Owen Steege

When I entered into this class this was the film I was most excited about. I have already seen Spirited Away and I saw it during the pandemic and I loved it. Not my favorite Studio Ghibli film but still great nonetheless, it is very rare when I actually think one of their films is just okay. Especially not this one though being that it won the best animated feature oscar. The animation quality in this film is one of the best of all time because not only does it actually have something to say about consumerism but also it still shows the quality a film can have when you still draw the films we create. Nowadays we have been so accustomed to 3D animation which, don't get me wrong, is still good when done right but you can never go wrong with some good ol drawings. Going onto the side of consumerism, when I first watched the film I didn’t think much of it but now it is blatantly obvious how it is about this. With characters like that of No Face and the parents turning into pigs is just very obvious. These parents turn into pigs after consuming so much food at the shop and becoming almost grotesque and nowhere as similar looking to their daughter. The same goes for No Face where he seems to be this spirit that at first isn’t welcomed by really anyone but at the same time seems kind of normal and doesn’t cause any harm to our main character. But once they get to that scene of the spirit eating tons and tons of food makes them become once again this grotesque monster that tries to destroy everything around them. It just seems to play in of itself of greed and consumerism, with this constant image of turning into these grotesque monsters it’s obvious what the overall message for the film could be. That at a certain point is okay but when greed comes into play that’s when people start to get hurt and start hurting the ones around you. Lastly, the one thing I did want to mention about this film is just the genuine amount of inspiration this film holds in not animation but cinema in general. Not just from the character design of every single character but how the story itself doesn’t necessarily need to make sense. It's like what a lot of people say about these films and that is once again the beauty of it. They’re like dreams that a child would have where these characters all exist in the same world and that's just kind of unique where we don’t have to make sense of everything. We’re in a mystical world, let's just live in it. 

With this being the first film made in the past decade that we watch in this class, I was excited to get some insight into the present film industry in Japan and modern culture. This film seemed to perform well in film festivals, and I can understand why. It’s a small-scale, simple, heartwarming story about day-to-day work in Japan making food. Some of the shots of the food preparation were super pleasing to look at for me, spending a while to go into great detail about the process.

Tokue, an elderly woman with a lot of cooking experience, join Sentaro in his food stand. A big part of the movie is a kind of redemption arc for Tokue. Sentaro originally doesn’t want to hire her, but she proves that she is needed when she provides a sample of home-made an for him (as opposed to the grocery-bought an he usually used). This is what convinces Sentaro to hire her, and during her time working with him she continuously pushes through struggle.

Tokue, having experienced illness for much of her life, talks a lot about freedom. This reoccurring theme in the film comments on the discrimination and limitations placed on people with disabilities in Japanese society, and through her redemption it says that these people deserve a shot at pursuing their goals like anyone else. I think that this one specific example of how people with leprosy have been isolated speaks on a larger message on social discrimination.

In Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 2001 horror film "Pulse" (known in Japanese as 回路かいろ "Kairo"), the internet isn't just a place to connect – it's a yawning abyss of loneliness, threatening to swallow any user whole. The story unfolds in Tokyo, the most populous and densely-packed city on the face of the Earth, yet where our characters feel utterly alone. This isolation fuels a supernatural horror unlike any other, where ghosts aren't confined to graveyards, but slither through the very cables promising connection.

Pulse follows several characters, their paths converging as a strange phenomenon grips the city. Many residents begin inexplicably taking their own lives, and those left behind are plagued by disturbing visions – pale, faceless figures appearing on computer screens. This imagery isn't just jump scares; it's a slow, creeping dread. The faces represent a surge of loneliness, a hollowness that spills out of the internet and into the real world.

Michi, a young woman working at a computer help desk, witnesses this firsthand. People call in, their voices laced with terror, describing the spectral encounters. The internet, supposed to bridge distances, has begun its transformation into the existential garbage disposal we know today. Meanwhile, Ryosuke, a hacker, stumbles upon a disturbing website promising a connection so complete, it erases your very existence. This website embodies the film's central fear: the internet as a Faustian bargain: it can connect you to anyone in the world instantaneously but at the cost of your sense of self and reality.

Kurosawa's cinematography is absolutely on point for the whole film. We see characters dwarfed by empty apartments, their faces illuminated by the cold glow of computer screens. The sterile hum of technology underscores the lack of human connection. The ghosts themselves are unsettling – distorted figures with vacant eyes, mirroring the emptiness they represent. The hollowness of their eyes showing clearly the yawning gap between reality and internet simulation they experienced before dying.

The film doesn't shy away from the dark side of human connection in the digital age. We see people using the internet for fleeting moments of intimacy in online chatrooms, only to be left feeling more isolated afterward. The characters yearn for connection, yet their attempts through technology only push them further away. Like a digital Chinese finger trap: the harder you try to force it, the worse you're stuck.

Pulse isn't a film that relies on gore or jump scares. It's a slow burn, a meditation on the anxieties of a hyper-connected world. It forces us to confront the chilling possibility that the very tool designed to bring us together might be driving us apart (honestly "might" isn't even necessary). Even today, the film feels eerily relevant. Social media can be a breeding ground for loneliness, with carefully curated online personas masking the emptiness underneath. A neologism for this phenomenon is "parasocial". Pulse serves as a stark reminder of the importance of face-to-face human connection in a world entirely dominated by screens. It's a film that will stay with me like Ghost in the Shell or Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade have.

I really don't know. I might have some ideas. But whether or not any of them are up to scrutiny is a whole other matter. Shunji Iwai's Swallowtail Butterfly is a coming of age story, sometimes it's a Hong Kong gangster movie, and there are other times where I frankly don't know what it was exactly that I watched. Something I can say for certain is that if I had to pin any particular theme that was consistent throughout Swallowtail Butterfly it was fluidity.

Swallowtail Butterfly throughout most of its narrative follows Ageha, a young girl residing in a non-descript immigrant shanty town occupied prominently by Chinese settlers at the edge of non-descript urban Japan. This general non-descript quality is a common element in Swallowtail Butterfly. After being orphaned Ageha is left in the care of Glico, a Chinese prostitute as she and their many friends find ways to survive in Yentown.

Yentown roughly encompasses the boundaries of urban Japan and is a space where immigrants from all over the world have come to stake their claim, collect enough yen, and to return home. Aside from the non-descriptness of place Swallowtail Butterfly also does quite a bit to play with the non-descriptness of race and identity.

After a series of absurd adventures that involves desecrating a grave in a potter's field, searching the contents of a human stomach, and using a Frank Sinatra cassette to run a counterfeiting scam Ageha, Glico, and their friends open the YenTown Club. It's during this time that Glico gains the attention of record company executives for her singing talent.

During an interview with a fairly prominent record label the executives present are discussing the marketability of Glico as Chinese and decide that it would be too difficult and instead ask her if she would become Japanese. This is where the fluidity of Swallowtail Butterfly and what it has to say about race and especially about being Japanese is the most identifiable. Glico's popularity is predicated on her ability to present herself as Japanese. Not only is being Japanese something which can be marketed and commodified but also something which is not so strictly defined by essentialized ideas of homogeneity.

There are certainly other times in the film where these grander ideals surrounding homogeneity are challenged such as with the band consisting of Japanese born individuals of non-Japanese descent who's cultural upbringing and only language seems to be almost exclusively. Are these individuals not Japanese?

This really was not a film for me. I didn't necessarily find it bad. The counterfeiting scheme in general was one of my favorite plot points of Swallowtail Butterfly, unfortunately from there things branched off into places that just weren't very interesting to me. One of my favorite aspects of the film though was the setting of "Yentown", and it's "city at the edge of the world" quality and the ways in which each character had seemingly drifted into there and the stories they brought with them and their struggles. It, and especially the underworld crime portion, reminded me quite a bit of Roanapur, a fictional South East Asian island that acts as setting for the manga Black Lagoon.

I LOVED Hanabi, even though it was a hard watch (so much blood)!

Although Nishi and Horibe had such terrible fates, they both found their own methods of perseverance. In fact, aside from their perseverance of the current, both men also individually dealt with their future selves here too. I.e. learning to be complacent with the situation you are in and find your own happiness. Both men are found in wildly different situations- one is healthy, but with a wife who is sick and dying; The other has a perfectly healthy wife! Except... she left him and he is wheelchair bound. One has lost all that made their life purposeful, while the other will lose it soon.

It seems that the main character himself has trouble processing his life as it is. Although his wife is sick and he is no longer a cop, he continuously hangs onto his glory days, going as far as to purchase a used cop car and repurpose it, a symbol of his delusion (Notice how the car is what gets the transformation, and not him?). Horibe, however, takes up painting after Nishi mails him some art supplies after a suicide attempt. While it is a very kind gesture, the abstract art he takes on symbolizes his new beginning, as he uses flowers in bloom to cover the faces of all living beings. With these paintings, Horibe is trying to tell a story of life: flowers sprout, bloom, grow, and wither. Here he is resprouting himself with a newfound hobby and purpose in life.

Joe Hisaishi's music tells a beautiful story amidst each scene- it heavily influenced how much I wanted to cry almost every time. I was also caught off-guard by the placement of the music, because nearly every scene did not exactly line up with what I heard. Namely, one of my favorite scenes in the movie is the ending scene, where Nishi rips the kite. An execution was about to take place. The music was hauntingly beautiful and melancholic, which I felt showed the emotional impact of one's life coming to an end, but the humorous moment before the deaths was particularly jarring. It's kind of like when you cry but then somebody makes you laugh shortly after?

I am not actually 100% sure if Nishi and his wife were killed, or if it was the hitmen who died. Yes, Nishi did rob a bank, his life has nowhere left to go, and his wife was nearly dead, but Nishi does have a track record of pulling a fast one. Perhaps, since the deaths were off screen, Nishi killed them? But then, he has nowhere to go after that.... That's why I personally believed he let him and his wife die here. You could see how much he loved his wife, and how he really had nothing after her.

So back to the dichotomy of Nishi and Horibe. Horibe learns to move on from the incident, somewhat, but Nishi... never really does. He stays in his own ways, violent, angry, and deceitful. His wife is dying, and he quietly decides to end his life sometime after hers, choosing to end his life rather than prolong it like Horibe does. For a while, during the beginning of the movie, I was expected Nishi to be blind due to the glasses he wears. Stevie wonder is one of the most famous blind musicians of his time, pictured below. Stereotypically, blind people are depicted in media wearing shades that fully obfuscate their eyes. I think that this is purposeful, as Nishi never sees the truth, i.e., he doesn't think that he can bloom after his wife's death. He is blind to the possibility of a happy life after.

I'd only ever heard sparingly about the Zainichi Korean population at times, mostly in passing. I knew a bit about the North Korean transplant population throughout certain areas of Japan. It's also not uncommon for me to see discussions surrounding xenophobia in Japan and I know a bit about the legacy of empire. Isao Yukisada's GO explores each of these topics intimately. What really invested me in this film though was the bare knuckle smack downs and the explorations of self and masculinity.

One of the most compelling aspects of this film was its main character. Sugihara is the child of Chosen-Jin (North Korean) parents, wherever he goes and and whoever he interacts with attempts to define him on whatever terms are convenient to him: criminal, traitor, impure. It's Sugihara's constant personal revolution to defy definition that characterizes his struggle. When his name gains notoriety and delinquents from nearby schools come to challenge him he swiftly defeats each in succession but ultimately remains disinterested in any acclaim attributed to violence and sees it purely as self-defense. When he choses to transfer from a North Korean transplant school to a Japanese school its not some larger formation in what others might contend as some betrayal or transformation of his ethnic identity but simply what he sees as an opportunity to explore a larger world.

In a society that seems at times obsessed with typifying and categorizing identity Sugihara's commitment to fluidity is an act of major rebellion. This isn't to say that's all he is. Sugihara is still a teenage boy and the film frequently reminds us of that. He spends time embarrassing his friend in front of a waitress. He lies to a cute girl because he doesn't want to admit that he was listening to Rakugo so he tells her it was rap.

One of the integral aspects of GO is the constant barrage of punches and generally the absurd amount of ass kicking. Sugihara's relationship with violence however is as multifaceted as he is. Japanese stories of male adolescence and alienation embroiled in violence at some point feels as if they take a path where the characters sets down a path towards self-destruction from where they can never return, in fact I feel this is also a trend in many American films surrounding the experience of immigrant men. I waited with baited breath throughout the entire film waiting for Sugihara to set down that road. He never did.

Even when his dearest compatriot and fellow rebel of fluidity Song Il was murdered by a Japanese individual he refused to participate in the revenge drawn across such identarian lines which they both so profusely despised. When he exposes himself in front of the girl he loves at a place of extreme fragility after the death of his nearest friend and laying out his trust in the name of their intimacy is ultimately rejected he simply walks away. He never is what others have already decided he was.

The absurd brawls that take place between Sugihara and his father in their own way aren't even necessarily about violence. Boxing is one of the things that are integral to Sugihara's relationship with his father and for them seems to be the most effective means of communication. Sugihara's paternal punch outs are less about who gets the most hits in and are more the conflict between a generation in which identity and regional and ethnic boundaries were all consuming and another in which individual self was prized above all things. After each encounter Sugihara's feelings seem to reach his father more and more and with time he seems just a touch more receptive to them.

I loved GO. Throughout the early 2000s Japan seemed to be revisiting the delinquent genre in manga, anime, and film. GO in a lot of ways especially in its fight scene reminded me Clover, one of my favorite delinquent manga from this period of time. I will likely be watching this many more times.

alright so i'm workin with exhaustion levels u've never seen b4 but i think i get this movie.

Firstly, the humor is pretty good throughout most of this film. I'm obsessed with the meta fourth wall breaking opening because that stuff is always done well. The goofy over-dramatized western movie aspects are hilarious and great, because they're so easy to mimic. Even the slapstick-esque (or like Chaplin style idk I'm TIRED OK) scene when they go visit Sensei and that one guy takes the kid into the kitchen to make omurice was pretty good even though I typically hate that style. This movie is so quirky weird and I vibe with that. Especially the little sound effects when they eat the noodles. The lil 'fwip' noises. It adds whimsy and who doesn't love whimsy.

Analysis wise, I think this movie's point is to show all the aspects of food and food culture? You have those that use it for greed, those that use it for pleasure (literally with the weird as hell sex scenes but like you go girl, ig) and so on. It's a very funny movie in many aspects but I don't think that takes away from the whole point that this movie celebrates food--specifically ramen. I like, too, that even the spaghetti scene we get where the etiquette teacher is trying to teach them all to eat like westerners/soundlessly, they go back to slurping the noodles and enjoying it how they would their food normally. It makes a point to show several times various people adding food restrictions to others (the elderly man and kid basically back to back) while immediately showing people sort of tempting them past those restrictions because food should be enjoyed however and whenever you want. (We're ignoring that the old man ate too fast and started choking).

Food is an art and that is shown in many, many different ways throughout. It should be explored, celebrated, and enjoyed in whatever way is personal to you. Good food unites people and allows for growth and connection. Food can also divide people because we all have our own tastes. It's oddly optimistic and sweet.

Could've done without the egg yolk orgasm and the turtle murder, though.

Throughout the entire watchtime of this film all I could think of was Whiplash, the 2011 film where J. K. Simmons mentally and physically torments a young jazz drummer. However, this film isn't so much about the relationship between master and student as Whiplash is. It's much more about the strained family dynamics of early 1980s Japan, the demands on every family member from society writ large, and the lengths that families were willing to go to get their children into prestigious universities. One facet of this film I found particularly interesting was the relationship between Shinichi and Shigeyuki.

Shinichi, the older brother, has already gotten into the prep school that his father wanted him to get into, Seibu High. Shinichi experiences a kind of post-accomplishment aimlessness; he's lost motivation to study since his motivation was to get into Seibu in the first place. He has reservations about going on to university since it doesn't seem to fit his life anymore. Shinichi is now much more interested in talking to girls and hanging out with friends for the vast majority of the movie. He's almost switched places with Shigeyuki.

Shigeyuki is struggling a lot with school, but not because he's simply not smart enough, he just has little to no drive to do so. He's much more invested in drawing and reading about rollercoasters than Japanese language class or English. It's not until his father has had enough of his slacking and gets an at-home tutor that Shigeyuki sees any improvement in his grades. This tutor quickly proves to be far more than Shigeyuki's father bargained for and ends up being physically abusive almost immediately.

The tutor, Mr. Yoshimoto, is a tall, imposing man who immediately establishes his dominance over the Numatas. He goes to a second-rate university, but carries himself as if he were a Toudai alumnus. He enforces his regime of studying onto Shigeyuki, slapping him and harassing him in public until Shigeyuki bends to his will. As we see later in the film, what Yoshimoto is actually trying to do is to teach Shigeyuki to stand up for himself and act on his own. We can see this when Yoshimoto smiles when Shigeyuki blocks his slap and slaps back. What Yoshimoto did is still assault and he should be charged as such, but it wasn't senseless assault.

Yoshimoto represents the cold reality of what it takes to make it in our hyper-competitive society. If you're not completely dedicated to the grind, not utterly focused on making it to your next goal, you'll end up like Yoshimoto himself: slapping 9th graders across the face for a couple hundred bucks. The very end of the film, where the whole family falls asleep midday to the sound of a helicopter flying overhead, is emblematic of just how exhausting the grind is. I think all of us can relate to just passing out midday when the lack of sleep from studying catches up to us.