Bakemono no ko (2015)

[starlady]

Hosoda Mamoru's latest movie is out now in Japan, and I went to see it with some friends last night in Shibuya. This turned out to be an uncannily appropriate choice, as half of the movie is set in Shibuya and is really a love letter to the neighborhood. As Shibuya is one of my favorite neighborhoods in Tokyo, I really appreciated that aspect of it.

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time was a good movie, and I really loved Summer Wars despite some of my quibbles with it, so I had high expectations for Bakemono no ko. Unlike Shinkai Makoto, Hosoda hasn't made a practice of setting up his films to be in dialogue with earlier classic Japanese animated movies, which is why it was a bit of a surprise to realize that this one is definitely a call back to Miyazaki's Spirited Away in some respects. This wound up being unfortunate, as Spirited Away is a better movie.

The story concerns one Ren, who runs away to the streets of Shibuya as a child and finds his way into the world of "bakemono" (monsters, literally, but more like fairies in that they live in an otherworld which operates by its own rules, and which is very Japanese even though it looks like Istanbul), where he winds up becoming the student of one Kumatetsu, a bear-form bakemono who has never taken a disciple before and who becomes both a father figure to Ren (who goes by the alias of Kyuuta in the bakemono world, as one should always do) and something of a student of his own. Through their taking a chance on each other, they both become stronger and better people as Ren grows up, until by the time he is 17 both of them are ready to take their lives in a new direction.

Unfortunately, this is where the movie went off the rails, since Ren's new direction involves going back to Shibuya, reconnecting with his estranged father, and falling in with high school student Kaede, who gives him a crash course in the eight years of school he missed and encourages him to go to study to take the college entrance exam so he can go to a second-rate college so he…can become a white collar drone. Yeah. Before that happens, there are some masterful sequences in which the spirit world begins impinging on Shibuya in a bad way, taking the already stellar animation to new heights, but in the end, the normal world half of the story feels very conventional, which is also to say that it's very predictable. Spirited Away understood that it needed to stay in the spirit world, which is way more interesting than our world, but Bakemono no ko doesn't, which is its mistake. It's fundamentally two movies, and the spirit world one is great, while the one in our world is pretty trite, obsessively detailed representation of Shibuya notwithstanding.

All that being said, I certainly don't regret having seen it, if only for the animation--it's some of the best I've seen in this mode, and it's compelling and beautiful from the very first sequence until the very end. The voice acting, the music, and the characters (in the spirit world) were also all pretty great. It was just the plot and the overall story that needed some work.

Comments

yeah, I really agree

[(Anonymous)]

It's weird that a director who previously said in an interview that female protagonists' lives weren't as black and white as mens' (males' being succeed or fail at career), thus their lives were more suited to film, suddenly populate a film with a mostly male cast save for a fridged mother and a damsel in distress. There are plenty of unanswered questions such as why Ren's relatives are cold to him and why his parents divorced (though there has been a DV, or domestic violence, theory going around online in Japan). The film's second half feels pretty conservative in its "be a good member of society that studies and become a salaryman," which is troubling given that in reality most schoolchildren and businessmen are not so happy with long hours of work and no play. But this conservatism not surprising given that in his previous film, he had one of his main characters go from an interesting tomboy into the ideal "demure schoolgirl." I wonder if such a conformist ending has to do with the climate the film has been made in: lots of commercialism for an original anime film as well as it being sponsored by NTV, which is related to NHK, which is famous for employing "self-restraint" regarding any portrayal of Japan and any potentially uncomfortable material. There have been only two critical reviews like yours of this film so far:

http://www.otakuusamagazine.com/Anime/News1/The-Boy-and-the-Beast-Film-Review-6667.aspx

http://carlcassegard.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-boy-and-beast-and-claustrophobia-of.html

Many Japanese critics on yahoo also think the second half is worse than the first and call both the heroine and the human father unnecessary.