Being so inundated with Hollywood blockbusters for so long, it’s nice to see how other movie industries go about it—what you find is often eminently familiar in their storytelling and reliance on special effects, but in a way that makes their idiosyncratic approaches and cultural differences all the more noticeable. The Great Yokai War is ostensibly a big budget remake of previous subject Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare, but in effect the films are barely connected—instead, it takes Japan’s beloved spirits and monsters and puts them in a big special effects extravaganza and a children’s adventure story with your standard “learning to be brave” character arc for the pre-adolescent hero. An even more important difference is that unlike Daiei’s Yokai trilogy, this is set in the modern day and actually grapples with some of the spiritual underpinnings of yokai myths as they apply to a current consumerist culture—all in the name of broad action and comedy, mind you, but it’s still an angle on yokai that I haven’t seen in a movie.
The movie is directed by Takashi Miike, who gained worldwide notoriety for disturbing and violent films like Ichi the Killer and Audition, but at some point around the time of this movie’s release became someone who will direct any and all projects, making big budget kids movies and adaptations of anime like Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure and video games like Ace Attorney and Yakuza alongside his signature stylized action thrillers, oftentimes in the same year. Seriously, he was directing at least two or three movies a year for most of the past two decades, creating one of the most impenetrable filmographies of any noteworthy director. No wonder he only got around to directing a sequel to this movie last year.
Miike brings style to The Great Yokai War as well, but saves his exaggerated editing and fourth-wall breaking ideas for specific moments, not really overdoing it. It begins early: the opening of the film flits between an apocalyptic cityscape drenched in blood crimson, a down-to-earth slice of life that could be mistaken for an indie drama about growing up (including the narration “It had been six months since my parents’ divorce…”), and a bizarre horror moment of a human-faced calf prophesying doom. These are tones that seemingly clash, but they are all present in the rest of the movie, with high-flying fight scenes and goofy comedy (and I mean Looney Tunes-style gags, such as text appearing on screen saying “Kids, don’t try this at home!”) as well—it’s a thick stew.
The plot follows Tadashi, a boy who has moved to a small rural town with his mother and his seemingly senile grandfather after his parents’ divorce (he has regular phone conversations with his older sister, still living in Tokyo) and faces bullying from kids who belittle his urban disconnect from the old legends. After attending a festival where he is chosen as the “Kirin Rider” by paraders dressed as mythical creatures (or maybe not so mythical), Tadashi is told the legend of the original Kirin Rider who brokered a deal with the local goblins that allowed them and humans to co-exist peacefully and kept his magic sword hidden in a local mountain. This is all part of plan by a group of yokai (including a kappa and a river princess who has a history of saving humans from drowning) to recruit him into helping fight off a grave threat to the entire country: an army of metal monstrosities created by forcibly combining yokai with scrap metal and abandoned appliances, orchestrated by the villainous Yasunori Katō and his beehive-sporting sidekick Agi, a yokai herself. Alongside the army of metal monsters (created using a pretty horrific process involving melting yokai in a supernatural liquid, some classic Miike horror imagery in this movie for children), he has summoned a vengeful spirit with the plan of invading Tokyo and covering it with eternal darkness.
Like the previous yokai movies, this one does not stop to explain the yokai and their individual natures to the audience—it assumes familiarity with them, as it probably should considering that these are characters who have appeared in popular myths for centuries. Many are given moments to do their shtick, including old favourites like the long-necked woman and the faceless ghost, and the special effects and make-up do well by them. The yokai are primarily played for comedy, and most of them are hilariously indifferent to the actual plot—the titular great yokai war only happens because most of them think it’s a big party. Oddly enough, the main antagonist is also an established character, but of a more recent vintage: Yasunori Katō originates from a series of historical fantasy novels by Hiroshi Aramata (who also worked on the script of this), where he was an ageless sorcerer who has a grudge against the city of Tokyo in particular (in those stories he is specifically out for revenge against the imperial line of Japan, but that was not carried over into this film.) The character had appeared in multiple films before this, most prominently in Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis, a film directed by Ultraman/Ultraseven/Ultra Q The Movie director Akio Jissoji—his portrayal in that movie also served as the visual inspiration for Street Fighter’s M. Bison. Sidebar over, but this ain’t the last sidebar, let me tell you.
There’s a stark contrast shown between the world of the yokai, the same thickets and empty paths along the mountain seen in the Daiei movies and portrayed with just as much eerie charm here, and the heavy industrial aesthetics of the metal monsters (called kikai), culminating with their giant sentient fortress with factories and spewing smokestacks on its back (it is mistaken for Gamera by some Tokyo vagrants.) This can even be seen in the choice of special effects: the yokai are portrayed with traditional costumes, make-up effects, and puppetry (and charmingly low-rent puppetry, too—the movie’s cute character, a robe-wearing weasel, is basically a sock puppet, but that one that gets a surprising amount of violence enacted upon it), while the kikai are all gloriously dated mid-two-thousands CGI—thankfully, while those effects certainly look their age, it is at least made up for by their inventive visual design, each one a rusted, skull-embroidered piece of abstract industrial art, everyday tools connected with pipes and jagged teeth. Very heavy metal album cover! While the effects have more money behind them and are more plentiful, there is still the same sense of joy that pervaded the older yokai films as they crammed in as many creature costumes on-screen at once, taken to its logical modern extreme here, with seemingly thousands of yokai showing up in the film’s climax.
The connections between the old yokai and these new monstrosities are the central thematic tie of the film: the kikai and the angry spirit are the result of the resentment felt by the countless abandoned objects towards humanity. That form of animism was always present in the traditional spirituality in Japan, and it’s what leads to creatures such as the umbrella ghost kasa-obake (a major player in the older Yokai movies, but here only a bit part—although we do get a direct visual shout-out to Spook Warfare when it appears floating together with the same priest-goblin), and so it feels only natural to wonder how our wasteful consumer culture, constantly producing disposable products, would interact that idea of the spirit world. While the Daiei movies focused on either karmic retribution against the corrupt, or (in the case Spook Warfare) traditional Japanese myths warding off foreign invaders, this is one goes in the direction of traditional beliefs against the side effects of modern convenience, urban society inadvertently turning the supernatural against them, with Katō regarding all of humanity with pure contempt. It is a point made that only children like Tadashi can see the yokai, although a writer seeking to publish a book about them (who, as we learn, was also saved by the river princess in his youth) is able to see them once he starts drinking some product placement cans of Kirin beer.
Of course, while there’s plenty of evidence that humanity kinda deserves it, the film ultimately argues against holding that kind of grudge, and despite its title, even against the concept of war. As we learn, the river princess was once an abandoned effigy who Katō attempted to recruit to his cause centuries earlier, but she refused—even though she says she “hates humans” for what they did to her, she feels that giving in to that hate would only make her like them. Ouch, burn on us! Meanwhile, the villain is so devoted to the concept of pure malice that he even kills his sidekick because she loves him too much (and is ultimately undone by love and goodness literally polluting his vengeance.) This theme, while certainly not rare among kids entertainment in general, seems to come directly from another major inspiration: manga author Shigeru Mizuki, whose comics depicting yokai (particularly the popular Gegege No Kitarō) were almost certainly what the Daiei movies were capitalizing on in the first place. Mizuki isn’t just an influence on this movie, though: he was a consultant, his comics are directly referenced (one of the yokai criticizes another for not living up to its heroic portrayal in Kitarō), there are scenes where characters visit his museum in Sakaiminato…and, oh yeah, he himself appears as a head in a box to summarize the movie’s anti-war message at the end.
The ending is a little strange—Tadashi and the writer sit around the devastated streets of Tokyo, a reference to the post-apocalyptic scene from the beginning of the movie, having a pretty mundane conversation (the aftereffects of such a catastrophe, or even how it affected anyone else, is not divulged), and then we flash forward to the future, where an adult Tadashi lives a normal family life in his grandfather’s home and, as established, can no longer see his yokai friends trying to get his attention. Katō appears again to tease a sequel that, again, took sixteen years to release. Is this meant to show that the cycle will continue? That seems awfully cynical for a movie like this, but maybe that’s the Miike touch asserting itself right at the end—you could also see hints of a mean streak throughout the movie, including in the characterization of the yokai.
For something that is ultimately an adventure-comedy for general audiences—still filled with stylized violence and horror imagery, mind you—this is a surprisingly dense movie (I mean, it is two hours long.) The sheer amount of specific Japanese cultural history just used as set dressing is staggering, and it doesn’t even stop to let you know about most of it. To be honest, I appreciate that, just like how I appreciate how it attempts to take these old stories and contrast them with modern concerns, all while keeping the same sense of goofy fun spookiness the yokai always exuded. While this walks and talks like a big movie, there’s definitely an individual spirit to it.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 