By Mark Schilling
As the Japanese industry continues to ramp up production, releasing 310 films in 2004, compared with only 251 a decade earlier, producers are making more films inspired by, based on or remade from earlier hits, domestic or foreign.
A sign of flagging creativity? Perhaps, but the Japanese movie industry has long ridden winning formulas to the point of exhaustion and beyond. The Tora-san series, scripted and mostly directed by Yoji Yamada from 1969 to 1996, is basically 48 tellings and retellings of the same story: Folksy-but-feckless peddler falls in love, but loses girl by the last reel.
Yamada, who often described himself as a maker of cinematic noodles, gave his customers exactly what they wanted -- a consistently entertaining, never-varying package. The Tora-san series produced hit after hit and kept the Shochiku studio afloat for decades.
Recycling is often a sound business strategy for the Japanese market, where audiences crave familiarity, but foreign fans who have come to expect something different from Japanese films -- from the cultish outrages of Takashi Miike to the commercial spookfests of Hideo Nakata -- may start to sense deja vu, if not yet terminal ennui, from the latest offerings.
Some, such as the recent spate of war and disaster films, are not meant for them anyway. One is Yamato, the latest in a series of live-action and animated films about the famous battleship that sank battling the Americans in the closing days of the Pacific War. The comeback of legendary producer Haruki Kadokawa, Yamato is frankly intended as a flag waver for local patriots (not to mention war nostalgists). Outlanders, particularly Asians with mixed feelings about the Japanese martial spirit, are not invited.
Another is Japan Sinks (Nihon Chinbotsu), Shinji Higuchi's remake of a 1973 disaster movie, based on an eponymous bestseller, about Japan sliding into the sea after a series of earthquakes. Higuchi also directed the WWII submarine actioner Lorelei and supervised effects on the films in the Gamera and Godzilla series. Once again the target audience is squarely domestic, though the topic -- natural disasters with civilization-destroying consequences -- has suddenly acquired wider relevance.
Then there are the films following in the large box office footprints of Crying Out Love In the Centre of the World and Be With You -- two dramas about love in the face of death that collectively grossed $120 million in Japan last year.
Among the mostly highly anticipated is Memories of Tomorrow (Ashita no Kioku), a drama by directed TV hitmaker Yukihiko Tsutsumi (Ikebukuro Westside Park, Trick) about a prosperous businessman suddenly faced with the devastation of Alzheimer's. Incredibly, the film will be Ken Watanabe's first starring role, in a career than includes The Last Samurai, Memoirs of a Geisha and Batman Begins.
Also, hot are animal films, a genre with a long pedigree in Japan, though the recent spate (litter?) is inspired by the success of Quill, Yoichi Sai's 2004 film about a lovable seeing-eye dog and its cranky middle-aged master that grossed $20 million in Japan. The latest is Helen the Baby Fox, a drama about a boy's love for a young fox -- and how that love changes his disabled sister. The species, if not the story, echoes Koreyoshi Kurahara's The Glacier Fox, a 1978 documentary whose monster success ignited a decade-long animal movie boom.
Finally, there are all the films that are sequels or new entries in long-established series. In the first category are Umizaru 2, Fuji TV's follow-up to its hit 2004 film about Japan Coast Guard divers, and Trick 2, Yukihiko Tsutsumi's follow-up to his 2002 comedy, derived from a cult hit TV show, about a struggling-but-sexy magician (Yukie Nakama) and a scraggly-but-handsome physicist who expose phony man-gods in a remote village.
In the second category is Gamera, the long awaited revival of the Daiei studio's signature series, first launched in 1965, about a fire-breathing flying turtle. Daiei, alas, is gone, absorbed into Kadokawa Herald Pictures last year, but its most famous monster lives on. Japan may some day sink, but its film franchises are forever.
