out the international-cooperation concept more robustly, so I wonder why Honda preferred one over the other.

The storyline follows the same basic path as The Mysterians but makes a few changes, most notably that the aliens - this time called the Natarl - are far more distant and honestly a lot scarier than the Mysterians ever were. You don't see a Natarl's face at any point, but their influence is massive: they have the ability to remotely possess and control humans, ordering them to do their bidding and abducting them with their UFOs at will. There's this incredibly creepy scene where the Earth astronauts arrive on the moon and one of them gets mobbed and almost killed by what we're lead to believe are Natarls themselves - I have a headcanon that these guys were actually something like Shocker footsoldiers and not the real aliens, but there's something about that scene that's just so eerie. The Natarls' proportions look off, their heads are too big, they move awkwardly, and there are too many of them. There's a real uncanny valley effect here that overrides some of the inherent goofiness of their costumes.

Because this is an Ishirō Honda film, we of course have one guy who sacrifices himself heroically for the good of the rest of the space crew. This character is played by the inimitable Yoshio Tsuchiya, whose best roles by far are his villains, but he does a commendable job in this situation as well. Another great scene is when Tsuchiya's character, Iwamura, is possessed by the Natarl while driving to Ginza. By the time he arrives there he no longer has a will of his own. The musical score becomes frenetic and disorienting, the neon lights flash across the screen, and we see a dazed Iwamura in the middle of the city, a passenger now in his own body.

Unfortunately, the recycled plot fails to fill out the film's runtime. But what it lacks in plot, it more than makes up for in practical effects. The Mysterians was Toho's big tokusatsu extravaganza, but the effects in this film easily rival it - if not surpass it altogether. Again, although there's many similarities between the two, changes are made here: whereas The Mysterians was almost entirely Earth-bound, Battle in Outer Space is a distinctly space-age film. All of its real standout sequences occur in the SPIP spaceships and on the moon (the lava fields of Mt. Mihara here standing in for the rocky lunar surface). Absolutely gorgeous 1950s conceptions of what the future would look like abound. At about 70 minutes in the plot essentially grinds to a halt and the remaining runtime is filled with expertly-filmed aerial dogfights, but I didn't even care that nothing was actually happening in terms of story because the effects were so fun to look at.

I still think The Mysterians is better, but it's a "two cakes" situation: fussing over the comparative quality of each film takes a backseat, for me, to celebrating the fact that we got two of a very good thing.

The Invisible Man Appears (1949)

directed by Shigehiro Fukushima, Shinsei Adachi

83 minutes

Japan

3.5 stars out of 5

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I recently got together a list of every tokusatsu film I've ever seen and realized that this and The Invisible Man vs. The Human Fly were conspicuously absent. I have seen Motoyoshi Oda's Invisible Man, but that's it in the way of invisible-man movies. So let's talk about this little-known but important early work of tokusatsu.

One can definitely see influences from this on Toho's "Transforming Human" trilogy. Not only in the fact that it's a noir-ish story about an altered human with a little crime thrown in for funsies, but also because the effects were done by Eiji Tsuburaya as his first postwar work (he had previously done effects for war films). I can't compare it to the Universal Invisible Man, because the only memories I have of that are seeing it playing on a TV somewhere in public when I was a small child. For what it's worth, even though the visual language is a direct callback to the Universal film, The Invisible Man Appears was actually based on a different source (a children's science fiction novel). However, Japanese Wikipedia claims that a lot was altered from this source, so it remains that riffing on the Universal original was probably intentional after all.

There's a general vibe of scientific experimentation run amok in the plotline, and the scenario chosen to highlight that is basically the idea that being invisible, you could do whatever you want, including - shock horror - jewel thievery. It gets a little more complicated than that along the way, because there's confusion about who exactly the invisible man is: is it the professor who invented the invisibility formula, or someone else? And is someone taking advantage of the whole situation and dressing up as the invisible man to get away with crimes? (The answer to that one is "yes".) To be honest, the plot was really confusing to me, and it required some Wiki journeying to unravel it all - could be because I was so tired I started passing out during the last half-hour of the film - but, while this is fun as a very of-its-time crime thriller, the real draw here is the special effects.

There's a reason why the unwrapping sequence from the Universal film is still so instantly recognizable. It might have been surpassed by computer animation in terms of quality, but I think - I hope - people still appreciate the effort behind creating an effect so sophisticated at such an early date. It's the same with The Invisible Man Appears. The effects are remarkably good for the time thanks to Tsuburaya's mastery of the medium, and the film is full of shots that take full advantage of the concept of an invisible human running wild. We see the invisible man manipulate objects around him, we see chairs depress when he sits on them, we see him gradually disappear when he removes his clothing. The sense of physicality despite the lack of a visible physical body is conveyed extremely well. (The first reveal scene was so good it almost made me not think about how I was basically watching a guy invade somebody's home and get completely butt-ass naked in front of him.)

It's also just really fun to watch this as an artifact of the time it was made. I was happily surprised to see that there's a scene where the characters all go to see a Takarazuka Revue, which is something I have a little knowledge about and interest in. I particularly want to highlight one member of the cast: Takiko Mizunoe, who was herself an opera performer in real life; she was Japan's first female film producer and a prolific player of male roles in theater. She definitely stands out from the rest of the actors as someone who looks and acts more like a stage performer than everyone else. Aside from that, the only face I recognized was a very young Saburo Date in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it role.

This was a pretty obscure film for a long time, and was unavailable on home media outside of Japan until its Arrow Video release in 2021, which is a shame because everybody loves Eiji Tsuburaya. (He apparently didn't regard his work on this film as being that good, and in fact decided not to stay at Daiei because of it - imagine!) I would love to have a movie marathon of the Transforming Human trilogy and stick this in alongside it, I think it fits really well with later kaijin-type films.

The H-Man (1958)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

87 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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This is a favorite of mine to watch while I'm on... herbal supplements, but I decided to watch it sober and finally give it a proper review. I'm never sure how much plot to talk about when I write these reviews, because I review movies with an audience in mind who has either seen them or has easy access to Google to look up what the hell I'm talking about, but to summarize this incredibly briefly: The H-Man is about humans who have become contaminated with nuclear radiation and transformed into sentient slime that has the ability to melt and consume other humans. The idea that the post-transformation "H-Men" (this is one of the only times where I think the English rebranding of a Toho movie is more succinct; in the original film they're simply referred to as "ekitai ningen", liquid humans) could retain their mental capacity is something I'll explore later on in this review. 

Honda directed so many movies in which the supernatural element is introduced by way of gangsters running afoul of it that I have to wonder if the noir-ish detective story framework was something imposed by the studio, hoping to capitalize on trends of the time, or if it was something that personally resonated with Honda and the screenwriters (Takeshi Kimura, in the case of the Transforming Human trilogy). This particular film isn't shy at all about where its inspiration lies: the film opens with newspaper headlines about a missing fishing boat feared contaminated by nuclear testing, a blatant reference to the real-life Lucky Dragon no. 5 incident that informed much of Honda's filmmaking.

This film came out the same year as The Blob, and it's impossible not to draw comparisons between the two in terms of how the practical effects for the creature/s in question were achieved. (The Blob is actually the latter of the two films, having been released in September while The H-Man was released in June, but it's still worth thinking about.) But a more interesting comparison, I believe, is the ways in which Japanese contemporary film was lifting tropes from American sci-fi and horror movies and utilizing them to tell stories with different meaning than their Western counterparts. American science fiction of the 1950s-60s was frequently obsessed with the concept of an other, of some invading force - sometimes thinly-veiled communists, sometimes just anybody who isn't a WASP-y American - whereas Japanese sci-fi films of this era seem to be more concerned with the idea of becoming the other. The terror at the heart of The H-Man lies in the possibility that one's body could be so transformed, through the echoing aftereffects of nuclear testing, that one would no longer be recognizable to one's fellow humans and - worse - would have no choice but to act in a way that is actively hostile to non-mutated humanity. Japanese science fiction often feels like it understands the outsider in a much more nuanced way than American films that were being released at the same time.

This is where the idea of sentient slime people comes in. It's not given a lot of focus in the film itself, but there is speculation that humans who have mutated into H-Men still have the mental capacity that they did before their transformation. It's even brought up that they might be purposefully returning to Tokyo out of some kind of instinctual, remembered pull. Despite this, the film ends with all of the known H-Men having been eliminated quite brutally, through the ignition of huge gas fires to drive them out of the sewers and the use of guns (yes, shooting the slime with a gun works; I love the 1950s). Like a lot of Honda's films, the ending is unfulfilling for those expecting a neat, tidy, day-is-saved wrap-up: there's no such thing as hope or optimism, just the stark acknowledgement that the world has changed irrevocably and things such as what we just witnessed will continue happening.

Interestingly, the element of the H-Men retaining their human memories was cut completely from the American version of the film.

It's also just a really good and fun movie. The colors are absolutely gorgeous (that's Toho Scope, baby!) and the music and fashion makes it a perfect little slice of 1950s cinema that exists out of time when viewed through a contemporary lens. These genre hybrids that Toho put out are so fascinating because they allow for heavier topics to be explored using visual language normally reserved for non-genre cinema. 

I've kind of intentionally been talking more about the implications of the concept of this film than the practical effects, because a lot has already been said about that side of it, but I have to acknowledge how extremely good the effects are anyway. It's one of those movies where you would think watching it in the best possible quality would make the effects less convincing since you'd be able to see all the rough edges, but it actually makes it better the more clearly you can see it. I am, tentatively, attempting to start up a tokusatsu film club in real life, and movies like this are the kind of thing I want to show to people.

Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo (1970)

directed by Kihachi Okamoto

Japan

115 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I revisited this movie after about two years because I wanted to see if it was truly as mid as I remembered it being. Everybody I've talked to about it agrees: it's good, but it's just good. I really don't want this movie to be "just good", because it has literally everything I could ever want out of a chanbara film: Zatoichi? And Yojimbo? Directed by Kihachi Okamoto? Co-starring Shin Kishida as a goth yakuza with a pistol? Soundtrack by Akira Ifukube? How in the world could all of that combine into something even remotely less than awesome?

Well, I will say one thing: no matter how so-so the bulk of the film is, those last fifteen minutes absolutely whip.

Ichi journeys homeward, to a village on the outskirts of his hometown, but finds that since the last time he'd visited, it's been taken over by yakuza, and the townspeople are suffering for it. He's hoping to relax a little, especially after a tumultuous fight that opens the film, but the town has changed so much that none of the tranquility he remembers remains. Thrown into the mix is a character instantly recognizable (although they never say that it's him, the implication is fairly obvious): a scruffy, drunk ronin played by Toshirō Mifune. And a fairly complicated subplot about hidden gold.

I have a theory that there's two major reasons why this movie didn't turn out as good as it could have. The first is that it rests too heavily on the interplay between Katsu and Mifune's characters. I actually don't see this as an objective problem, because personally, over the past two years, I've seen a shipload of films starring both actors, and I was very entertained watching them play off of each other here. Is that enough to carry an entire film? I don't think so, unless you are specifically watching it for either of these two. I also think that, despite the title making it clear that, yes, they are putting Mifune in this on purpose and they want you to think of his character from Yojimbo, the ronin is far meaner than Sanjuro ever was. I do kind of love it - his wheedling senseiiii!! as he mocks one of his lackeys is, though cruel, really funny - but it feels like too-clever marketing to do all of this and then make the bodyguard in question a different character from who you're thinking of.

The second reason why I think this fell short is because they didn't let Okamoto do the Okamoto thing. I don't know anything about the production history of this film, or of the Zatoichi series in general, but I was getting a sense that Okamoto had maybe been told to tone down his usual wildness a little bit so that his entry wouldn't be the proverbial sore thumb of the franchise. So instead of two hours of antics and shenanigans à la Red Lion, we get two hours of talking capped by fifteen glorious minutes where Okamoto is finally loosed upon the production.

If you've seen a lot of his films, you can instantly recognize a battle scene from an Okamoto movie. It doesn't matter whether he's directing a war film or a swordfight in a jidaigeki, all of his climactic battles have the same disorganized, chaotic, brutal, bloody choreography. Nothing is pretty or practiced: limbs fly off, people die with no dignity whatever. Okamoto witnessed combat during the Pacific War and he films his battle scenes with a kind of frenetic violence that can be uncomfortable to watch. That is present during the climax of Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo, and the stylistic choice is also paired with a pathos that had been building since the beginning of the film: the hidden gold is finally uncovered, in the form of dust secreted inside Jizo statues, and the fight occurs as high winds kick up, so the town is literally suffuse with the gold: the yakuza, the town youths, Ichi, and Sasa are all fighting while physically covered in the thing they're fighting for, which is impermanent, blowing away with the wind, ultimately useless. The futility of violence is on full display, and although Ichi may not be a party to greed the way the other characters are, he is still part of the fight.

I also think, because I managed to see a print of this that was one of the clearest, crispest film-watching experiences I've ever had, this is an extremely well-shot movie. The lighting is really unique. Every shot has this Caravaggio quality to it, with the extreme darks and stark lights side-by-side. It's genuinely beautiful for every second of the film. The physicality of the run-down town that the film takes place in is also impressive: I particularly liked one shot where Ichi is tackling a four-story staircase, and the scene is filmed from outside the house, so you see Ichi going up the stairs through the open windows. And the Ifukube score sounds like all of his other scores - which is to say, fantastic.

I've given this an extremely subjective four stars because it's got everybody I like in it and the climax is so good it makes me sweat. But you do have to sit through about an hour and forty minutes of actors who you may or may not be a fan of to get to it. It's ironic that despite much of Okamoto's typical directorial quirks being removed from the equation, this unusually lengthy entry in the Zatoichi series still feels different - not entirely in a good way - from the others.

The Whale God (1962)

directed by Tokuzō Tanaka

Japan

100 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I tried watching this quite some time ago but couldn't make it through, I guess because it felt too long. But recently, thanks to it finally getting a good home media release, people have started talking about this movie again - and for good reason, because sitting down and mustering the energy to focus on this fairly demanding, but extremely rewarding film made me realize how much of an underrated gem it is.

This is a movie about a whaling village driven collectively to madness by their repeated failure to catch and kill an abnormally large whale which they've taken to naming the "Whale God" (kujira-gami; it's more or less a literal translation, but there are subtleties to the word "kami"/"gami" that I encourage you to look into). From an outside perspective, it's easy to balk at that runtime given the simplicity of the plot - "Movie about a whale, 100 minutes" - but there's so much that goes into the story that it makes those 100 minutes feel expertly utilized.

Most of the first half of the movie deals with establishing individual characters and developing conflicts between them. One thing that's interesting about this is that the presence of so many extras and various background actors in every scene gives the characters who are focused on more of a sense of just being random members of the village. They're not - one of the leads is the son of the village's best spearman, and other prominent figures such as the village elder and his daughter come into play - but there's none of that feeling of the movie being full of random nobodies and then a couple of famous actors that you might get in a Hollywood film with a similar setting. Not that the actors in the forefront are nobodies: we have Kōjirō Hongō (Gamera, reluctantly), Shintarō Katsu (Zatoichi), and Takashi Shimura (everything), as well as Shiho Fujimura in a smaller role, who is not immediately recognizable but had a career playing various supporting female characters in many famous films. But these more familiar faces are blended really well into the overall atmosphere of the village so that everybody feels like they're on even ground.

I want to take a second to talk about Katsu's performance in specific because he's really great here. His character, Kishu (this I think was less of a name and more just a nickname based on where he says he came from) is an outsider whose only goal is to make money off the Whale God. The village elder promises his home, title, and his daughter's hand in marriage to whoever can kill the whale. Not only does Kishu have his sights set on all of this, but he openly brags that he won't be satisfied there; he'll sell the daughter to a brothel and continue making money off of his kill. Katsu in this role exudes a malevolence, a total lack of conscience. He has an unsettling and domineering physicality to him that makes for a real contrast with his role as Ichi. Kishu plays off of Hongō's character, Shaki, in very interesting ways; had I the time to do so, I would want to go on at further length about how deeply homoerotic the fight scene between the two of them felt, but I'll leave that thought in my brain for now.

An element of this movie that I think is absolutely fascinating but remains subtle is the fact that this whaling village is either undergoing or has already undergone Christianization. A white Christian priest has a church in the village, and when Shaki adopts the child his girlfriend Ei has after Kishu rapes her, they have the baby baptized in the church. Although the backdrop of Christianity is there, the villagers nonetheless continue to conceptualize the whale as a kami, and this is never shown as being in conflict with the growth of Christianity in the village. Indeed, traditional religion seems to take precedence over Christianity when it really matters - although the priest is against it, the villagers move the dying Shaki to where he can converse with the remains of the whale in his last days. 

There is an implication here that, with Shaki and Ei's child, the future of the village and its traditional animistic religion is uncertain. The killing of the Whale God could be an element of this. With the death of the whale there is now one less god in the world - a trivial thing, perhaps, when your worldview holds that every single object and animal is inhabited by its own god - but the presence of a new God begins to take shape. The villagers' collective rage and hatred towards the whale swells to such an all-consuming height that one cannot help but begin to wonder if there's something else underneath it.

An incredibly dark, at times somewhat slow-paced film, The Whale God is capped off by twenty or so minutes of total practical effects insanity. Both Hongō and Katsu spend the latter part of the film on top of the whale (sorry, Raúl Ruiz fans, pun intended) in a protracted sequence that looked absolutely miserable to film but extremely compelling. The whale is very realistic, but what really cinches it is the performance both actors give while attempting to ring the whale's nose and bring it to shore to be killed. It's totally believable, as is everything else about the film. Akira Ifukube's inimitable score, Kaneto Shindo's screenplay, Tokuzō Tanaka's direction, and the myriad of impressive acting skills on display here all work together to create a film of rare caliber.