In short: Our Little Sister (2015)

Original title: Umimachi Diary

Hirokazu Koreeda (often written as Kore-eda, but I would prefer not to) is one of the masters of contemporary Japanese cinema any way you look at it. He is a director steeped in the Japanese tradition – think Ozu, his peers and what followed - of calm, subtle, and artfully staged films that treat themes which should be all rights be over the top and melodramatic, but come to a delicate, complex and human life without following modern ideas of how to treat a plot. Quite a few critics – from the West as well as from Japan - love to set this sort of thing up as a big difference between Japanese and “Western” filmmaking as a whole, an idea that to my eyes seems to ignore the whole history of Japanese popular cinema, which follows very much the same rules as the Hollywood model. But I digress.

Koreeda’s films, basically all focused on family relations and absent parents in one way or another, move in ways and at a pace all of their own, demanding patience and concentration from their viewers. That focus they repay in slowly enfolding movements of deep humanity, compassion, and an ability to actually teach you something about people, their ways of life and a way of looking at them without any didacticism whatsoever.

Our Little Sister, about three sisters who take in their teenage half-sister after the death of their estranged father, their relations, and all the unspoken things – not all of them bad – between them might be Koreeda’s most Koreeda film. There’s particularly little plot here; the film instead moves through a series of intimately observed scenes that make a lot of other examples of “observational” cinema look boring and empty thanks to the director’s ability to not just look at characters’ lives but make us understand it through editing choices, camera work, great, subtle acting (Haruka Ayase, Masami Nagasawa, Kaho and Suzu Hirose are incredibly perfect here as individual actresses as as well as an ensemble) and something rather less technical – call it a vibe, call it soul, call it a direct line to the ineffable.

That I’m ending up on these latter terms I find particularly interesting in the context of talking about a filmmaker and films this naturalistic – apparently, feelings of transcendence really can be invoked by a piece of art that never leaves the natural, realist world.

Shin Ultraman (2022)

For some time now, the members of a government organization known as the SSSP have fought off one kaiju attack on Japan after another. The danger and weirdness of the attacks only seem to increase over time. Fortunately, a giant silver guy quickly dubbed Ultraman – there’s a running gag about a politico coming up with kaiju names on the fly - appears and begins fighting the kaiju.

As it will turn out, SSSP member Shinji Kaminaga (Takumi Saitoh) has died and somehow melded with the alien Ultraman, who now sees it as his responsibility to protect humanity from alien menaces while driving Shinji’s body, or a version of Shinji’s body. Ironically enough, Ultraman’s appearance might actually worsen the situation, putting a cosmic spotlight on our (self-)destructive species.

After doing their very clever and fun version of Godzilla (which I apparently haven’t written up here), Shinji Higuchi and Hideaki Anno continue their renewal of classic Japanese kaiju and tokusatsu franchises. This time around, Higuchi is solely responsible for the direction, while Anno – who was apparently working on the eternal return that is his perpetual rejiggering of Evangelion – “only” directed, produced and edited. Tonally, this doesn’t lean quite as heavily on the political satire as the duo’s Godzilla movie did – though there certainly is some satire here – nor is the main story quite as serious. Rather, this one aims at being as fun as possible, throwing an astonishing number of monsters and fights and so much plot at the audience, you could make one and a half seasons of most streaming shows out of the material. There’s a sense of lightness to the film even once its plot escalates and it starts talking about the self-destructive nature of humanity and becomes something of a parable of the colonialist mind-set. With this lightness comes a willingness to take the silliness of its set-up seriously without being over-earnest, embracing the silliness without shame or irony.

It is also full of jokes that are actually funny.

The film is suffused by a palpable love of the original Ultraman series (and the franchise that became of it), not the sort of fanboy love that deems everything about the old material perfect and sacrosanct, but one that has identified which elements of the original it loves and then doubles down on them while being fully willing and able to discard those elements that were simply mirrors of its own time. Which to me seems like the obvious and best approach to this kind of project, avoiding slavishly tying oneself to elements that simply wouldn’t play to anyone but a tiny percentage of the most fanatic fans of a franchise, while also keeping the doors open for all kind of fanservice of the good kind, as well as people who might have been excluded from earlier iterations of the series. So why not make the original suit actor of Ultraman your mo-cap actor for this one? Why not have credits that show the SSSP minus Ultraman fight off half a dozen or so kaiju from the original show? But also why not give your female main character (Masami Nagasawa) actually something to do?

When it comes to the copious kaiju action, Shin Ultraman doesn’t falter, either. I’ve seldom seen CGI that not only shows such an understanding of what is awesome about suitmation traditions, but that also manages to integrate this knowledge (and some actual suitmation) this well, thus realizing kaiju fights that are inspired, awesome, dramatic and often also quite funny. And because the film is much pacier than basically anything else coming out right now, there are five or six big fights in here, one better than the next, until things culminate in the sort of psychedelic space shenanigans that reminded me of nothing so much as 70s cosmic Marvel comics, in form as well as in pop-philosophical subtext and heft. That, by the way, is one of the highest compliments I could make any piece of media.