Now the Death Note movies did have high production values and the special effects were ok, but they never really seem to fit at any time during the movies. It’s quite hard to tell this in stills, but there is a youtube movie that shows some parts with the shinigami (死神 lit: death god), muting your computer is slightly recommended.

This could have been a conscious choice to make the shinigami feel like they never fit in the world, but I have a suspicion that this is just not the case here. I’m really not sure why they didn’t do what is done in a lot of other movies with characters that occur often, but look… odd. Ron Perlman has made a career by wearing tons of make-up and heavy costumes; can it be true that there is no one like this in Japan? Anyway, intentional or not, the shinigami stick out as aberrations on the cellulose.

This is how you do creatures.

Deer Man is a tv show here about a teacher who, somehow, can talk with some deer in Nara. The show is pretty normal most of the time, but at some points he is talking directly to deer. This is a tv show with a moderate budget, so what way do you think they handled the problem of this teacher talking with deer? You probably have some good ideas of how to do this: do the old Mr. Ed trick, make the speech be telepathic, put the camera behind the deer, etc. What did the director/producer decide on? A shitty animatronic deer that can’t move (go to 3:00 to see what I mean). “Then what do they do if the deer has to move?”, you might say (and the deer does move). They use a variety of methods that often look shitty.

Their special effects go further than just the deer. There’s some kind of monster below ground that is making earthquakes. Instead of not showing it and making it more mysterious, they make a bad cgi version of it. Why did they do any of this? There was no reason whatsoever that made them have to use special effects (or a shitty mechanical deer). They could’ve saved all the money they spent on that one deer and could’ve bought many more hookers than they did.

Unnecessary.

There is a link between all of these, they were originally in print form with the majority being manga. Manga and anime are a less restricted in what they can pull off, because of the medium in which they are made. The shinigami in the manga/anime fit much better than their film brethren, same with Gegege no kitaro. When you have something like these which are hard to do because of the content, you have to take liberties with the story and also realize that sometimes less is more.

Then again, sometimes you can use a low budget to your advantage. An upcoming movie, Machine Girl, doesn’t have a big budget, but it still manages to look awesome. Likewise, a pilot on BBC3 called Phoo Action has a small budget but does great things with the little money that it had.

The villain’s head is a basketball? I’m there.

This can all be boiled down into a couple important phrases, one of which was said best by one of our recent Secretaries of War, “You have to [make a movie] with the [budget] that you have, not the [budget] you want.” It’s all about attitude, you can’t have small budget effects and still carry the same attitude as blockbusters, it just doesn’t work.

Another movie based on manga? Ha, you bitches ain’t got shit on me.

Japan does have a movie industry that has been making movies of variable quality for some time. It started out quite well with Akira Kurosawa, but towards the end of his career he was smearing the industry and accusing them of making mountains of shit on their dinnerplates (where the aliens would land) and then putting that on film. You could make the case that the reason he said stuff like this is because he was an old man and many old men are cranky fuckers. However, if you really look at what movies are made in Japan, even including Kurosawa’s perfectionism, you can see that he does have a point even if he was overstating his case just a bit.

Not saying that there aren’t any good Japanese movies these days, there are. Hayao Miyazaki consistently makes good films and, to some extent, Miike Takahasi, to give some examples. But given the number of films, you start to notice that it’s a sad state of affairs. Good instances of these affairs are easy to find, you don’t have to dig that deep.

Godzilla is one great example of one of the problems with the Japanese film industry. Now, it’s not that they have made a Godzilla movie, that’s fine. But then they went on to make 27 more. Now, I know that there are some franchises that have been beaten into the ground and are halfway through the mantle, but not to the point where there were 28 movies. Can anyone do anything interesting with a series after 28 iterations? What should the next one be about, “Godzilla takes Satan through the backdoor”? Then again, you can’t blame only the industry for doing nothing more than the same when the audience is clamouring for it.

Another problem in the film industry (everywhere and in everything really) is that they seem to hate taking any risks at all. Big projects like Death Note didn’t come to theaters until December of 06. It only covered half the series, which required it to have a sudden and senseless ending. That’s not really the problem though. The problem is that they always knew that the film was going to make money. That’s fine, of course, but this happens all the time in the Japanese film industry. The Juno’s, the Pi’s, the Waking Life’s, as rare as they are in American cinema, they are that much more rarer in the Japanese counterpart.

Coming soon to theaters: A decent story that you already have read.

Now I know that these problems aren’t just in Japan, they’re in all film industries around the globe. The thing about the Japanese film industry is the ratio. The ratio of good:shit is much lower than one would find in some other places. Japan needs to step out of it’s safe zone and make some films that push boundaries, make people question things, give a different angle on a common theme, show societal discrepancies, something. The best movies of Japan manage to find their way to all corners of the globe. Do you know of any other living Japanese director besides Miyazaki or Takahashi? Didn’t think so.

Note: There are some directors getting meta-success with their horror movies (Ring, Dark Water, The Grudge, etc), but an American remake of a Japanese movie is much different from a Japanese movie making inroads to the western market.