Stéphane du Mesnildot Japanese Blog 東京の奇妙な日々

The Obayashi Madness

Discovering the cinema of Nobuhiko Obayashi, populated by
teenage girls, devoured by visions and almost unknown outside of Japan.

by Stéphane du Mesnildot

Translation by Jhon Hernandez

On the eve of Japan’s entry into war, four troubled
high-school boys and a young girl suffering from tuberculosis are swept up in a
whirlwind of dreams and violent passions. Shown as a preview, Hanagatami (“Flower
Basket”) by the 79-year-old Nobuhiko Obayashi was the most beautiful and
inventive film at the latest Tokyo festival (see p. 68). Adapted from a 1937
novel by Kazuo Dan, this tribute to Japanese literature blends the pessimism of
Osamu Dazai, Mishima’s homosexual eroticism, and the “tuberculosis tales” of
the 1930s (The Wind Rises by Tatsuo Hori, which inspired Miyazaki).
It also marks Obayashi’s return to his favored experimental style, drawing its
enchantment from silent cinema and its naïve special effects. His love of
romantic imagery and vampiric motifs, and the figure of a young girl in a white
dress floating in the ether of fantasy, make the film a close cousin of
Coppola’s Twixt. The packed theater and the armada of television
cameras that welcomed Obayashi testified to his stature in Japanese cinema.
Moving, too, was the tribute paid to the courage of a filmmaker who, despite
cancer, gathered all his strength to complete a project that had been dear to
him for more than forty years.

Idols and Vampires

Who is Nobuhiko Obayashi, this cult auteur in his own
country whose films have never crossed our borders? In Japan in the 1980s, he
was seen as the master of the seishun film – literally
“springtime of life,” that is, the coming-of-age teenage film. His cinema is
inseparable from the period of abundance in a Japan with a triumphant economy,
a country that had renounced all forms of protest in order to intoxicate itself
with consumption. Chris Marker pokes fun at this infantilism in Sans
Soleil: “Today it is little girls who make and unmake fashions, and
record-company bosses tremble before them.” The major figure of this cinema is
indeed the teenage girl, which allowed studios to cash in on the idol,
those bubblegum-pink pop singers who flooded magazines and variety shows. Were
the seishun films of the 1980s merely mercantile and
opportunistic, which would explain for a long time the indifference of Japanese
cinephilia toward them? Exploring the decade nonetheless reveals hidden
treasures: genuine auteurs and actresses who are far from being mere dolls.
Recalling the distortions Jean-Christophe Averty inflicted on yé-yé singers,
Obayashi pushed the pop style of the period to its extreme, projecting his
young performers into worlds gone mad. In the teenage girl’s bedroom in The
Girl Who Leapt Through Time hangs a poster of The Wizard of Oz,
the filmmaker’s inspiration for the transitions from black and white to color
and for his handmade special effects, but above all as the story of a young
girl’s journey into a parallel world.

Obayashi began making films in the 1960s, in the wake of
experimental filmmakers such as Shūji Terayama (Emperor Tomato Ketchup)
and Toshio Matsumoto (Funeral Parade of Roses). His medium-length
film Emotion (1966) is a vampiric fantasy whose fractured
editing, speed effects, and monochrome sequences would become the most
recognizable hallmarks of his cinema. While the vampire has a humorous
dimension, with his black cape and parasol, his victim is endowed with powers
that will belong to the heroines to come, commanding the sun and raising storms
at sea. The adolescent girl, with her energy and melancholy, her sweet yet also
tempestuous inner world, would become the very substance of the cinematic experience.
At the same time, shōjo manga (comics for girls) were
developing a similarly frenetic style, in which there are never too many
flights of doves, shattered mirrors, or torrents of tears to convey emotion.
The finest of them, such as Dear Brother by Riyoko Ikeda,
stand at the crossroads of Douglas Sirk and Dario Argento, a heterogeneity that
is also found in Obayashi’s work.

His first feature film, and his most famous, House (1977)
begins like a Technicolor melodrama about a high-school girl who cannot accept
her father’s remarriage, then suddenly turns into a Richard Lester–style pop
musical. In reality, everything is trompe-l’œil: sliding painted backdrops and
scale models. In the haunted mansion where the heroines go to spend their
holidays, they are subjected to frenetic fast motion, Méliès-like
dismemberments, or else drift into flamboyant reveries in superimposition. Yet
this mad house has a painful heart: the heroine’s aunt, who vampirizes the
teenage girls, is a woman whose fiancé died in the war. Obayashi is not merely
a light entertainer. His images, endlessly destroying and regenerating
themselves, draw on the country’s traumas, particularly the nuclear bomb. This dark
past is rendered in a sooty black and white, with light imitating the flicker
of silent cinema. As the lovers exchange a final kiss, the film stock burns,
rhyming with images of the atomic mushroom cloud. The medium itself, like the
reality of the country, is destroyed. These historical elements reappear
in School in the Crosshairs (1981), a true live-action manga
with special effects drawn directly onto the film and delirious compositing.
The idol Hiroko Yakushimaru battles extraterrestrials who, though ridiculous
(the villain imitates Liberace), want to turn her school into a fascist state.

The Little Magicians of the 1980s

In the 1980s, Obayashi made the Onomichi Trilogy, named
after his hometown near Hiroshima. It comprises Exchange Students (1982), The
Girl Who Leapt Through Time (1983), and Lonelyheart (1985).
His alter ego at the time was Toshinori Ōmi, a lunar, ethereal actor, always
confronted with the mystery of young girls and sometimes equipped with a Super
8 camera. In Exchange Students, a perfect gender swap comedy, he
plays a middle-school boy who, for no reason at all, swaps bodies with his
female classmate. From this now well-worn premise, Obayashi draws an initiatory
tale about discovering otherness, for which Onomichi (with its vertiginous
stairways leading to temples, its secret alleyways, and its bridges spanning
the Mitsugi River) provides a magical setting. Obayashi takes this situation in
directions American teen movies would never have dared. Without taboo, the
heroes explore the other’s body as much as their own predestined social roles.
The film reaches a powerful moment of depression that anticipates the work of
Shinji Sōmai. On the run, Kazumi and Kazuo end up in an inn in the company of
drunken salarymen. They realize that even if the exchange is reversed, another
ordeal awaits them: finding their place among these adults who drown a
dreamless existence in alcohol.

Another disruption awaits Tomoko (singer Tomoyo Harada)
in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, the first adaptation of
Yasutaka Tsutsui’s novel: reliving the same day endlessly. The time loop in
which Tomoko is trapped is that of adolescence itself, caught in the repetitive
return of classes, family meals, and walks with childhood friends. Once the
spell is broken, the memory of that day will evaporate and, with it, the
constraints and feelings one believed eternal. Of the time traveler she loves,
Tomoko, once grown up, will retain only a vague nostalgia linked to the scent
of lavender. Sensitive to Tomoyo Harada’s slightly sleepy performance, Obayashi
proceeds with great delicacy in this science-fiction tale. As if he wanted to
capture the fleeting nature of time, what first passes across the screen are
volatile substances: smoke escaping from a laboratory vial and a teacup, or
that slightly milky light that bathes reality. The same lightness is at work in
a heady pixilation sequence in which Tomoko slips into a parallel time where
she never existed, moving through the mourning caused by her absence. We find
again Obayashi’s characteristic figure of the cut-out silhouette of a young
girl hurled into a psychedelic cosmos, sometimes regaining substance in the
real world before falling back into multicolored spirals. Between live action
and animation, the adolescent never entirely belongs to our world. The
“springtime of life” that Obayashi paints in hypnotic colors is itself of a
fantastical nature.

Lonelyheart, the final installment of the trilogy,
more humorous in tone, shows Toshinori Ōmi as an ever-shy high-school boy
sharing a home with a ghostly young girl whose face is painted white. Even if
Obayashi does not reach the heights of the previous films, the town’s charm
still works its spell, as in the sequence where the boy runs through the
alleyways to watch the girl of his dreams take the ferry in the light of the
setting sun. In 1991, Obayashi returned to Onomichi for the beautiful Chizuko’s
Younger Sister in which the heroine cannot bring herself to part from
the ghost of her elder sister, a loving and venerated figure. Fantastic and
romantic adolescence is constructed here with meticulous care: from the
schoolgirls’ costumes recalling those of the 1930s, to the wooden, time-worn
interiors, to classical music concerts and ballets. Absolutely impermeable to
the modernity of 1990s Japan, Onomichi is definitively the ghost town of the
filmmaker’s youth, a territory where memories of love wander, where identities
blur, and where time turns back on itself. What also circulates there are
memories of cinematic images – those shot on 8mm during his childhood, thus the
omnipresence of recreations of that format throughout the trilogy. The ending
of Exchange Students is unforgettable, when Kazuo, from the
moving truck of his parents, films Kazumi in Super 8, whom he may never see
again, and the film ends on those fragile black-and-white images. The
adolescence Obayashi describes is always a little his own, and the camera is a
time machine, often one that repairs the past. Through these trembling figures
of young girls, their melodious, whispering voices, Obayashi was indeed the
filmmaker of “things that make one’s heart beat faster,” in the words of the
writer Sei Shōnagon.

The Heirs of the Master of Dreams

In the decades that followed, Obayashi moved away from his
favorite figures to make charming children’s films or family chronicles. Within
this vast filmography, much of which remains inaccessible, one can nevertheless
single out Sada (1998), a baroque and theatrical evocation of
the heroine of In the Realm of the Senses. Recovering the spirit of
the films and illustrations of the early Shōwa era, the filmmaker once again
explores a female mystery, always impenetrable, that of Abe Sada.

Did Obayashi have peers and heirs? In the 1980s,
while he was making his seishun classics, Shinji Somai began
his career. In the escapist films Sailor Suit and Machine Gun (1981)
and Typhoon Club (1985), the lives of ordinary adolescents are
thrown into disarray and become utterly alien to them. Inheriting a yakuza clan
at fifteen or trapped in their school by a storm, they enter a world of
violent, heightened desires. In the 1990s, Shunji Iwai picked up the torch of
the seishun film with the gentle, dreamlike fugues of Fireworks (1993)
and Hana and Alice (2004). More recently, in Sono Sion’s TAG (2016),
a teenage girl with multiple identities races through the corrupted Cool Japan
of Shinzo Abe. Alternately high school student or wife, she realizes she is
only a clone in a perverse video game, destined to satisfy the greedy impulses
of a male audience. Delving into the imagination of Japanese teenage girls to
craft a delirious fantasy film, Sono Sion proves himself one of the most worthy
heirs of the creator of House.

The most fervent tributes to Obayashi and 1980s seishun cinema,
however, come from the new wave of animated films. Mamoru Hosoda once again
adapts The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006), restoring the
provincial poetry of Obayashi’s film. Makoto Shinkai, with 5
Centimeters per Second (2007) and The Garden of Words (2013),
works within these coming-of-age love stories, but it is with Your Name that
he pays direct tribute to Obayashi, synthesizing Exchange Students’
gender-swapping with The Girl Who Leapt Through Time’s temporal
play.

At a time when the old master delivers a magnificent
testament, it is this cinema of the exaltation of feelings, rich in narrative
daring and refined formalism, that must be rescued from oblivion.

In Memory of the War

Interview with Nobuhiko Obayashi

Your parents were doctors. Did that influence your work?

Everyone in my family was a doctor. My father was a
respected practitioner, so I was naturally expected to follow in his footsteps.
It was his dream. But when he went off to war, he left me a camera and a
projector, which gave me the desire to make films. When he returned, he
encouraged me to follow my own path rather than his dream. Still, thinking
back, I’ve always wanted my films to be able to heal, like a bandage or a good
medicine. My father dreamed of a world without doctors; perhaps I dream of a world
where cinema would no longer be needed to make people happy…

This childlike practice of cinema explains the artisanal
quality of your work, close to Méliès or animation.

My childhood projector made the sound of an old locomotive,
“choo-choo,” and behind my images you can still hear that train sound,
“choo-choo.” Like me, Méliès only wanted to entertain his audience, and cinema
was still a scientific invention. I always try to invent something in my films
as well. There is also, in animation, a kind of animism with which I feel a
strong connection.

You began in the 1960s, in a very politicized Japanese
cinema. How did you see yourself at the time?

It was mostly the generation before me and the one after
that was rebelling. There were tragic deaths among students at that time. Shūji
Terayama and I were part of an apolitical movement. In a way, it was also a
form of activism. During the war, we had seen ideologies clash; ideologies that
ultimately proved false and only convenient for certain people. We no longer
wanted that conception of the world, or those grand ideas of justice. We
defended our opinions individually, without belonging to any movement.
Otherwise, as Akira Kurosawa said, one might as well become a politician.

You have a very particular universe that is already
visible in Emotion, with vampires and silent-film effects…

Yes, I love silent cinema. It’s the form of filmmaking that
gives me the greatest pleasure. These are classic films, yet at the same time
very experimental. In my filmography, Emotion is one of my
favorite films. The French New Wave inspired me because I saw those young
French filmmakers trying, after the war, to rebuild cinema and rediscover a
form of beauty. The eroticism of Roger Vadim, especially in his vampire
film Death by Pleasure, was a major influence. At the end of the
film, a rose dies, and that contains all the despair of the world. You can make
horror films that are very beautiful and also very frightening. The aesthetic
universe of vampires is magnificent, with these beautiful women in white
dresses. But the vampire’s only way of loving is by sucking blood. Some things
are superb but also terrifying. Take the atomic bomb: its inventors must have
thought that all this energy contained within would become a sort of flower when
it exploded. It is both beautiful and destructive.

Where does your interest in vampires come from?

From reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula and
watching Murnau’s Nosferatu. I was also inspired by the character
played by Isabelle Adjani in Herzog’s Nosferatu for the
heroine of Hanagatami. I like poetic vampires, but when they become
too frightening, like Christopher Lee in the Hammer films, they interest me
less. Dracula is someone who has power but is weak because, to survive, he must
suck the blood of the people. People in power (economists, politicians, even
directors) are a kind of vampire. As soon as you have power, you are someone’s
vampire. By recognizing this and working on ourselves, we can turn that vampire
into a good vampire. Strikes and activists remind those in power that they must
question themselves.

In Japanese cinema of the 1970s, your most famous
film, House, looks like nothing else.

I made House ten years after Emotion.
In the meantime, I worked a lot with Toho as an advertising director. I shot
commercials with Charles Bronson for whisky, or music videos for the singer
Momoe Yamaguchi. Every day I was filming on sets worthy of a Hollywood movie.
One day, a guy from Toho came to see me and said: “There’s this film in the
United States, Jaws, which is a huge success. We’d like to make a
horror film like that, but we can’t ask our usual directors to do it. Would you
be interested?” So when I got home, I went to see my eleven‑year‑old daughter,
who was taking a bath, and I asked her: “Would you have an idea for a horror
film?” She got out of the bathtub and started brushing her hair. Then she said
to me: “What would really scare me is if the person on the other side of the
mirror came to eat me.” Of course, sharks eating people is frightening, but
with that idea of the mirror she was talking about her own reflection and her
own identity.

You were commissioned to make a horror film in the spirit
of Jaws, and you proposed a mix of musical and cartoon!

Matsuo Karu, the producer, said to me: “I’ve never seen a
project like this, it makes no sense at all.” He didn’t understand anything.
But he added, “The films I produce don’t sell anyway, so we can give it a try…”

In the film, the aunt is a cat-woman, in the tradition of
classic Japanese fantasy, who steals the youth of teenage girls.

When I was a child, I had the intuition that war and
vampires were connected. I loved vampires, but I also knew they represented the
oppression of the powerful over the weak. In House, the aunt is a
woman who had been wounded by the war and wanted to make young girls understand
what that meant. She then transformed into a house and devoured them. I wanted
the youth of that time to be aware of what war could be.

From the 1980s onward, you became the filmmaker of youth
with films like School in the Crosshairs and The Girl
Who Leapt Through Time. You worked with young idols like Hiroko Yakushimaru
and Tomoyo Harada.

I never considered my young actresses as models or idols,
but as human beings. They were very intelligent and curious girls, and since I
was an old child myself, it worked very well. Through my films, I have always
wanted to educate my audience, to help them grow. It was the same with my
actresses; I wanted it to benefit them. That’s why I believe you should never
film anything ugly.

While respecting them, you reveal something very intimate
about the lives of these young girls.

That sense of intimacy perhaps comes from the
direct-to-camera looks, which are very present in my cinema. At that moment,
they are looking at me. For them to do that, they have to trust me. This
results in films where the audience feels observed by these young girls. That’s
where you find the greatest intimacy in my cinema.

The other great filmmaker of adolescence, who emerged in
the 1980s, is Shinji Sōmai.

He was ten years younger than me, and I greatly admired his
work. He made that very beautiful film, Moving, about a little girl
witnessing her parents’ divorce. In the background, I produced his television
film, Gassan. He died too young, and I miss him very much.

War is ultimately the subject of all your cinema.

I have always sought in my films to depict war, to show the
shadow of war, its influence. I lived through it, and I turn it into cinema,
aiming toward the pursuit of happiness and dreams. I made House because
no one wanted to think about the war anymore. In contrast, with Hanagatami,
it returned to the center of the audience’s concerns. That is also very sad. I
was seven years old when I experienced the atomic bomb. I was born in
Hiroshima, and many people very close to me died because of radiation. Today,
those same radiations are trying to heal me from cancer. It’s so
contradictory, Hanagatami. That’s why I make films: to explore
these contradictions.

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