Bullet Train Explosion: Needs more fuel

Bullet Train Explosion (2025) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated TV-MA, for dramatic intensity

Available via: Netflix

By Derrick Bang

Japan’s Shinkansen high-speed railway system couldn’t ask for a better promotional video than this film’s opening sequence.

 

Having already overcome several unexpected predicaments, Conductor Takaichi
(Tsuyoshi Kusanagi, center), politician Yuko Kagami (Michiko Ono) and her secretary,
Kodai Hayashi (Daisuke Kuroda), contemplate their next move.

As the Hayabusa No. 60 (5060B) bullet train awaits departure from the Shin-Aomori Station, seasoned conductor Kazuya Takaichi (Tsuyoshi Kusanagi) describes the vehicle’s features to a lively group of high school students: attainable speeds, the importance of maintaining a tight schedule, and even the coupling mechanism concealed within the engine’s nose.

Following this demonstration, the students pile into 5060B’s many luxurious passenger cars, alongside scores of other commuters and travelers of all ages. The train pulls out of the station, driven by the perky Chika Matsumoto (Non) and supervised — in the Shinkansen Operation Control Center — by general manager Yuichi Kasagi (Takumi Saitoh).

 

Shortly after departure, an anonymous caller — with voice electronically concealed — informs the control center that a bomb has been placed on 5060B, which will explode if the train slows below 100 km/hour.

 

By way of proving this isn’t a hoax, the caller alerts the center to the impending destruction of a freight train at a station in Aomori-Higashi. It blows up on cue, after slowing below 5 km/hour. The threat duly established, the bomber calls again and demands a ransom of 100 billion yen in exchange for the means of defusing the bomb on 5060B.

 

If this scenario sounds familiar, that’s no accident. This film actually is a long-gestating sequel to 1975’s Shinkansen Daibakuha (The Bullet Train), a thriller concept which then producer Toei Company — and director Junya Sato — felt would prove as popular as recent high-profile American disaster films such as Earthquake and The Towering Inferno. Sato’s big-screen hit, in turn, inspired the 1994 American film Speed.

 

This new film — helmed by Shinji Higuchi and scripted by Kazuhiro Nakagawa and Norichika Ôba — is an impressively polished production, highlighted by persuasive special effects, an engaging cast, and sharp cinematography (Yusuke Ichitsubo and Keizô Suzuki). That said, the often laughably overblown melodramatic touches undercut the tension that Higuchi and editors Atsuki Satô and Kaori Umewaki work hard to establish and maintain.

 

That’s an uphill challenge, because this film doesn’t earn its 134-minute length.

The Imaginary: Sweet, but slightly flawed

The Imaginary (2023) • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five). Rated PG, for scary images and dramatic intensity

Available via: Netflix

By Derrick Bang

Despite its often melancholy tone, director Yoshiyuki Momose’s wildly colorful film is a heartfelt valentine to children and their imaginary friends.

 

Amanda and her "imaginary friend," Rudger, enjoy wonderfully colorful adventures
limited solely by what she dreams up.

This is the third film from Tokyo’s Studio Ponoc, founded in 2015 by Yoshiaki Nishimura, former lead producer of Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli. The Imaginary follows 2017’s Mary and the Witch’s Flower and 2018’s Modest Heroes, all three boasting the colorfully lush, hand-drawn animation that has long been a hallmark of Studio Ghibli.

And, just as Studio Ghibli dipped into British children’s literature with 2010’s The Secret World of Arrietty — based on Mary Norton’s beloved 1952 novel, The Borrowers — Momose and screenwriter Yoshiaki Nishimura have adapted A.F. Harrold’s popular 2014 British children’s novel, with illustrations by Emily Gravett.

 

That said, Momose does his film no favors with a chaotic prologue likely to overwhelm viewers ... and perhaps even put them off. (Grit your teeth and hang on for five minutes, at which point things will make sense.)

 

Young Amanda (voiced in the American edition by Evie Kiszel) and her mother, Lizzie (Hayley Atwell) live above the Shuffleup Book Shop, a charming little store her parents established in an unspecified English country village. But Lizzie hasn’t been able to make ends meet since her husband’s recent death; job interviews haven’t been promising, and the shop is days from closing.

 

Her father’s absence explains Amanda’s creation of Rudger (Louie Rudge-Buchanan) — please, never “Roger” — an imaginary friend who proudly boasts that he was born “three months, three weeks and three days ago.”  Thanks to an active imagination fueled by the contents of her marvelous attic bedroom — a retreat most of us would have hungered for, at a similar age — Amanda and Rudger share all manner of exciting, colorful and just-dangerous-enough-to-be-thrilling adventures.

 

Rudger is completely real to her, which — and this is the story’s core point — makes him real, although he can be seen only by Amanda. During their flamboyant exploits, all of them opulently realized by Momose and his talented animators, the two frequently chant a mantra:

 

“Whatever happens, never disappear ... protect each other ... and never cry.”

Mary and the Witch's Flower: A disappointing bloom

Mary and the Witch's Flower (2017) • View trailer 
Three stars. Rated PG, for no particular reason
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 5.15.20

Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli clearly has inspired the look and narrative approach of Japanese animated cinema.

When encouraged to look around an office laden with all manner of strange artifacts
and colorful treasures, Mary discovers a mirror with a concealed compartment
behind it, which contains a book of powerful magic spells.

Mary and the Witch’s Flower comes by this influence honestly, since director/co-scripter Hiromasa Yonebayashi helmed 2010’s The Secret World of Arrietty and 2014’s When Marnie Was There for Ghibli, earning an Academy Award nomination for the latter.

Mary and the Witch’s Flower marks Yonebayashi’s directorial debut for his own recently founded Studio Ponoc. Although it has the gorgeous, hand-drawn lushness of a Ghibli production, Yonebayashi didn’t pay sufficient attention to the story and its characters; too much of the action feels random and unfocused, as if we’re watching the abbreviation of a much richer miniseries.

This is also one of those aggravating fantasies that fails to remain consistent to its own rules, and where characters, good and bad, are only as strong — or weak — as a given moment demands.

Which is sad, given that the film is adapted from Mary Stewart’s popular 1971 children’s book, The Little Broomstick. Yonebayashi and co-scripter Riko Sakaguchi have done it no favors; they’ve overloaded Stewart’s gently rural fable with a slice of steampunk that feels quite out of place.

(Yonebayashi clearly has a fondness for British children’s novels; The Secret World of Arrietty was based on Mary Norton’s The Borrowers.)

Matters aren’t helped by the fact that Netflix limits us to the dubbed British voice cast, robbing us of the more story-appropriate Japanese actors.

Mary opens with a cataclysmic prologue, as a young girl attempts to escape from a conflagration that destroys some sort of immense structure; she’s pursued by slithery, gelatinous creatures out of nightmare, their grasping tentacles attempting to absorb her. She seems to get away, but then a final blast of wind knocks her and the flying broom to ground in a forest, where tiny glowing blue spheres — which she has carefully sheltered — burst and have a most unusual effect on nearby trees and animals.

Your Name: Star-crossed love

Your Name (2016) • View trailer 
4.5 stars. Rated PG, for dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.22.20

The spirit of Studio Ghibli lives on in writer/director Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name, a mind-bending romantic fantasy steeped in the Japanese culture, tradition and mysticism that are hallmarks of Hayao Miyazaki’s best films.

Mitsuha, center, can't begin to explain to her best friends — Tessie, left, and Sayaka — why
she isn't quite herself at the moment.

On top of which, the lush hand-drawn animation, at times approaching photo-realism, is so gorgeous that it almost hurts the eyes. Indeed, at times the visuals virtually overpower the narrative: ordinarily an ill-advised distraction, but in this case merely a welcome excuse to watch the film again.

Shinkai’s story is so carefully composed, so deviously cunning, that almost any plot description is guaranteed to spoil the viewer’s sense of elated discovery, as each fresh twist is revealed.

If your curiosity is sufficiently piqued, best to stop reading here, until afterseeing the film (which is available via Amazon Prime and other streaming services).

High school-age Mitsuha (voiced by Mone Kamishiraishi) lives in the rural community of Itomori, in Japan’s mountainous Hida region. She and her younger sister, Yotsuha (Kanon Tani), are being raised by their grandmother, Hitoha (Etsuko Ichihara); the elderly woman has schooled them in venerable Japanese traditions such as kumihimo (thread weaving) and kuchikamizake (sake fermentation), the latter taking place during a lavishly costumed kabuki ritual.

Both practices have symbolic significance that factor into what will follow.

Mitsuha, bored and restless, yearns for a more exciting life anywhere else: a desire she confides to best friends Tessie (Ryo Narita), a construction worker; and Sayaka (Aoi Yüki), a nervous girl too shy to acknowledge her crush on Tessie.

Elsewhere…

High school-age Taki (Ryunosuke Kamiki), living amid the hustle and bustle of Tokyo, works part-time in an Italian restaurant while studying to become an architect; he’s also a gifted pencil artist. He has a crush on restaurant co-worker Miki (Masami Nagasawa), a slightly older university student, who is amused by his somewhat clumsy attention.

The Wind Rises: This film soars

The Wind Rises (2013) • View trailer 
4.5 stars. Rating: Rated PG-13, for dramatic content and disturbing images
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.14.14

Animation fans who think of Hayao Miyazaki’s films solely in terms of fantasy realms and whimsical (sometimes dangerous) supernatural creatures — 2001’s Academy Award-winning Spirited Away having much to do with this genre affiliation — are in for a surprise.

To his amazement, young Jirô (running in foreground) seems to share his dreams with
the flamboyant Caproni, a famed Italian aeronautical engineer who designs planes for
the sheer joy of mechanical artistry. Can a bespectacled country boy hope to do the
same, when he achieves adulthood?

Quite a surprise.

Although The Wind Rises opens with a surreal quality that feels like vintage Miyazaki, focusing on a young country boy smitten by the rhapsodic magic of aircraft, this film is grounded in historical fact: much more biography than imaginative fancy. The year is 1918, the boy is Jirô Horikoshi, and he often finds himself in plane-laden dreams that seem to be shared by famed Italian aeronautical designer Giovanni Battista Caproni, whose bombers played a significant role in World War I ... but who also has far-reaching concepts for peacetime passenger aircraft.

This is mere prologue: the spark that ignites Jirô’s determination to become an aircraft engineer. A few years pass; having reached young adulthood (now voiced, in this dubbed American version, by Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Jirô boards a train in order to attend college in Tokyo, little realizing that Miyazaki — employing the artistic license so beloved by writers who play with time and place — has orchestrated an appointment with fate.

What later came to be known as the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 strikes just as Jirô’s train reaches the city outskirts. He meets and rescues Nahoko Satomi (voiced by Emily Blunt), re-uniting her with family while firestorms sweep through the city and surrounding areas. Without much of a backward glance, Jirô then pushes on to his university, where he and new friend Honjô (John Krasinski) do their best to rescue books and other valuable property.

Time passes anew; Jirô and Honjô join the Mitsubishi engineering company in 1927, where they’re constantly browbeaten by their grumpy, imperious boss, Kurokawa (Martin Short). Even so, Jirô’s innovative concepts quickly catch the attention of senior designer Hattori (Mandy Patinkin).

These initial years at Mitsubishi unfold against Japan’s Great Depression, which forces the seriously understaffed and overworked Mitsubishi engineers to labor under significant handicaps. Jirô revels in the work for its own sake, having no outside life to distract him; Honjô supplies some outer-world context by lamenting that their primitive conditions are keeping them 10 years behind superior German designers.

By way of illustrating this disparity, Mitsubishi’s test aircraft must be hauled onto fields by oxen.

From Up on Poppy Hill: Young love and simpler times

From Up on Poppy Hill (2011) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rating: PG, for dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang

From its very first frame, From Up on Poppy Hill is breathtaking.

You’ll literally gasp at the hand-drawn watercolor lushness of the opening tableau, as the young heroine’s neighborhood is unveiled, her home set high on a hill that overlooks Japan’s Yokohama Port. Computer animation, for all its delights, never looks like this; one must go all the way back to the Walt Disney Studio’s early days, and Snow White or Bambi.

When Umi forgets some ingredients for the evening meal, her new friend Shun offers
to speed her down the hill, in order to reach the market as quickly as possible. The
resulting trip is exciting for its breakneck danger, and also for Umi's close proximity to
a young man she's beginning to care for quite deeply.

Or any of the recent offerings from Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli, of course, which deliver the same painstaking level of luxurious quality.

From Up on Poppy Hill — incidentally, Japan’s top-grossing 2011 film — marks the first feature collaboration between the legendary Miyazaki and his son, Gorō; Hayao wrote the screenplay with Keiko Niwa, while Gorō directed. The film is adapted from a 1980 manga series by Tetsurō Sayama (writer) and Chizuru Takahashi (artist); the story is a gentle and poignant coming-of-age saga about a teenage girl who can’t let go of a past tragedy.

Aside from the visual splendor, we’re immediately struck by the fact that this is a real-world period piece. For the most part, animated features are set in fantasy realms that involve magical creatures, talking animals or other mythological tropes. Exceptions, such as 2007’s Persepolis, tend to rely on grim political content.

But while From Up on Poppy Hill certainly has its solemn moments, they result from family secrets and unexpected revelations, rather than complex issues playing out on a broader national or global stage.

The year is 1963, a time of great excitement in Japan, as ambitious plans are made to showcase the country during the upcoming Tokyo Olympics. References to construction and renewal allude to Japan’s emergence from the still-recent horrors of World War II, but the script never calls undo attention to this sobering element.

Nor do the upcoming Olympics have any impact on Umi Matsuzaki (voiced in this American release by Sarah Bolger). The 16-year-old lives in Coquelicot Manor, a boarding house she essentially runs, while caring for her grandmother and two younger siblings, Sora (Izabelle Fuhrman) and Riku (Alex Wolff). Their mother, Ryoko, is studying abroad in the United States; their father was killed in the Korean War.

Every morning before school, Umi rises early to handle various chores and prepare an elaborate breakfast for her family and the manor’s residents. She does the same with each day’s evening meal. We immediately realize that this dutiful young woman maintains an exhausting schedule from before dawn to late at night, while diligently keeping up with her studies.

Her final ritual each morning, before walking to school, is to raise a set of signal flags on the manor flagpole that her (now deceased) grandfather built for her long ago.

The flags’ message: “I pray for safe voyages.”

The Secret World of Arrietty: Spread the word!

The Secret World of Arrietty (2010) • View trailer
Four stars. Rating: G, and suitable for all ages
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 2.17.12


Those already familiar with Studio Ghibli need not be reminded of Japanese animation impresario Hayao Miyazaki, famed for classics such as Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle and My Neighbor Totoro, the latter lending its corpulent title character to the company logo.

When necessity finally prompts Arrietty to reveal herself, Shawn initially is
astonished by her tiny size. But he quickly overcomes his surprise, realizing
that in every respect, Arrietty is much like any other kid his own age. More to
the point, they'll need to work together to defeat a common enemy.

Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli are synonymous with lush, painterly work, done in the elegant, hand-drawn manner that we rarely see today. We tend to forget the gorgeous beauty of early Disney animated films — Snow White and Pinocchio, in particular — and Miyazaki and his colleagues are among the very few keeping that style alive.

Vibrantly alive.

The introductory garden setting of The Secret World of Arrietty — Japan’s highest-grossing film of 2010, and only now making its way to our shores — is luxuriously fashioned, with an impressive eye for detail: ladybugs taking flight, droplets of water clinging briefly to leaves before falling earthward. It feels like a magical place, and in a way it is: Any setting that teems with life is deemed magical by Miyazaki.

No surprise, then, that this film opens as a tiny girl, standing perhaps as tall as a cigar, flees from a pursuing cat. The girl reaches the shelter of a nearby house’s basement, safe behind the grill of an air vent; the feline yowls in frustration.

The girl is Arrietty, and this film is Miyazaki’s adaptation of Mary Norton’s 1952 children’s classic, The Borrowers. Miyazaki produced and co-scripted this project — sharing the latter credit with Keiko Niwa — and turned over the director’s chair to protégé Hiromasa Yonebayashi, who has worked as an artist/animator on Studio Ghibli films dating backing to 1997’s Princess Mononoke.

The Japanese setting notwithstanding, this film follows Norton’s book reasonably well; since we never leave this isolated house and its garden, it obviously doesn’t matter whether the nearest big city is Tokyo, Toledo or Tunbridge Wells.

Arrietty (voiced in this U.S. version by Bridgit Mendler) lives with her parents — Pod (Will Arnett) and Homily (Amy Poehler) — in the basement beneath a house owned by the elderly Jessica (Gracie Poletti). Arrietty and her family are “borrowers”: tiny people who collect cast-off items discarded or forgotten by the much larger “beans” (human beings) who mostly remain unaware of their existence. Rare sightings are written off as rumors and urban legends.

Ponyo: Style over substance

Ponyo (2008) • View trailer for Ponyo
Three stars (out of five). Rating: G, and suitable for all ages
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.20.09
Buy DVD: Ponyo• Buy Blu-Ray: Ponyo (Two-Disc Blu-ray/DVD Combo)


Japanese animation impresario Hayao Miyazaki's Ponyo is gorgeous, lyrical, poetic and deeply moving at unexpected moments.

It's also slow and very, very strange.

Despite the magical Fujimoto's desperate efforts to "calm" his unusual daughter
back to her normal state, Ponyo -- originally a goldfish -- has tasted the
delights to be experienced as a human being. Then, too, she has made a
land-based friend in the world above: a little boy who already wonders what
has become of his new companion.

To a degree, the latter can be excused by the stylistic disconnect between Western and Japanese fairy tales. Miyazaki, who both wrote and directed this film, relies far more heavily on visual storytelling than narrative exposition; while U.S. directors John Lasseter, Brad Lewis and Peter Sohn clearly tried to clarify details for this English-language version, much remains oblique and only minimally explained ... if, indeed, explained at all.

The broad strokes are easy to discern, though, and other issues can be excused if "magic" is accepted as the reason for various events. Even so, adults likely will emerge with dozens of questions that simply don't have answers.

Children, on the other hand, may be completely satisfied with the core relationship between a 5-year-old boy and the rather unusual goldfish he rescues one day.

The would be Ponyo, introduced as a mute, reddish goldfish: a bit larger than her hundreds of sisters, and all of them carefully sheltered by Fujimoto (voiced by Liam Neeson), a wild-haired, undersea mad-scientist type who mutters dire imprecations while carefully pouring various colored potions into the oceans, in an effort to maintain a harmony constantly under attack by pollution from the lands above.

Ponyo, having grown old enough to be curious, hitches a ride to the surface on an obliging jellyfish: an act that very nearly ends her life, when she is scooped up by a massive dredger and gets stuck in a discarded jam jar.

Fortunately, she's spotted by young Sosuke (Frankie Jonas, yes, of that Jonas family), who quickly rescues the little fish and makes her a pet. He does this by filling a bucket with tap water, which might raise eyebrows among viewers savvy enough to understand the distinction between fresh water and sea water ... but this is the first of many, many details we simply must roll with. As far as this story is concerned, water is water; it's magic, remember?