Busy Day!
Programmer Rupert Bottenberg was justly proud of having the anime shorts program all independent works by up-and-comers, which probably makes getting four of the six to Montreal - Yasuteru Ohno ("Mamiko's Poop"), Shuzuku ("Dreaming of a Whale"), Ryusei "Vab.png" Hasegawa ("Beyond the Trail"), and Kim Sung-jae ("Redman") - even more remarkable. It was a fun introduction, although one that kind of underlined for me just how odd doing an event like this in a foreign land must be: You stand there kind of stoically while folks are going on in another language, and then become very animated when given a chance to speak about your film. Must be a crazy thing to do so young. Still, they had fun with it, including Ohno challenging the whole auditorium to rock-paper-scissors for a copy of a compilation DVD containing all the final film projects for his school (which you may not be able to play in North American players because it's Region 2, although at least it's NTSC).
After that it was across the street for
The Devil's Bide, which I'm going to need another run-through to really appreciate; hopefully it hits the Brattle in the fall ahead of its Blu-ray release.
Then back across the street for the rest of the night, with programmer Steven Lee (man, seems like he was just an intern yesterday!) introducing "Check Please" writer/director Shane Chung and director of photography Tristan Baumeister. It's one he pushed for, because apparently picking up the check is a Big Deal for a lot of Asian and Asian-American folks, especially Korean[-American]s, which I've seen referenced occasionally. They got a nice slot ahead of the new Takashi Miike film,
Blazing Fists, which was cool.
Although, about
Blazing Fists... So, I heard programmer King-Wei Chu mention that there was a miscommunication and a movie they believed to be an hour and twenty minutes (1:20), was actually two hours (2:00), and it was this one, which was going to have a domino effect on the rest of the evening's schedule. Not a really big deal - the next film would be the rest of the day, but it meant that by the time I got out of
Blazing Fists, the press line for
Good Boy was good and long, and I was in the last group of six to get in, meaning this was my view:
Not really complaining - I try to just be grateful the festival thinks this blog is worth a pass in these situations - although I was glad that this was a really quick short and feature because I didn't have a chance to prioritize an easy exit from my seat should my bladder act up.
Crazy the zoom the camera in one's phone has, huh? Here we've got actor Thompson Sewell, producer Mackie Jackson, and writer/director/DP Tyson Edwards of "Look Closer" (and programmer Mitch Davis on the side) talking about their nifty little short; I gather Jackson created the painting in the center, which they built the short around.
And here, Mitch welcomes director (and co-star) Ben Leonberg, who left the titular good boy Indy at home because this situation would probably freak a dog out and it's not like his dog knew he was starring in a movie anyway. As he put it, there's a good reason why most folks make movies with humans; this was apparently 400 shooting days over three years, with a mind-blowingly ratio of usable footage to what was shot. The set-up often took longer than shooting time because dogs don't actually have a great attention span.
It was, though an interesting shoot to describe, with Leonberg acting in the film just because he's Indy's human and the one he'll respond to, although his face was often out of frame or occulted so that a real actor could dub his lines. The sound guys, he said, were heroes, because almost every shot had Leonberg and his wife talking over it to coax Indy around, so the whole thing had to be re-recorded. And while there wasn't any digital work done on Indy, they created a shattering window when he jumped through an empty frame, composited a shot where Indy follows a ghost dog up some stairs together because Indy and the other dog were buddies and would have just played together if they weren't shot separately, and used a fake dog (mostly used for lighting setups) to jump off a roof with Indy coming out from behind the bush.
Just an absolutely crazy project, and it's kind of amazing how good it came out. I don't know if it will get a wide release - it's genuinely eccentric - but given that the audience was giving it the same reaction as a I remember a preview audience giving
Flow, I suspect there's a lot of folks out there who will go for it.
Anyway, long Saturday ; Sunday was more spread out with the sci-fi shorts,
The Battle Wizard, and
Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat in Dark. Since I'm up to posts running two days behind, my plans for Tuesday are
Stinker,
Sweetness, the "Perilous Ports" program,
Peau à Peau, and
Contact Lens, with
Fucktoys (seen at BUFF) a good time.
"Loca!"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)
Maybe not
the single most cheerful post-apocalyptic movie you've ever seen, "Loca!" nevertheless has its two little kids who may be the last people on earth full of energy as they explore rural Japan, where the plant life has started to overrun the cities, although there's apparently enough pre-packaged food to eat and there's somehow still power where there needs to be. They're surprised when the train they find starts to move after they press the Big Red Button, but writer Takeru Kojima and directors Ion Miyamoto & Yuta Uchiya do not show any particular worry about the future or burdens of loss for them; the closest they come is mentioning that the people from before must have been really clever.
Which is sometimes disconcerting, maybe making this a brightly-colored horror story for the adults in the audience. But there's also something kind of joyous about it as one watches these two explore, learn, help each other out and start to build. The style is made to sort of evoke crayon drawings even though the actual ones that the kids are making in a notebooks are a different thing, a bright and colorful world that hasn't been specifically nailed down and is full of adventure, with the voice acting bouncing back to excited shouting quickly after every time it starts to get a little down.
"Dreaming of a Whale"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)
Seeing the two in sequence, one almost wonders if the girl wandering an empty Japan in "Dreaming of a Whale" with her dog Joanne is one of the kids from "Loca!" five years later or so, but it's a different vibe, as she is seeking something out and less protected from danger as she falls into a derelict (but unusable) train car of her own. She's frustrated by cryptic messages coming through on her radio, but still hoping to find another human being.
It's a more traditional anime style than the previous short, but director Shuzuku makes a nice-looking film and the voice acting from Myu as the girl and Sumito Owara as the voice at the other end of the radio are very nice. Shuzuku uses enough of the eight-minute running time to give her journey heft and suggest something larger, but also builds up to a climactic revelation that is simultaneously horrible and also something one appreciates for its cleverness, and which gives her a new path forward.
"Mamiko's Poop"
* * * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)
Ten out of ten, no notes. "Mamiko's Poop" - the end result of a schoolgirl eating her feelings after seeing her crush with another girl - packs as many outright guffaws into its two-minute runtime as movies fifty times longer. It feels like a manga where the art style suggests someone drawing in a caffeinated fever for its crazy designs and accelerating pace, and somehow has time to ramp up from sadness to binging to "ewww" to hilarious violence.
Director Yaasuteru Ohno did this for school, and who knows what he'll learn in professional apprenticeship by the time he gets a chance to make something bigger, but it should be a ton of fun.
"Dungeons & Television"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)
I don't know if I'd necessarily watch a "Dungeons & Television" anime series or read it as a manga - I can actually see myself chuckling at the high concept but not wanting to commit to a long-term series the way I do when I come upon
Delicious in Dungeon in previews, but as someone whose idea of stringing telegraph lines across a kingdom always got shot down when playing
Dungeons & Dragons as a kid, I appreciate the idea. This could be fun.
How fun? That's kind of tough to tell. Writer/director Junchukan Bonta seems to have the basics down for his six-minute short, in that the designs are just nifty enough to make one believe in the possible invention of television five hundred years or so ago, the adventuring party looks decent, and there are a few very solid gags in there, it's also moving way too fast for a viewer to really get attached and involved, seemingly just showing the highlights and almost having no time to tease effectively.
Heck of a calling card to show producers as a pitch, though.
"Redman"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)
This is definitely a case where I feel like I might like it a lot more if I was a bit more familiar with the context. I kind of get the idea of a tokusatsu hero trying to live a normal life (though is he depicted with his helmet because he's wearing it and everyone thinks it's normal or because this is his self-image?), wanting to stay away or get involved as something mysterious is going on with his old teammates, and I dig the noirish style of it. But I do wonder if greater knowledge of the sort of story it's either sending up or grittifying (to coin a word) would allow me to see general patterns or fill in the blanks because I knew what references it was built out of.
As it is, it's tantalizing and the craftsmanship is darn good, but I'm not up on the shorthand.
"Beyond the Trail"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)
A nifty little anime that could probably handle expansion to a feature, with two junior members of a team that is helping to clear away biological weapons left behind after a devastating war admiring a legend in their unit, although she holds some dark secrets. It's a mash-up of familiar sci-fi anime bits - people transforming into monsters, cool vehicles, the source of power being related to the monsters and slowly killing the heroine, mysterious foes whose interests are actually aligned - but they're familiar because they often work. The designs that the filmmakers have come up with are pretty cool, and there's a potentially pretty nice emotional core with the hero-worship Leichte has for Esus maybe not an entirely healthy complement to Esus having lost a daughter.
There is some difficulty balancing all this at 30 minutes, though - Leichte & Esus is probably the thing you want to focus on, but it leaves all the lore they're supposed to clean up feeling more like Macguffins rather than something that shaped them, and getting cut off because the story can only go so far in any direction. It also means Leichte's partner Gros winds up disappearing for a bit when their pairing is a lot of what's fun about the movie in its early portion. Just no room to work and I don't fault the filmmakers for prioritizing pretty aggressively on an independent, crowd-funded production like this, and I hope they get to do more.
"The Story of Three Sisters (or How the World Came to Have Four Seasons Instead of One)"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Animation Plus, laser DCP)
A charming little storybook feature that has seven directors for its seven minutes, but doesn't necessarily impose a strict separation on them, even as one sees the style of its mythic tale of how three goddesses of the sky, time, and life found their static world collapsing into constant change as one found her curiosity getting the better of her. The rapidly changing style feels like the origin of a myth, taking new shapes in the telling.
The thing I kind of dig after thinking about it, though, is how well these three concepts map to certain human family dynamics: Ida, the sky, is the responsible elder sibling, very fixed in her ways and seeing safeguarding her sisters as her responsibility; Tia, the tiny youngest sibling, is the baby who is more or less allowed to run amok and get into trouble; May, the middle child, is dissatisfied, chafing at her older sister's authority and envying Tia's freedom even as she loves her. This strict alignment must eventually fall, scary as that is, for the three to not resent each other and work together, because a family is not strict assignment of roles.
Neat.
Velnio nuotaka (The Devil's Bride)
N/A (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Retro, laser DCP)
Pre-order the disc at Amazon
I am very much hoping this one comes around to the Boston area at some point, because to be completely honest, I think that I zonked out for about ten minutes in the middle or missed a subtitle indicating a time jump and just absolutely, completely lost the plot. It was like I was suddenly watching a different movie with most of the same cast and locations, also an opera, but I had no idea how the start and end were connected.
I do want to see it again, though, because where it's great, it's really great. The manic, probably sacreligious opening scene is reason enough to catch a pretty short movie, there's plenty of wit to be found around afterward, and the music - have we mentioned that this story of an angel who falls to earth and is immediately enslaved by a miller and caught up in various strange romances is a rock opera - is pretty darn good. I suspect that my biggest issue might be that the style of the music doesn't vary much from start to finish, which is how you get into a sort of reverie and eventually look up to wonder what's going on.
"Check Please"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Pretty dang simple when it comes down to it, as two co-workers out for dinner in New York - one a Korean ex-pat, one a Korean-American born and raised in the city - both try to pick up the check, only for things to escalate quickly into slapstick martial arts.
The action is pretty darn good - it's smartly staged so that one admires the athleticism and choreography, and winces occasionally at how that would hurt, but kind of stops short of feeling violent or dangerous; we're kind of having fun here and sort of representing things as larger-than-life so one can see the intensity of the feeling more clearly. I like that, ultimately, it ends on a sort of feeling of desperation to cling to this as part of their identity as a Korean man, with Jay (Richard Yan) lamenting that his (presumably non-Korean) wife knows more K-pop lyrics than him and he has to use a dictionary when he calls his grandfather, while Su-bin (Jeong Sukwon) notes he had to uproot himself from his home to provide for his family. It's maybe a sneaky second layer that the cashier is a woman, staring at her phone while guys go at this again.
Mostly, though, it's good jokes and physical comedy with appealing participants.
Blue Fight: The Breaking Down of Young Blue Warriors (aka Blazing Fists)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)
Has it actually been a while since Takashi Miike delivered a movie about a bunch of juvenile delinquent fighting, or does it just seem that way? This one is maybe not quite a masterpiece of the genre; it feels a bit like the genre as seen through the eyes of comfortable, older filmmakers rather than something bursting with rebellion, anger, and energy. That happens to us all, I guess, and who knows, maybe Miike and company are acknowledging that with the 18-year-old in juvie clearly played by someone twice that age.
He's around when a new resident of a juvenile detention facility, Ryoma Akai (Kaname Yoshizawa) meets Ikuto Yagura (Danhi Kinoshita), who has been there for a year. They become fast friends and are inspired to take up mixed martial arts during a visit by a fighter and internet celebrity whose webseries "Breaking Down" combines confessional and fighting elements. It's not long before they are paroled, join a gym, and find work in a factory, though they've also got marks on their backs from a local gang consolidating their power and a crush on an influencer Ryoma knew from high school (whose ex is teetering on the brink of winding up a thug himself). Oh, and Ikuto was in juvie after being fingered for a crime he didn't commit (this time) and has vowed to take revenge on the person who did, not knowing it's Ryoma.
If this sort of movie is going to be comfort food now,
Blazing Fists is at least enjoyable and amiable enough. The script is a bit on the wink-y side when it celebrates the power of friendship and happily walks through the genre tropes; though writer Shin Kibayashi is not adapting a fighting manga, he knows how the structure works but has the freedom to build it so that the expansive cast, regular fights, and sudden twists fit a movie rather than a serial. The cast is likable and each knows what they're there to do, not necessarily subtly (the scenes with the kids' mothers are fun, if kind of slight).
The movie also pleasantly recalls the V-cine aesthetic from when Miike started out with these films; things feel like they were shot quickly and allowed to be a bit flat or low-res (though today's low-res would have been top of the line thirty years ago). It's consciously not fancy, rather coming off of professionals getting the job done without a lot of fuss or pretension. It is, maybe, a love letter to the juvenile-delinquent movies that figured prominently in Miike's early career that doesn't treat them as more than they were.
Plus, the fighting is fun, eventually upgrading from earnest martial arts to the over the top brawls one expects from these movies. It's action that knows it's larger than life, where Miike and company enjoy throwing colorfully costume heroes against a horde, with as many jokes as battle cries thrown in. At the end, they're maybe looking to prove a point, both acknowledging the fakeness of these cinematic brawls but not giving a lot of credence to the stage-managed fights produced as mere web content either; even the main villain recognizes that the point of this is to fight like hell for the people you care about.
It's all right on the edge of self-parody, with the main characters' earnestness keeping it on the other side, but, then it's not like these movies are ever far from that, it's it?
"Look Closer"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
"Look Closer" is an impressively well-balanced horror comedy, making the audience feel just tingly enough to be uneasy but delivering solid dark laughs as an exhausted painter (Thompson Sewell) trying to power through to meet a deadline suddenly finds another work on his easel featuring a creepily distorted figure.
It's just on-the-nose enough to make one chuckle, as the painter seems to half-suspect that he's in some sort of nightmare, but niftily executed: Not only does one get the idea that the painting came first rather than just being a prop created to reflect the live-action make-up job, but there's a nifty effect of the painting seeming to throb with a heartbeat, alive in its own right. Filmmaker Tyson Edwards gives it all just enough time to breathe and make an impression and gets out before things have to make more than emotional dream-logic sense.
Good Boy
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Good Boy could easily be a movie that is remarkable for simply existing - getting even a very well-trained dog to do everything required to serve as a movie's protagonist is a daunting challenge - but this impressed beyond that. It walks a line between genre film and drama, getting viewers inside its canine hero Indy's head without necessarily anthropomorphizing him.
Something is wrong with Indy's human Todd (writer/direct Ben Leonberg dubbed by Shane Jensen), but he's not quite sure what; he's sleeping a lot and his sister Vera (Arielle Friedman) seems very worried. Soon after Indy stays with Vera a few days, Todd decides to uproot them from their Brooklyn apartment to the house upstate that Todd inherited from his grandfather (Larry Fessenden), but that seems even more wrong, and not just because Grandpa had a lot of dogs that didn't necessarily have long lives: Todd doesn't feel quite right, there are things in the corners that the human can't see, and a strange threatening presence in the dark.
What's perhaps most surprising about
Good Boy is just how stylish the movie is. Some of it is perhaps a matter of necessity, where keeping the camera near Indy's eye level is necessarily going to create a different framing that everything else in the film must respond to. But the lighting is terrific, often a hellish red to highlight the dog's emotional turmoil, or kept low to emphasize how he and his human are out of their familiar crowded city. Humans often appear in backlit silhouette, eerie for human viewers, but a reminder that dogs don't read faces so much as body language, so those are the emotional cues we get without seeming to cheat to limit information.
And it works as a horror movie. The filmmakers seldom go for jokes about dogs finding vacuums scary, but seed something vague about what might be haunting this house before presenting it in a way a dog might experience it. The shadow game is strong, and the score highlights what's unnerving to Indy nicely. Some of the effects work, when it comes to that, may seem like it doesn't match the live action footage, but I like that somewhat, having given it a little thought. There's a wrongness to what Indy detects in a way that's not quite equivalent to human senses, and this gets that across.
Plus, Indy? Such a good boy! The best boy! We've been seeing more CGI dogs in movies lately, which is fine - it's not like animals can agree to participate or emote on demand - but they often seem too blank or too human, while Indy is all dog, with an expressive face and the right sort of whine. He's not really giving a performance, of course, but the editing is convincing and the raw material is charming.
I suspect the film may seem too experimental or gimmicky to some - even at 72 minutes, it's probably roughly at its limits - but the material is pretty universal and both the human and canine emotion feels genuine.
