Japanese Film, Anime and Games

Yasujiro Ozu made roughly fifty films and refined the same domestic subject over and over: parents and adult children, obligation and love, the unbridgeable gap between generations. Tokyo Story is ranked first on virtually every critics poll that has ever been conducted, which means most of the people who cite it have perhaps seen it once, filed it under 'masterpiece,' and never returned. That is a shame, because Ozu requires patience and rewards revisitation in a way that almost no other filmmaker does. The 360-degree floor-level camera, the pillow shots, the refusal to cut on action: these are not stylistic quirks but an entire ethical stance about where the camera should stand in relation to a human being. Watch Late Spring, then Early Summer, then An Autumn Afternoon, and you will start to hear the variations. The sadness accumulates.

Satoshi Kon made four features and a TV series before his death at 46, and the best of them, Paprika and Perfect Blue, are as formally inventive as anything in world cinema. He was doing unreliable-narrator, reality-collapsing psychological horror a decade before it became an art-house default, and doing it in animation because animation gave him complete control over every frame's deception. Christopher Nolan has cited Paprika as an influence on Inception; Darren Aronofsky has acknowledged Perfect Blue's influence on Black Swan. What Kon was doing, however, was considerably stranger and more disturbing than either of those very good films. Millennium Actress is the one that hits hardest on a rewatch: a woman's life told through the genres of Japanese cinema itself, melancholy and precise.

When Demon's Souls appeared in 2009, the critical consensus was that it was a punishing niche title for masochists. That reading completely missed what Hidetaka Miyazaki was doing, which was using difficulty and opacity as narrative tools: the world's story exists in its architecture and item descriptions rather than its cutscenes, because the game trusts you to be curious rather than passive. Every FromSoftware game since has refined this, and by Elden Ring the method had absorbed open-world design and come out the other side. The influence on games broadly has been enormous, but the deeper achievement is formal: Miyazaki found a way to make environmental storytelling actually work, which is something open-world developers had been claiming to do for two decades without ever quite managing it.

Grave of the Fireflies is misread as an anti-war film, when it is something more specific and more uncomfortable: a film about how a social system fails the people it claims to protect. Seita and Setsuko do not die from bombs. They die from a collapsed social network, from relatives who resent their presence, from a boy's stubborn pride that is partly heroic and partly fatal. Isao Takahata was Miyazaki's creative partner at Ghibli and in some ways his opposite: where Miyazaki builds toward wonder, Takahata builds toward weight. Only Yesterday and The Tale of Princess Kaguya are equally rigorous and similarly underrated. He is the Ozu to Miyazaki's Kurosawa, and he deserves to be discussed on the same terms.