Labyrinth of Cinema

The last showing at an old theatre in Obayashi Nobuhiko's hometown of Onomichi, Hiroshima. It's a fitting idea, knowing that this would be his own last film.

Labyrinth of Cinema follows a similar pattern to that of Kon Satoshi's Millenium Actress, where characters fulfill the role of both the listener (audience), and as the actors, in a multitude of short stories centered around Japanese war history.

The film is long at almost exactly 3 hours of runtime, the editing, whimsical as to be expected in an Obayashi film. While still upholding the emotional and strong anti-war message prevalent throughout the late directors films. Worth remembering Obayashi being from Hiroshima.

A last chance to use his voice perhaps swells the runtime, but this is a real spectacle.

In short, not the greatest choice for a first film to watch from Nobuhiko Obayashi but certainly a worthy film as the footnote to the wonderfully inventive career.

The plot: A japanese cinema opens one last night and shows japanese war movies all night. Various villagers come and watch. A girl (Noriko) doesn't know about war and wants to find out by going directly into the films. 3 men (a yakuza wannabe/monk, a film critic, and the girls lover) follow her to rescue her from various dangers, the girl being present in different incarnations within the movies. The four encounter various battles of japanese history starting from the 1860s with the fall of the samurai and ending with the bombing of Hiroshima, making friends and enemies on their way.

The movie: First I have to say despite this being Nobuhiko Ôbayashis last movie it was my first from him. I was told about his experimental roots beforehand and knew the anti war & movie topic. Still, this movie has a very special style. Instead of using actual old japanese war movies they get kind of rebuild. The first ones in 4:3 and b/w with intertitles before we head to talkies. Generally Ôbayashis choice in most of the scenes is to have two layers in it: the background & the characters, by choice badly cut in. You get 3 hours of very fast paced dialoge, singing, a lot of cuts & repetitions, panels with poems, semi-documental scenes, overlays with facts/information in japanese, overlays of circles, etc.

Storywise, although its meandering style, it all concludes fine in the end & has a strong as well as important message. But still a very hard one to sit through.

As an avid Japanese cinema guy, I've seen my fair share of great films, from the sublime Kurosawa epics to the modern horror, drama and historical samurai sword-and-sandals films we sometimes are blessed with. What I have never seen is a film that is somehow 3 hours long, and yet is also somehow one of the fastest paced films I've come across. It is in equal measures incredible visually, in that I will forever remember the visuals. They aren't cutting edge CGI scenes depicted, and yet every janky goldfish floating in a spaceship, random camera lense refocus, and amateur hour photoshop visual is somehow pleasing to the eye. The sound is 100% mis-synched and I presume on purpose to reflect olden films and the visual medium. There's a great visual gag on subtitled films as well, which is then also offset with smelly fart gags.

The story is simple enough, 3 moviegoers and a fourth young innocent girl, Noriko, are sucked into the war films they are watching, playing out little vignettes from spoofs of wartime classics. The acting is incredible, in that it somehow works despite being over the top, unsynched, and at times unhinged. The directing is superb, because I don't have a single doubt that in the 3 years it took to make this while the Director was dying of lung cancer, he was meticulous and every random floating goldfish and fart joke, every heartfelt love confession, each brutal rape scene, all have a role to play in the service of two key things.

The first is a genuine overt love for cinema, the power to move and the power to mislead, and in doing so to still arrive at a truth that, at its best, elevates us all and has the power to shape our future. With his nods to film-making, to classics in Japanese cinema, to nods to film-makers who perished too early in war themselves, Obayashi is both paying tribute and asserting the importance of the works of fiction on society.

The second, more overt and yet also more difficult to stomach, is the agony and at times evil of war, through the lens of atrocities committed during war, after the war, and the impact of this on people. There is no shortage of people having the worst brought out of them through the wars they are involved in, and our hapless protagonists interactions with them all.

Fundamentally, having some understanding of Japanese can go a long way as the subtitles fail to capture the on-screen written Japanese for several key scenes, and the importance of seeing an Okinawa-based dialogue alongside the Japanese subtitles alongside the English ones are pretty challenging. But also, the importance of the Boshin War on Japan and the removal of the Tokugawa shogunate, bringing forth the Meiji era of modernization of Japan, as well as the Sino-Japanese war and the fighting in Manchuria are central to the importance of the anti-war message. Indeed, as noted in some critic reviews, Western audiences probably only start to feel more at home once you get to World War II, the Okinawa draft experience and the bombing of Hiroshima, as easy references. It's also where those who have visited Hiroshima start to feel a sinking feeling as the people on screen in the final moments are those made most famous in the museum including what appears to be the crane girl, and the burned soldiers, and culminating in the scene of the shadow on the steps, an image that cannot be forgotten once seen. These effective moments are incredibly moving and chilling, which is a weird feeling in a film that announces itself with enthusiastic reading of the opening credits, puts in a fake intermission, and even thanks some random actor who couldn't be there, which is never really explored. I can't tell if that is a genuine thank you to an actor who could not travel, or if this is just more fiction to harken back to the olden days.

The mixture of silly slapstick, crazy cuts, deep and profound moments in Japanese history, crucial poems from a wartime poems, and an unconventional narrative with the very serious and dour tones of war as the film progresses are something that shouldn't work. I should be rating it 1/10 for visuals for what is "janky" CGI, or 1/10 for sound that simply will not synch to the actors speaking the lines, or 1/10 for the narrative structure that is all over the shop. But it works, I don't know how, but it absolutely works. It's a masterpiece of cinema, an ode the joys of film, a tribute to those whose life goal was to make great films, and a fitting end to an incredible career by Obayashi, who sadly couldn't see his work get a general release. It was ironically scheduled for domestic release on the day he died, but was pulled due to the pandemic.

I cannot recommend highly enough that people watch this, and I do think that you need to get through the full film as there's a strong turn for the "familiar" that comes with moving into Okinawa 1941 that might help those not as familiar with Japanese history.

I am way into Hausu, and School in the Crosshairs was good - Labyrinth of Cinema does not disappoint those tastes. It adds to them in a grandiose way - more mature, but also hyper, as hyper as a child at the peak of their day. I couldn't believe how the film strode through its plot.

The unreality of the film is so delightfully stylized that it is fun to examine the background - and after so much exposure to constantly weird sets, you find yourself realizing a lot of unique arrangements have slipped you by.

Similarly, the plot has a lot of nods and references to earlier moments, so it is a good one to be on your guard for. I bet it will be better when I watch it again.

Feels very revitalizing when it is over: Obayashi is unbelievable, obviously powered by a deep sentiment and still as able to let the viewer feel the connection between characters like it flows through them. I would like to learn about the process of making this film.

It totally matches with the "farewell to the days of reel cinema" vibe that has slid undercurrent for a decade or two. In that regard it pairs well with Once upon a Time in Hollywood or perhaps something with George Clooney in it: A little man-focused in that regard, maybe, but I did always perceive a feminine focus in Obayashi's work which maintains here.

It's more serious than Hausu, but also, way more silly? Not sure what happened to me while I watched that film, but I am completely discombobulated. Got carnival legs after that one.

Being the final film of the recently departed Nobuhiko Obayashi I watched this with one laughing and one crying eye. Obayashi was known for his visuals, humour and wild even experimental style. A prime example being 1977's Hausu which has become somewhat of a cult classic by now and for good reason too as it is a perfect destillation of all his greatest qualities.

Labyrinth of Cinema is an even more extreme example of his style which is both joyfully wonderful and ultimately a detriment.

The wrap-around story is about the last movie theatre in Onomichi city, Obayashi's birthplace, closing its doors forever with an all-night showing of Japanese war films. This attracts a colorful variety of odd characters who get sucked into the movies themselves and the historic events they portray.

What follows is a 3-hour long very meta, often funny, often tragic trip through 400 years of history and 100 years of cinema with the focus being on world war II, Japanese atrocities against their own and other people and ultimately Obayashi's own experience of being a child during the Japanese Empire including the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

Despite what this may sound like the message of the film is actually very positive and uplifting yet doesn't really mince words when it comes to humanity's destructive capabilities.

The fact that this movie even exists is inspiring in itself. Obayashi was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2016 and given only a few months to live, yet he still completed this film and another three hour epic Hanagatami before it.

What makes Labyrinth of Cinema a much lesser film than it could have been is the complete and at times ridiculous oversaturation of style, which makes it really hard to recommend. It becomes quite exhausting very quickly. While it does get better and eventually allows important emotional scenes to breathe more it was still too much for me. And I'm usually a big fan of the sensory overload approach to art.

With more restraint this could have easily been a more epic live action version of Satoshi Kon's Millenium Actress. Still, the joy and energy this dying old artist brought to the screen in his final film is inspiring and there is plenty of good commentary that really packs a punch.

It's not going to be for everybody, if you're not well-versed in Japanese history, culture and cinema a lot of the details will go straight over your head, but I'm sincerely glad I saw it and wow, what a way to go.