The Great Yôkai War

Monster Mash

The Great Yôkai War
aka Yôkai daisensô
Japan 2005
Directed by Takashi Miike
Shochiku Blu Ray Zone B
From Arrow’s Yōkai Monster Collection Blu Ray set

Once again, the Yôkai monsters are back... along with a whole host of new Yôkai (literally hundreds or possibly thousands in the scenes where they gather for ‘the final battle’ of the movie). This time around, however, they are set in contemporary times and the great and extremely prolific director Takashi Miike is setting the pace (I believe he’s just made a sequel to this movie last year) with The Great Yôkai War.

Now, Miike can be a bit hit and miss and the amount of visual information thrown at the audience in this one is huge and, to my western eyes, mostly bewildering. However, I believe the incredibly complicated story is revealed, in the end, to be a really simple tale after all, with a tsunami of energetic set dressing, so to speak. The plot involves a young boy who is chosen, in his village’s traditional annual festival, to be that year’s token Kirin Rider... who is supposed to retrieve a sword from Goblin Mountain to keep the ‘worked at’ peace every year. However, a very nasty demon who is enslaving many of the Yôkai and who is the living spirit of the ‘resentment humanity has earned’ by throwing out old things they think no longer useful, is leading a hate filled invasion of the world of humans and it’s up to the young, new Kirin Rider, along with some of his new Yôkai allies, to try and stop all of Tokyo (just for starters) from being destroyed.

Okay, so there are various twists on the plot dressing, such as a friendly rat creature and the return of various early Yôkai such as the snake necked lady Rokurokubi and the umbrella demon Karakasa Obake (with his long dangly tongue), not to mention the Kappa from Spook Warfare (reviewed here)... and also a gruesome process where the evil demons melt down the good Yôkai and merge them with resentful objects to transform them into evil, metal creatures... it all gets a bit Tetsuo, to be honest.

There’s also the bold colours that Miike can sometimes work with and the colour palette on this one tends to run to pinky mauves, reds and blues (other than a few shots of nature, I don’t remember seeing too much green in this one). Ditto for the sometimes striking frame compositions although, it all gets a bit lost here because there is just so much thrown at the screen, it seems to me. And a technique where he edits out many frames at a time to make these flash edits of someone, but they are still rooted in the same spot rather than walking away or to the camera, which kind of highlights the facial expressions as an overload of information on the part of the main protagonist. Don’t remember seeing that done before.

This is said by many to be a remake of Spook Warfare but I think that, although it shares some basic themes, such as the idea of two factions of Yôkai in conflict, it mostly does it’s own thing in this one. Even when one takes into account that the fragmentary, non-linear nature of some of the set up and first of the mini epilogues to the action could be seen as a distortion of the general plot (yeah, okay, I got there in the end but my brain had to wake up to decode this and try to make sense of it for a while).

The CGI effects of the evil demon’s metal monsters is interesting here because, although I can only assume this is all CGI, the monsters themselves look almost a throwback to the stop motion animation techniques pioneered by Willis O’Brien back in the 1920s/30s and, especially, to the ‘Superdynamation’ cinematic realms of Ray Harryhausen. Now, aping this technique with more modern methods isn’t anything unusual, I’ve seen this done before in films such as Blood - The Last Vampire (reviewed here) but it’s still nice to see this kind of homage/tribute to the special effects techniques of yesteryear and it’s far less dull than what might have been put up on the screen.

Other nice things on show here are an ‘on screen’ tribute to Shigeru Mizuki, who brought the Yôkai back to popular public consciousness in the 1960s with his manga based on the tales he heard from generations back and, indeed, he also has a small cameo in the film as a demon king. When the main lead goes to research a cute Yôkai that befriends him, he travels to the real life Mizuki Museum to get the information on the creature. There’s also a cool moment in the film when a giant demon-like thing flies through the sky on its way to destroy Tokyo and one of the people at ground level exclaims “Ah, it’s only Gamera.”, which did make me smile. I was also pleased to see the umbrella demon being used to float/fly another demon, as it was similarly utilised in Spook Warfare.

Some bits did fall flat for me though... 

 The use of an advertising jingle used to herald the fact that the evil demon is accidentally merging with an Azuki Bean which, given that “Azuki beans grow in love and peace!” as we are sung to, means his plans are scuppered. Similarly, an action sequence involving the main protagonists accidentally finding themselves riding on the wings of a jet plane, only for the screen to suddenly freeze with the caption “Don’t try this at home kids!” seemed a little pretentious and too much like a nod and a wink to an audience which might not, by this point, have found themselves too invested in the story line.

And that’s all I’ve really got to say on this one. I love Miike but The Great Yôkai War is not one of his films I could watch over and over again. There’s a lot of rich, visual, surrealistic creations on screen (and the reveal of the Rokurokubi is perfect) but the ‘throw everything in at once’ nature of the dense visuals means you are always just trying to take everything in to the point where, it has to be said, it becomes a bit of a dulled down experience. Still, it’s nice to see some of these monsters back and I certainly want to see what he’s done in the new one... although whether it will wash up on these shores is another matter.