Film
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The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013)
One day, while gathering bamboo stalks in the forest, a farmer is amazed to find a mysterious sprout that grows incredibly fast right before his eyes. The plant flowers and opens to reveal a tiny little girl inside of the flower, whom the farmer believes was sent from heaven for him to take care of, so he takes the tiny girl home with him. Once home, the farmer’s wife holds the little forest nymph and she turns into a baby, which the couple care for. They, with the help of the neighborhood children, name her Princess Takenoko (“Little Bamboo”). Their baby grows fast, and before they know it, she is…
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Tokyo Story (1953)
In Tokyo Story, an aging couple take a trip from their city of Onomichi to Tokyo to visit their adult children and grandchildren. The movie opens with scenes of every day life in Onomichi: ships passing, children walking to school, and a train chugging along at the base of the mountains. In the Hirayama house, the aging couple are getting ready for a trip to visit their two oldest children, Kōichi who is a physician, Shige who is a hairdresser, and their widowed daughter-in-law, Noriko, who was married to their middle son, Shōji. Their youngest daughter, a teacher named Kyōko, lives with them and helps them get ready. The opening scenes…
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Ocean Waves (1993)
Ocean Waves is a coming of age tale about a student named Rikako Muto who transfers to a new high school. Rikako is talented in academics and sport, but comes off as arrogant to many of the students at her new school. However one of her classmates, Taku, thinks that Rikako is unhappy after leaving Tokyo. Taku gets entangled in Rikako’s life after Taku lends her ¥60,000, which she fails to promptly repay. When Taku gets a phone call from Rikako’s friend Yumi, who is stressed because Rikako tricked Yumi into getting a plane ticket (which was paid for with Taku’s money) for a concert when the real destination was…
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Ran (1985)
Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (乱, meaning “chaos” in Japanese), an epic film inspired by Shakespeare’s King Lear, tells the story of an elderly warlord, Lord Hidetora Ichimonji (Tatsuya Nakadai), who decides to retire and give his empire to his three sons: the eldest, Taro (Akira Terao), who is to rule, his second son Jiro (Jinpachi Nezu), and his third Saburo (Daisuke Ryu). Hidetora’s announcement of this takes place in the opening scene on a idyllic day in the mountains with his sons, his men, lords from neighboring lands, and the fool. Hidetora envisions that his sons will rule as a strong unit, giving an example of three arrows and how they…
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From Up On Poppy Hill (2011)
When Umi Matsuzaki (Masami Nagasawa), a girl living in a boarding house that was once a hospital, meets a member of their school’s newspaper club, Shun Kazama (Junichi Okada), in their mutual effort to clean up the school clubhouse, they form a bond and begin to unravel their mysterious past. Set in Yokohama, Japan in 1963, this is a story of determination, friendship, and family. From Up on Poppy Hill was directed by Gorō Miyazaki (also known for directing Tales from Earthsea and Earwig and The Witch), with screenplay written by Hayao Miyazaki (who also wrote and directed Laputa: Castle in the Sky, My Neighbor Totoro, and Kiki’s Delivery Service, among others) and…
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Arrietty (2010)
Arrietty, Arrietty the Borrower (JP) or The Secret World of Arrietty (US) is a Studio Ghibli animation about Arrietty, a tiny girl who befriends a human boy, Sho. Arrietty and her tiny family live under the floors of Sho’s house and borrow little things that go unnoticed from the “human beans” who live above them, however they must keep themselves out of human sight in order to survive. The story is based on the book The Borrowers by Mary Norton with screenplay by Hayao Miyazaki and Keiko Niwa. The animation was directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi. Consistent with Studio Ghibli, this is a beautifully animated film with a lovely story, and it is the…
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Exit 8 (2026)
Liminal spaces, often empty, sterile, fluorescent-lit rooms and hallways, represent places of in-between, of transition, or on the threshold of one state of being to another, and seem to be a growing theme in movies, especially with the recent A24 release Backrooms (2026) which solely focuses on these places. Increasingly, viewers want to take a deep look into these spaces and process the eeriness. Often, these are rooms or hallways that we pass through quickly, without giving them much thought, but when the Lost Man (played by Kazunari Ninomiya, known from 2006’s Letters from Iwo Jima) gets stuck in a subway station, he realizes he must take a closer look…
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Seven Samurai (1954)
Often hailed as one of the greatest films of all time, Seven Samurai (七人の侍, Shichinin no Samurai) is writer and director Akira Kurosawa’s tale of a village aimed to defend themselves from marauding bandits. Based on an account from the Edo period of samurai defending a farming village from bandits, Seven Samurai takes place in a mountain village of farmers in the year 1586. When farmers overhear a gang planning to raid their village once their crops are ready, they take the matter to the village elder, Gisaku, who suggests hiring samurai who will take food as payment. Thus begins their quest to find seven samurai who can protect their village.…
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Drive My Car (2021)
After Yūsuke Kafuku’s wife dies, he must navigate his way through a world without her. The movie starts two years prior to this, where we are introduced to the couple in the opening scene of Drive My Car, where actor and director Yūsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and his wife Oto (Reika Kirishima), a screenwriter who brainstorms story ideas with her husband during the afterglow of sex. At this time in his life, Yūsuke performs in a multilingual theater production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and the film switches between scenes in the play and the complications building in Yūsuke’s real life, touching on parallels between the two. Two years later,…
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Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989)
When a young witch leaves home on a clear night with a full moon, as is customary for witches, she and her cat Jiji start a new life and find new possibilities in the city of Koriko, where Kiki starts a flying delivery service as she becomes independent. This delightful movie, created by Studio Ghibli (My Neighbor Totoro, The Tale of The Princess Kaguya, Spirited Away, When Marnie Was There, Grave of the Fireflies, Princess Mononoke, Howl’s Moving Castle, and more), is the fourth film in my year of watching 50 Japanese movies. Kiki’s Delivery Service (originally titled Majo no takkyûbin) was produced and directed by Hayao Miyazaki and based on the novel Kiki’s…
