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.