In a November 20, 1988 review of several Japanese films, "New York Times" critic Vincent Canby wrote, "Throughout Mitsuo Yanagimachi's 'Fire Festival' ('Himatsuri'), one of the finest films to be made here in recent years, there recurs a series of images that are initially funny but which, as the film progresses, become increasingly disturbing... It reinforces the enormous power of a movie that, above all else, is about the shifting, contradictory impulses shaping contemporary Japan."