 |
The Daily Yomiuri on January 29, 1998 |
Japanese film gets respect in '97
1997 was certainly a memorable year for the Japanese cinema. Shohei Imamura's The Eel and Takeshi Kitano's HANA-BI captured grand prizes at two of the world's top three film festivals (Cannes and Venice respectively) and Hayao Miyazaki's The Princess Mononoke set an all- time domestic box office record, topping Hollywood's E.T. For a cinema long thought to be in its death throes, 1997 could be called the year of the Japanese film phoenix.
There were other good tidings as well. Jun Ichikawa, a fine director little recognized abroad, won the Best Director's prize at the Montreal Film Festival for Tokyo Yakyoku and Naomi Sento (formerly Kawase) became the first of the young generation to hit it big abroad by snatching the Best New Director award at Cannes for Moe no Suzaku.
While anyone looking beyond the major studio output in the last few years has known of the vibrancy of the Japanese scene, it took the above kudos to finally awaken the media and filmgoing public. When the weekly Brutus blared on its cover, "Only Japanese don't watch Japanese films, " perhaps the collective shame over Japanese ignoring their own cinema (even when it is one of the world's hottest) for the likes of the jingoistic Independence Day would finally nudge them to respect their own movies.
Possibly as the first sign of change, last year theater attendance increased 25 percent and the number of theater screens, long in decline, rose as the multiplex invasion continued--indicating that people will leave their television sets if the films are good and the theaters comfortable.
A glance at the list of top box office films, however, reminds us that all is not rosy in the Japanese cinema world. As exemplified by Mononoke, Doraemon and the cult disappointment Evangelion, it is undeniable that animation still dominated. And whenever live-action movies did turn up, they were usually series films such as Mothra and Gakko no Kaidan 3 that were mostly supported by the dubious maeuri (advance ticket) system, which artificially inflates box office results as studios force loads of tickets on their corporate partners (and the tickets are then rarely used).
But the Toho, Toei and Shochiku film companies did distribute some decent movies. Toho gave us such good comedies as Shinobu Yaguchi's My Secret Cache and Yojiro Takita's Sharan-Q no Enka no Hanamichi, as well as Naoto Takenaka's Tokyo Biyori. Toei reheated the old-fashioned stew of sex and double suicide with Yoshimitsu Morita's Lost Paradise and, even if you didn't like it, at least provided us with a cultural curiosity.(from the article)
