Tora-San, an itinerant peddler who is thrown out of his father’s house twenty years before but reconnects with his aunt, uncle and sister Sakura. Tora wreaks some havoc in their lives, like getting drunk and silly at a marriage meeting.
Tag: JAPAN
The story of Shinsuke ranging from his infanthood to his mid-teens, he’s a young man who lives through a stormy life coming from a poverty-stricken coal-mining family.
World War II, Japan: Saburo, a Tokyo-based student, meets Keiko, an illustrator of propaganda posters, in a bomb shelter during an air raid on the city and becomes infatuated with the young woman. After several more chance encounters, a tender, yet passionate love develops between the two. Their relationship, however, remains unconsummated as Saburo is called up to the front to fight as a soldier of Japan’s imperial army. As time goes on, Japan’s war of aggression becomes a lost cause, which threatens to destroy the prospects of the lovers’ ever meeting again…
Michiyo moved to Osaka two years ago, when her husband Hatsunosuke who works at a stock brokerage was transfered from Tokyo. She wash, cook and clean 365 days a year. All the dreams and hopes she had when they got married five years ago seems to be gone. From here on we follow the everyday life of Mr. and Mrs. Okamoto.
Setsuko is unhappily married to Mimura, an engineer with no job and a drinking habit. She’s always been in love with Hiroshi, but he left for France years ago without proposing. Now he is back and Mariko (Setsuko’s sister) tries to reunite them, although secretly she loves him too.
0cm4 is the philosophical story of a color-blind man called Maeda who decides to have an operation to cure his vision. The problem is that he is not quite sure if he wants to do it, as he thinks that everybody else in the world sees things differently. He’s afraid that after the operation, his world is not going to be the same.
A spontaneous romance blooms between Kawamura, a professor touring Europe, and Naoko, a married woman living in Paris, scarred by the Nagasaki atomic bombings. The two protagonists travel around Europe trying to find themselves.
Author/illustrator Sanpei Shirato’s Ninja bugei-cho was a popular graphic novel serialized across Japan in the 1960s, well loved by students and leftist radicals for its tale of a young boy’s alliance with a band of ninja during a peasant uprising. Nagisa Oshima takes an experimental approach to adaptation; out of deep respect for Shirato’s artistry (and his usual cinematic prankishness), he films Shirato’s images as they appear on the page, like an anime version of Sans soleil, with the camera hovering and darting over each “scene” to provide movement and life. Adding voices, sound effects, and a narration that connects the plot’s myriad strands, Oshima intervenes in yet another unexpected genre to create a fascinating treatise on cinema, narrative, and action.