By Mark Schilling
Japanese pop culture has become eminently exportable, with anime in every Blockbuster,
manga in every Waldenbooks. Meanwhile, Japanese films are not yet in every AMC
multiplex, but their remakes certainly are.
Ever since Gore Verbinski's The Ring, based on Hideo Nakata's 1998 horror hit Ringu,
rang up $129 million in 2002, Hollywood has been remaking other potential winners
from Japan. Hitting US theaters in October were The Grudge, Takakshi Shimizu's
reworking of his own 2003 film set in a Tokyo house of horrors, and Shall We Dance?,
Peter Chelsom's take on the 1997 Masayuki Suo comedy about a bumbling
businessman's passion for dance -- and his dance instructor. Coming in March: The Ring
2, Nakata's follow-up to The Ring, starring Naomi Watts. Nakata has also signed to
direct Out, the remake of a 2002 Hideyuki Hirayama black comedy about four women
who get into the body disposal business.
As the above examples indicate, Japanese horror, or J horror as it is now know
worldwide, has been attracting much of the interest -- and not only among Hollywood
remake specialists. The spate of mostly mediocre J horror movies the followed on the
success of Ringu may have temporarily turned off local fans, but Shimizu's Juon: The
Grudge and its follow-up Juon: The Grudge 2, brought them streaming back in 2003, as
did One Missed Call, Takashi Miike's 2004 remake of a Korean film about mysterious
cell phone messages that predict the owner's death.
Taka Ichise, the producer of Ringu, The Grudge and other horror hits, has launched a new
slate and a new company with international ambitions. Called J Horror Theatre, the slate
consists of six films by six of the genre's leading directors, including Nakata and
Shimizu. The company, Entertainment Farm, will produce other projects through a film
fund subscribed by both Japanese and international investors.
The first two films of the slate, Masayuki Ochiai's Infection, with its
ripped-from-the-headlines story about a super-virus, and Norio Tsuruta's Prediction,
about a newspaper that predicts the future, opened in Japan in October, while he third
feature installment in the Juon: The Grudge series will begin filming in the first half of
2005. Meanwhile, rival Kadokawa Pictures is prepping One Missed Call 2 for a February
2005 release.
Horror, however, is not only hot genre in Japan. Even ones that not long ago were dying
slow deaths (the samurai swashbuckler), beyond the budget reach of the local industry
(the SF epic) or politically problematic (the flag-waving war movie) are making a come
back. Meanwhile, perennials like the romantic drama, comedy and thriller are getting
injections of fresh creative blood and reaping box office rewards.
Why the upsurge? The addition of nearly 1,000 new screens in the past decade, mostly
on multiplex sites in provincial cities and suburbs, has attracted new audiences,
including folks who had never been to a theatre in years. Meanwhile, more foreign fans
have been discovering the delights of Japanese genre films, both old and new, boosting
rights sales around the globe. (Lions Gate's, the worldwide sales rep for Ichise's J
Horror slate, sold nearly all major territories before a single film hit the screen.)
Also, talented young Japanese directors, who might have become indie auteurs a
generation ago, no longer feel that genre films are beneath them. Instead, they are creating
new takes on old formulas, including Hideaki Anno with the SF erotic comedy Cutie
Honey and Kazuaki Kiriya with the retro future epic Casshern -- both based on TV anime
shows from the early 1970s.
In Japan, however, the genre making the biggest comeback, both critically and
commercially, is the samurai drama -- a one-time staple that nearly died when most of its
fans migrated to television. Takeshi Kitano's Zatoichi, a free-spirited, rousingly bloody
take off on the 1962 Kenji Misumi hit that spawned a 26-part series, earned Y2.85 billion
($26 million) in 2003. The year before Veteran Yoji Yamada's somber-but-heartwarming
drama The Twilight Samurai grossed Y1.2 billion ($11 million), while being nominated
for a 2003 Best Foreign Film Oscar. On October 30 Shochiku released Yamada's
follow-up, The Hidden Blade, which is also the opening film of this year's Tokyo
International Film Festival.
Younger filmmakers are also taking up the sword. One is Ryuhei Kitamura, who burst on
the international scene in 2000 with Versus, a gangster-cum-zombie movie, but moved
into the mainstream last year with Azumi, a manga-based swashbuckler starring Aya Ueto
as a girl warrior out for revenge. The climax, with Ueto facing off against 200 male
opponents, helped make Azumi a sensation (if not quite the box office smash that
distributor Toei was expecting). Ueto is back for the sequel, which Toho will release this
spring, but Shusuke Kaneto, an SFX specialist known for his work on the Gamera and
Godzilla series, is directing. Meanwhile, Kitamura has made Godzilla: Final Wars --
which Toho is promoting as the "last" Godzilla movie and will release on December 24.
Also hot at the domestic box office, if not quite as readily salable abroad, is the romantic
drama. The Japanese formula for this genre differs from Hollywood's in that one of the
lovers usually dies or otherwise disappears by the last reel -- a fatal attraction indeed. Isao
Yukisada's Crying Out Love In the Center of the World adds a new twist: The object of
hero's affections died nearly two decades ago, when he was still in high school. The film,
which alternates between the past and present, is thus a prolonged, tortured lament for
what might have been -- and has been making Japanese audiences cry buckets. Released
in May, it has soared past the $80 million mark is being touted as remake material
Hoping to follow in Crying Out's footsteps is Be With You, Nobuhiro Doi's take on a
best-selling novel about a woman, thought a year dead, who appears out of a forest one
rainy day to the astonishment of her husband and six-year-old son. There is one problem:
she can remember nothing of them -- and has to relearn to love them. Toho is releasing
the film on October 30 in Japan. "Dramas about pure love are popular now, but this film
goes them one step better," explains Daisuke Ooka," a producer for the TBS network, one
of the film's backers. "It's about not just a couple but a family -- like Kramer versus
Kramer, with something extra."
This year Micott & Basara released another new take on a now popular genre: Appleseed,
an SF animation based on a 1985 comic by Shirow Masamune, best known abroad for
Ghost In the Shell. Directed by newcomer Shinji Aramaki and produced by Fumihiko
Sori, a visual effects whiz who directed the 2002 hit Ping Pong, Appleseed was an
eye-popping amalgam of 2-D anime character design and 3-D CGI effects.
Released last spring, Appleseed impressed industry insiders with its spectacular but, by
Hollywood standards, spectacularly cheap, effects. Toshio Suzuki, president of animation
powerhouse Studio Ghibli, declared that Appleseed's production methods, which
combined motion capture and off-the-shelf arcade game software, would "eliminate the
need for animators" and revolutionize the industry.
Now Micott & Basara is back with a sequel, Appleseed 2, that Geneon Entertainment is
representing worldwide, excluding Japan and South Korea. The company is also
developing an animation slate on the Appleseed model. "With all of these projects we are
thinking from the very beginning of the worldwide market," says Micott & Basara
president Sumiji Miyake.
Not only thinking of the worldwide market, but placing themselves in the very center of
it, are Jun'ichi Suzuki and Ko Mori, the co-founders of Eleven Arts, Inc., a production and sales company based in Los Angeles. While repping films by cult icon Teruo Ishii (Japanese Hell, The Blind Beast Vs. The Killer Dwarf) and Suzuki himself, including the soccer comedy Go Rascals! and the family drama Sukiyaki, Eleven Arts is also developing new projects for US and worldwide release. "There is a certain level of credibility being in L.A , or I should say Hollywood, somehow," says International Sales president Ko Mori. "Maybe not too much from American companies but outside the US, including Japan." Also, while admitting that "stereotypes -- samurai, horror, anime -- are what the world market wants from Japanese movies," Mori is starting to feel what he describes as a "different vibe" -- a reaching out for a new sort of Japanese coolness.
Could it be dramas targeted at salarymen -- Japan's loyal legions of economic warriors?
Don't laugh yet. Consider Lady Joker, Hideyuki Hirayama's new film for the Nikkatsu
studio based a novel about on the real-life kidnapping of a candy company president that,
two decades later, remains unsolved. In the film the kidnappers are men who have been
shunted aside by economic change. "It was a difficult story to film," says Nikkatsu
International Department manager Yasue Nobusawa, "but Hirayama managed to give it a
contemporary spin, without sacrificing the true-to-life elements familiar to the Japanese
audience." An imaginative Hollywood producer could set the remake in a Rust Belt state,
with the kidnapper heroes transformed into unemployed workers whose jobs have been
outsourced to -- almost anywhere but Japan. Their victim? The choice is almost limitless,
isn't it?
