Arietty

At the end of 2009, Studio Ghibli promoted one of its chief animators, Hiromasa Yonebayashi, into the director's chair for The Secret World of Arietty. Based on Mary Norton's classic (1952) English children's novel The Borrowers, the tale of the endangered species of tiny household spirits had already inspired many English-language film versions (most recently another BBC production, starring Stephen Fry, Christopher Eccleston and Victoria Wood).

Ghibli and its co-founder Hayao Miyazaki won the animation Oscar in 2002 for Spirited Away (the first foreign-language film to do so) and may hope to do the same when Disney distributes the latest film in North America in February 2012. It won't.

It suffers from the disadvantages of Miyazaki's dominant themes. When a story doesn't have enough action, interesting characters and pacing, the studio's customary motifs of ecological awareness, feminism, anti-capitalism, humanity and pacifism are pretty tedious.

The Borrrowers was a gentle, genteel saga, a pining for older days and ways, and it lent itself ideally to Miyazaki's ethos. The only child of a house's last couple of surviving Borrowers, 14-year-old Arietty, is introduced by her father to the frightening world of the huge humans, from which small essential supplies must be "borrowed". In scenes of miniaturisation akin to Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Arietty is spied by the sickly boy of the house, who befriends her and helps her family escape from the clutches of a grumpy housekeeper.

The hand-drawn imagery of ivy, raindrops, hidden passageways and spring flowers is brilliantly imagined, manoeuvred and coloured. Such work is a world away from the traditions of Disney or Pixar, and the Japanese conventions of adorable big-eyed children, animals with conflicted characters and boo-able grouchy old ladies are maintained handsomely. There just aren't enough dramatic developments or side-attractions to grab a non-Japanese viewer's attention. The specially-commissioned music (by Cecile Corbel, the French-Bretonne singer and harpist whose sound resembles that of New Agers such as Ireland's Enya) has a similar languor.

[The DVD version watched had an unfortunate typo in otherwise excellent subtitles: the Borrowers' neighbours are called "human beans".]

Air doll

In 2007, Lars and the Real Girl enabled Ryan Gosling to have an actor's ball partnering an inflatable lover. Two years later, innovative Japanese director Hirokasu Koreeda played well with the same concept in Air Doll, his screen adaptation of a manga written the same year by Yoshiie Gouda (entitled, self-mockingly, perhaps, "Gouda's Philosophical Discourse: The Pneumatic Figure of a Girl").

Nozomi, the life-size plastic doll dressed as a maid (with optional costume changes), is the pampered companion of a lonely middle-aged waiter (Arata, whose movie debut in 1998 was in Hirokasu's After Life). He chats with her during dinner, takes her out for wheelchair rides, has sex with her and meticulously washes her detachable lower part. One day, the doll lurches to life, acquiring puppet-like cold-skinned movement, a heart and soul, abilities to sketch, hold memories and mimic human words, and lands a job in a video store, where she falls in love. Played with po-faced big-eyed mystified innocence by Donna (The Ring Virus, Host, Linda x 3) Bae, Nozomi is an enchanting fantasy character.

At its original 125-minute running length, the movie was dismissed by many critics as an over-long fable. Eight or more minutes were cut out for foreign markets; the effects are frustrating at the end of the movie, when Nozomi inexplicably enters and changes the lives of local lonely characters she'd met on her wandering. Her expanding role, growing heart and inevitable death become a series of fairly silly tableaux, and may have been more credible and meaningful within an extended narrative context. For the first hour, though, the switches from wry reality to magical realism are very acceptable logical nonsense.

I guess Japan's movie-goers (even more than those in the USA) require a movie to last at least two hours, to justify high ticket prices. That could explain the lengths that film producers need to go to, often working with slender plots. One side benefit of that is the necessity to employ directors who can fill time with rich details, artful lighting and exquisitely composed scenes; Hirakasu achieves all that, creating an intriguing visual essay on urban loneliness, human frailty and love's and life's substitutes. "Pretty basic philosophy" sounds dismissive, but isn't meant to be.

Cold fish

Black comedy, softcore porno, serial killers and gory horror are favoured elements in mainstream Japanese movies. Writer-director Shion Sono gave his audience their money's worth of all such macabre big-screen entertainment with 144 minutes of Cold Fish. Of its kind, its many genres, it's excellent.

An avant-garde poet and actor, Sino's first feature as a writer-director (in 1990) was Bicycle Sighs. His 2002 gory cult hit Suicide Club (aka Circle), and its 2006 sequel, Noroko's Dinner Table, brought him commercial and critical success, as well as global film festival attention.

Cold Fish is loosely based on a pair of serial killers who owned a pet shop. The film's alpha-male middle-aged extrovert madman owns a grand tropical fish store, and he matter-of-factly tells his chosen new business assistant that he's made 58 people "invisible". The younger man, a weak-willed nerdish pet fish shop-keeper, is easily trapped when the happy maniac rescues his bolshie teenage daughter from shoplifting charges.

Both men have sexy young wives with enhanced breasts and lesbian tendencies. The madman was sexually abused as a boy by his father. The daughter is a bad-mannered bitch who detests her young step-mother. Carnivorous fish are also featured, and a madly menacing hoodlum working for the aquarium boss. Various corpses are butchered methodically, by candlelight, their flesh and bones anointed with soy sauce before burning.

For two hours, the nerd is drawn further into the murderer's mayhem and mindset, and then, inevitably, the worm turns with horrific results. And any viewer who doesn't giggle and gasp, sitting spellbound by the blackly comic audacity, cannot be human.

The actors all present remarkably credible characters (even the voluptuous breast-bared wives) as psychotic misfits living in a loveless world of pain. The editing is well-paced, the camera-work exciting without being too flashy, and sound (especially rain) and music (pop and classic) effects underscore the moods tellingly. This is black comedy at its best, streaked with lots of red blood and wild-eyed scenery-chewing. Yet the only award it's collected was for best screenplay at a fantasy festival. It deserved better recognition.

Departures

Any tendency to over-laud other countries' movies arises from the commercial reality that foreigners only get to see, rent or buy a nation's exportable best products. Even Japan produces trash movies, surely. Its movies cannot all be as critically successful as Departures (Okuribito).

Its 2009 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar win gave director Yojira Takita unexpected international acclaim to offset its initially cool treatment in Japan. The subject matter - death - is a taboo topic, obliging the production team to tread tightropes. Adapting an autobiographical volume (Aoki Shinmon's Coffinman: The Journal of a Buddhist Mortician) Kundo Kojama crafted a screenplay both ironic and sensitive, comic and sad, manipulative and touching.

An unemployed orchestral cellist mistakenly applies for work at "Departures", a company he thought was a travel agency. Instead, he learns to care for the departed as an "encoffineer", providing a corpse with a symbolic public choreography of respectful washing, dressing and facial make-up, enabling the departed to go to heaven looking good and peaceful.

Lead actor Masahiro Motoki was a member of a top boy-band in the 1980s, and still sports a deliberately cute social awkwardness which didn't match my image of an over-ambitious cellist with a young wife (Ryoko Hirosue, simpering sweetly and silently sobbing in mildly irritating traditional housewifely style).

However, Motoki was totally convincing as a sensitive naif finding an outlet for a natural talent and artistic feelings in ritual ceremonies. His facial concentration and bodily grace rightly won him five Best Actor awards, his best haul since Masayuki Suo's comedy Sumo Do, Sumo Don't (1992). He'd also rated well for Takashi Miike's The Bird People in China (1998). Inevitably, there are a couple of gratuitous scenes allowing Motoki's fans to see him in non-frontal nudity, reminding me of a well-preserved younger version of Hong Kong's Alan Tam.

Director Takita got his start in the 1980s working on the "Molester" series of comic softcore pornographic movies (Japan's defunct "pink film" industry), and was previously best known for the satirical The Yen Family. He steps neatly along the cinematic tightropes, slipping gently from comic interludes to tear-jerking moments, relying on the excellent cast of extras (grieving families, corpses and the standard bath-house old-timers) to push the audience past the screenplay's incredibly long sequence of dramatically convenient coincidences. Notably, veteran Tsutomu (Tampopo) Yamazaki is a central pillar of the production as the self-taught master of funeral rites, personifying traditional Japanese surface taciturnity and deep emotions.

At the end, though, discretion is abandoned. When the encoffineer's socially-embarrassed wife returns to him (happily pregnant), his aged bath-house friend dies, and his long-lost destitute father's body turns up in a nearby port, the production releases all floodgates on its tear ducts. Tears stream, hover at nose ends, and the movie ends with a symbolic smooth rock linking three generations.

It's all too much, but it works splendidly. Just like the elaborate funeral beautification rite it honours, the movie is a visually enchanting display of graceful technique and professional TLC.

Still walking

Family, death and memories are dominant themes in the work of Japanese writer-director Kore-eda Hirokazu, multi-award-winningly-so for After Life (1998) and Nobody Knows (2004). He's gained international acclaim too for Distance (2001) and Hana (2006); his Still Walking (2008) prompted critic Roger Ebert to dub him the new Ozu of Japanese cinema, as a similar master of immaculately-observed family relationships and human behaviour.

Hirokazu dismisses such a comparison in his very informative to-camera interview for the Criterion DVD; instead he relates himself to the veteran director who also influenced Ozu (best known outside Japan for The Tokyo Story) - Mikio Ukigumo Naruse.

The Ozu comparison was inevitable. Still Walking reveals a prickly proud old local doctor and his bitter-sweet wife hosting their two surviving children's families for an annual gathering marking the accidental death of their oldest son. They bicker, cook (in brilliantly-detailed close-ups), exchange niceties, suppress emotional outbursts and grudgingly cope with the universal problems of belonging to an unlovable family.

Hirokazu once again shows his winning ways with child actors, and this film's trio are everything that Hollywood brats so often fail to be: natural, moody, coolly observant, clearly sensing their elders' social inadequacies and weaknesses. Their parents are distinctive characters; the in-laws are the nicer people to meet. As a self-confessed semi-autobiographical set of anecdotes, this film clearly sublimates the writer-director's dislike of his parents' personalities and the young man they made him become.

Each cast member, several of whom have worked for Hirokazu on other movies, present characters as nuanced as the writer's storyboard, and as finely-detailed as the director's focuses on production details. Most notably, veteran actress Kirin Kiki, as the pseudo-deferential venomous grandmother, rightly won various awards.

The director's interview includes his comment that he should have deleted the end scene, an unnecessarily poignant and happy conclusion whose pat voice-over words and symbol-packed scenes look like pretty plastic bows of platitude and pretence added to the whole movie's sincere package of home truths.

Hirokazu's next film really shunted aside the petrifying burden of being seen as Ozu reincarnate: Air Doll (2009) is a quirky delight about a blow-up model who gains a human spirit and falls in love.

Confessions

Shortlisted for the 2011 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, Japan's entry is a well-crafted tale of horror-tinged revenge. More cerebral and slower-paced, and less violent, than similar Japanese films in the revenge genre, Confessions presents a dazzling package of movie bravado.

The acting, screenplay, editing, music and cinematography frequently alienate, surprise and shock their audience. Do all the devices make it a better film than the actual Oscar-winner (a sentimentalised racial allegory from Denmark)? Yes. Could it have won? Never. Would Oscar voters applaud megalomaniac children who are cold-blooded murderers with vicious or neglectful mothers?

A widowed junior school teacher's infant daughter is killed on purpose twice by two of her pupils, on whom she will wreak horrible vengeance. She won't kill them, but eventually ensure that they kill their mothers. The stories ("confessions") of almost everyone involved are told, via flashbacks and off-screen commentaries, starting with the teacher's 30-minute detailed account of her child's death.

After their milk break, and initially unruly, the school class is told how two boys, A and B, waylaid the child and drowned her. Slowly, through finely-timed cuts, the children are seen to pay closer attention, finally panicking when told by the teacher that she's laced the two boys' drinks with HIV-infected blood (from her dead husband). A noir tale that's barely credible, it's told with gripping calmness by the lead actress, Takako Matsu.

The two boys note their formative influences and innermost wishes, while the class's quiet self-willed leading girl recounts the new young male teacher's efforts to reach out to one of the boys, who's turned into an unwashed mentally-disturbed reclusive. That boy's wimpering, doting mother blames the woman teacher for his state, but his partner in crime is sure that the teacher's HIV claim was only a scare tactic. He befriends the schoolgirl, killing time with her while he plans how to be re-united with the mother who'd abandoned him.

Loose ends in the story dangle threateningly around much of the time, most noticeably in the foolish replacement teacher's lack of knowledge of the school's involvement in a child's death. Coincidences are hard to accept, but only on reflection. During the film, visually dazzled by darkening cloud formations interspersed between artfully-composed sound, light and blood effects and aerial or hand-held shots of malicious children, an audience can only sit transfixed, waiting for explanations.

With an ending that's close to grand guignol, and a final line of dialogue that's a dramatic slap in the audience's face, the movie leaves one shattered emotionally. Disbelieving, but aware that that the original, horrific sinfulness of children has been conveyed so well, a la Lord of the Flies.

This seventh feature film from writer-director by Tetsuya Nakashima, based on a novel, prompts searches for his previous award-winners: Memories of Matsuko, Paco and the Magical Book and Kamikaze Girls. It's pleasing that the Japanese film industry sent Hollywood a film it must have known could never win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Sentimentality.

Outrage

Takeshi Kitano is a leading Japanese film and TV industry character and charismatic screen personality (as "Beat" Takeshi). The multi-talented Kitano's early film directions created a distinctive "deadpan" style of glossy, black-comic and violent portraits of yakusa gangsters and corrupt police (Violent Cop, Boiling Point, Sonatine), starring himself as a man of few words and harsh action. In 2010, after a decade of unpopular experimentation with other forms, he returned to his crime metier with Outrage, a stereotypical gangland movie with a few cinematographic flourishes.

They mostly comprise fixed or panning distance shots of lines of sleek limousines, on otherwise empty highways or parked outside gangster mansions. The opening scene is the most memorable: a long tracking shot of black-suited yakusa drivers and henchmen awaiting the emergence of their family bosses from a yakusa council meeting. Kitano's expressionless face is one among many, all silently conveying the extent and menacing power of the gangs, whose carefully structured world is as far from reality as that of fedual royalty or corporate tycoons.

Throughout the film, only one detective is seen questioning the yakusas, and he's immediately established as a paid-off associate, and an old schoolpal of Kitano's character. He has a name, as do all the gangsters, and the four families they belong to, but for a non-Japanese it is difficult to develop a clear understanding of who's who and which of them is a blood brother or son of whom. All be-suited and seriously treacherous, they can only be distinguished by the actors' facial quirks, and it isn't worth trying to know their names: they don't matter.

Kitano, who wrote, edited and directed the movie (in his usual omnipotent fashion), gave himself a central character with a surprising level of gullibility, and loyalties almost as divided as those of his yakusa rivals and henchmen. One by one, the yakusa chief arranges the slaughter of competing families, only to be slayed at the end by his own badly-treated lieutenant. In between, gangsters are stabbed with a dental drill and chopsticks, shot in a train and many limousines, machine-gunned, beheaded by a speeding rope and have many finger ends sliced off. The only outsider involved, apart from slain call girls and waiters, is an African country's ambassador tricked into turning his embassy into a casino. He survives, digging a grave for a family boss.

As that scene illustrates, this is a minimally credible movie Kitano may have made out of financial necessity. It isn't a worthy use of his old multi-talents. He's still a charismatic presence, but the light has faded.

Horrors of malformed men

"Banned for decades! The most notorious Japanese horror film EVER made!" What a grand sales tag that is, all in upper-case characters: could a movie possibly live up to it, even one called Horrors of Malformed Men?

Its director, Teruo Ishii, was a cult figure in the erotic-grotesque sub-genre of Japan's "pink" movie industry of soft porn, in which firm nubile breasts were flaunted with pseudo-aesthetic abandon. Initially an indie phenomenon, its large audiences appealed to Japan's mainstream production companies, including Toei. The studio funded Ishii's "eroduction" of a screenplay he'd co-adapted from a sensational novel.

The plot is mostly not bad enough to be laughable, but a horror movie it is not. It is a tale of a medical man imprisoned in a lunatic asylum where bare-topped young women scream. He escapes and discovers he has an unknown recently-deceased brother, whose wife has her way with him, then dies, as has another young woman. His unknown father has webbed fingers and has exiled himself to a rocky island where he's developing a paradise comprising deliberately malformed humans, including two-sexed Siamese twins joined at their back.

Daubed with much white mud, lurid make-up and contorted limbs, the malformed are portrayed by one of Japan's strangest fringe groups, Butoh performance artists. A post-War anarchic form of modern dance, influenced by contemporary homosexual culture and anti-Western feelings, Butoh (originally a term describing ballroom dancing) and its white-painted practitioners found favour in the West (and were a featured aspect of an offbeat 2008 German romantic film, Cherry Blossoms). One of the dance form's leaders jerked and jumped, leered and laughed manically in full Butoh fashion in Ishii's film, playing the demented outcast father.

The movie also incorporated a detective story, introduced as a deus ex machina at the end, thereby tying up lots of loose ends and silly plot devices, explaining them all, laboriously, to the audience and the very confused movie characters, using a series of colour filters and shadowed close-ups. The last few minutes do become almost joyously laughable, when the unintentionally son and his sister choose to die atop a fireworks storeroom, their body parts (including clasped hands) soaring above the island, calling out to their much-abused but not malformed mother.

Why was the movie banned, for four decades? Breasts (naked or knife-carved), incest, perverted surgical experimentation, lesbian caresses and cavorting maidens were not graphic, and it's somewhat cheering to learn that Japanese censors decided the film was horribly insensitive to the feelings of handicapped people.

Ever since the first recognised pink film (Flesh Market in 1962), directors working in the genre usually knew its limitations better than Ishii did this time. The genre survived industrial ups and downs and still thrives in Japan. Eventually, of course, the "pink" movie phenomenon did get around to churning out gay-themed movies too (Legend of the Big Penis: Beautiful Mystery is a 1983 movie that will have to be seen to be believed).

This movie was lead actor Teruo Yoshida's penultimate career movie. He made one the following year (1970) and only reappeared once again, for the same director, 25 years later. There may be a strange professional tale or coincidence to be discovered, because Ishii also took a long career break, being uncredited between 1979 (when he was 55 years old) and 1991, when he returned, making six more movies. He wrote, produced and directed his final movie in 2001 at the age of 77: Blind Beast v Killer Dwarf, a low-budget effort focusing on Tokyo's all-girl Asakusa Revue company and bodiless limbs.

House

Who could resist a comic horror fantasy in which schoolgirls are consumed by a haunted House? The 1977 Japanese smash hit was recently reissued in a Criterion DVD set, its informative extras including comments from director Nobuhiko Obayashi (now 72 and working on his 43rd film). House was his first feature-length work, and its wildly experimental style helped win him the Blue Ribbon Best New Director award the following year.

The DVD's 45-minute set of subtitled, well-edited interviews mixes interesting production notes from Obayashi, his screenplay writer Chiho Katsura, and his daughter Chigumi, who provided her father with the movie's original story ideas when she was a 12-year-old.

Her commercial-making father had been asked by the Toho studio to write a Jaws-style film. His daughter told him she'd enjoy seeing a house that consumed schoolgirls, suggesting such lethal weapons as a grandfather clock, piano, well, futons and mirrors. Obayashi chose to create a standard Japanese group of seven (a practice in reality as well as in Disney and The Seven Samurai), while Katsura's development of the idea was inspired by a Walter de La Mare short story. Other influences included the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (Obayashi's home city) and grieving post-Pacific War lovers.

Many factors illustrate the creators' determination to make a new type of movie, one designed to please young audiences and not high-brow critics, one that would look and sound uniquely fresh, be exciting cinema to watch and hear. Most amazing, Toho let Obayashi keep his English-language title, after a two-year media campaign had transformed it into a radio production, musical album, graphic magazine and marketing stunt. When none of the studio's own contract directors would touch the populist project, it was finally given to Obayashi himself, to be made in Toho studios.

The story was simple: young Gorgeous, distressed by her widower father's intention to marry a beautiful woman, invites herself and six schoolfriends to stay at the Western-style country house of an aunt she'd only seen once before. A snow-white blue-eyed Persian cat arrives at her home, at the same time as her aunt's written invitation. The girl, the cat and her friends (epitomising their given names of Fantasy, Kung Fu, Mac (for Stomach), Melody, Prof and Sweet) reach the house, are welcomed by the love-lorn cat-loving wheelchaired aunt, and then disappear one by one in grisly (and bizarrely comic) ways.

Every shot and frame is innovative (Obayashi acknowledging that his team mischievously filmed typically artistic scenes in ways that would most infuriate directors such as Ozu and Kurasawa). Self-conscious alienation effects pop up constantly, with inappropriately raucous pop music, luridly colourful painted backdrops and gaudy set props, a dancing skeleton, delicate compositions to accompany the cannibalistic piano, fast jump cuts, glossy imagery, animation and cartoon effects. The three lead actresses are credibly beautiful and bewitched, while the six novice teenage actresses - models the director had worked with on commercials - sport airs of joyous fun and terror.

Audacious and joyful itself, the movie is memorably entertaining cinematic art.

[One similarly OTT fantasy that now needs re-viewing is the wonderfully exuberant Thai homage of 2000 to cowboy movies and romances, Wisit Sasanatieng's Tears of the Black Tiger. Like Obayashi's movie, it belongs in a genre of its own: pastiches to celebrate the art of cinema.]

Tokyo story

Celebrated Japanese auteur Tasujiro Ozu was reportedly inspired by Leo McCarey's melodramatic Make Way For Tomorrow (1937) to create Tokyo Story in 1953. Seeing the older film for the first time was a compelling reason to watch the Japanese equivalent (also re-issued on DVD by Criterion).

Both are B&W, stagy and very dependent on the skills of the ensemble casts. They are totally different in style, story line and pace, of course. One is derived from Broadway, the other builds on the traditions of Kabuki and Noh theatre. The movies' themes are the same: ageing parents and generation gaps, family neglect and youthful selfishness. But where McCarey plumped for melodrama, Ozu presents subtler scenes. The major problem is his old-fashioned Japanese approach: he takes twice as long to tell his story.

Written with Kogo Noda (the co-writer for 13 out of Ozu's 15 post-War films), the movie watches a couple in their late 60s travel from a seaside town to Tokyo for the first time, to visit a son, daughter and the widow of their second son. He'd died in the Pacific War, and it's remarkable how the movie never refers nationalistically to the war and American occupation. I sensed a level of self-censorship; no character expresses any post-War bitterness. (There's even an odd, to Western eyes, product placement for Rinso washing powder.)

Much of the time in the first hour, the family members express little except standard Japanese conversational politenesses and male grunts. Plot developments occur off-screen and are referred to as past or future events. This is apparently an Ozu trait, as are the sudden cuts to details in stark townscapes (especially children walking, smokestacks and bare skies) with musical accompaniment. The most notice trait is constant usage of low-level camera positions.

This tatami-level cinematic viewpoint can be wearisome when it only shows doorways, corridors and women criss-crossing kitchens. In Western cinema, other than in Welles' truly ground-breaking sets, the device was usually a method for showing (and showing off to) audiences that a movie had been filmed in real locations with ceilings and natural lighting. In the Japanese context of households, designed for kneeling and squatting, the low-level angle does make sense. It also heightens the effect of close-up facial shots during reveries and conversations (when Ozu's characters are usually seen speaking direct to camera).

Roger Ebert commented memorably that in this movie Ozu had allowed his camera one tracking shot, which was much more than he usually did. The camera follows the old couple for a minute as they walk along an undifferentiated piece of pavement. They've decided to leave Tokyo, and it is a turning point in the scenario, but is it really so crucial that its audience needs to have significance emphasised?

The staginess in Ozu's plotting is clear from the frequent front-of-centre fixed camera position. Initially alienating, the formula captured my attention in the second hour, when the characters begin to draw back the curtains of their self-consciously two-dimensional lives. Scene by scene, one watches a cinematic version of an animated slide show.

The pace moves from a slow stroll to an almost sprightly amble while the mother dies and her family gathers again in their parents' home town. The widowed daughter-in-law and single younger daughter are the most dutiful and loving members of the younger generation, but the screenplay only hints at the obvious conclusion: children who marry inevitably make their own lives, create their own families, and will also end up alone.

Matter-of-factual and docu-dramatic, the film is rated by many critics to be Ozu's masterpiece and an all-time great. Not in my eyes and mind, which are not looking forward eagerly to watching other Ozus.

Tokyo!

An international bunch of producers chose three top indie directors to create short films set in Tokyo! Such compendiums are the movie equivalent of a collection of short stories by different writers. In theory, they serve to display the ideas and techniques of different artists. In practice, it's hard to find logical reasons for doing so.

Michel Gondry is a French musician who had triumphs in the US (Human Nature, Eternal Sunshine, Be Kind Rewind) following a top-rated career there making commercials. Leos Carax is also French, had two early successes (Boy Meets Girl, Bad Blood) and two big flops (Lovers on the Bridge, Pola X). Joon-ho Bong (Korean) was best-known for Host (until he made Mother in 2009).

Why them? Presumably because they had timely spaces in their work schedules. They do not share cinematic styles and their short films have no clear thematic approach (as there were in metropolitan movie anthologies set in NYC and Paris).

Gondry co-adapted a tale originally set in New York, showing how an indie film director's girlfriend finds purpose in life by turning into a wooden chair. Cute idea = cute title: Interior Design. Carax imagined a one-eyed Jesus-like freak emerging murderously from the city's sewers. Gross idea = gross title: Merde. Bong went into the house and mind of an urban recluse (with its own modern Japanese nomenclature, hikikomori) who re-joins the world after 11 years when he makes contact with his pizza delivery girl during an earth tremor (Shaking Tokyo).

It's possible, but pointless, to identify motifs such as loneliness, self-awareness, urban isolation and pressure. They appear dominant, almost malevolent forces in the vast organised chaos of Tokyo, in its neat narrow lanes and cramped living spaces, its human anthill of polite non-connecting citizens. Admirably, the trio of directors did take their audiences into the city's back streets, away from the cliche-ed urban images, most effectively in Bong's mildly futuristic vision of a Tokyo where everyone's a recluse and pizzas are delivered by robots.

They record moments that help an outsider recall or imagine Japanese quirks, good and bad from origami packaging artistry to apartment storage rituals, racist fears to male chauvinism. But they do not add up to an overview of a city that warrants an exclamatory title.

Handsome suit

It's been reported that the 2008 hit Japanese comedy, The Handsome Suit, closely resembles a South Korean movie in which a fat woman becomes svelte. Well, what's original under any sun, Hollywood's or Japan's?

In this frothy version of a cliched plot line, a self-consciously ugly and unhappy Osakan diner cook is transformed by a body suit into a fashion world icon of handsomeness. Shrek meets The Mask, so recognisably in terms of plot strands and moral conclusions that no one in Hollywood, least of all Jim Carrey, will think of purchasing the rights of remaking it.

From a non-Japanese viewpoint, the movie has problems of credibility. The "beautiful" diner assistant the cook loves has a scrawny face, uneven teeth and possible anorexia. The "handsome" model into which the cook is transformed has a wrinkled weak chin, floppy long hair, and facial, physical and vocal traits even his best friends might think a bit too camp.

Ironically, "ugly" actors always need to gain audience acceptance by conveying character better than non-uglies. Happily, comic dramatic brilliance is also provided by the actors portraying the obese middle-aged cook and the equally chubby waitress who replaces the loved one who rejected him. They are a fun-filled giggly pair who are fun to watch.

A small squad of thinly-etched supporting actors have physical distinctions reminiscent of any Brit comic movie set in Notting Hill. All of them are garbed in retro clothing items chosen by a director and/or set designer who clearly adore bold bright colours. Such dabs of blatant blue, glaring greens and ravishing reds also decorate the indoor and outdoor sets. Together with the soundtrack collection of late 20th-Century pop, they embellish the movie's deliberately old-fashioned and simple stylishness. I suspect non-Japanese will miss comic echoes in many of the period references.