Funky
Forest
Film
Comment Vol.42 No.6, New York, 2006
(Opening
excerpt only currently published online)
A saving grace of contemporary Japanese cinema is that - like Godzilla retreating to the ocean depths - it is returning to an inscrutable state. Partially reviled recent films like Casshern, Izo (both 2004) Princess
Raccoon (2005) and The Takeshis (2006) have materialised on the global cinematic stage like strangely contorted performances set to otherworldly music. Maybe they're all musicals. Kitano's Zatoichi (2004) pretends to be a chambara film, but it's a matsuri trickster movie. In typical Japanese festival spirit, it adopts a grotesque mask - "I am the Blind Swordsman reborn" - only to refute that claim and join everyone on stage for a tap-dance finale, declaring - "We all are music". This perverse cine-play is typical of Takashi and his Beckett-like stoicism inherited from manzai twin-comedian routines.
This
circuitous introduction now drops us in a cinematic terrain
where music, comedy and anime govern the atmosphere and
breed unclassifiable plants. Let's call it a film: Funky
Forest: The First Contact (2005). You'll want a description - but I'll give you a mask. Let's say it's a disenchanted young guy drifting in a space pod, flipping channels and grazing the cut-up mediascape of manzai gags, routines, songs, tracks and dances which momentarily attract him.
