Shunji Iwai’s White Films – Fantasia International Film Festival

The Criterion Collection, a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films presents Shunji Iwai’s White Films – Love Letter, April Story and hana & alice.

Few filmmakers capture the wonder and angst of young adulthood like Japanese writer-director Shunji Iwai. With the hazy, sentimental lens of his regular cinematographer Noboru Shinoda, Iwai’s early feature films explore pivotal moments in teenage life through the mundane challenges of the everyday. Audiences quickly embraced Iwai’s treatment of grief and love with his smash debut Love Letter, about a woman rediscovering her late fiancé through letters exchanged with his former classmate. Linked by their cold introductions, Iwai and Shinoda’s subsequent films – 1998’s April Story, about a shy girl’s move to university, and 2004’s romantic con-job hana & alice – trace the changing times as much as the changing hearts of their characters, and collapse style and substance into lyrical poetry. These “White Films” express Shunji Iwai’s unique view on young love and loneliness and exemplify the dreamy landscapes he nostalgically maps in his films.

SPECIAL EDITION COLLECTORS’ SET FEATURES:

• 4K digital restorations, approved by filmmaker Shunji Iwai, with new 5.1 surround soundtrack mix presented in DTS-HD Master Audio
• Fantasia International Film Festival 2020 live-streamed tribute, masterclass, and Career Achievement Award with Shunji Iwai, hosted by Ariel Esteban Cayer
• Animated storyboards for Love Letter
• Music videos directed by Iwai and featuring April Story star and pop singer Takako Matsu
• Filming of H&A, an 80-minute behind-the-scenes feature on the making of hana & alice
• Four short films featuring Hana and Alice
• Theatrical trailers and TV spots
• New English subtitle translations
• PLUS: Essays by Japanese film scholar David Desser and critics Grady Hendrix and Hayley Scanlon

Office Royale (Kazuaki Seki, 2021) – Fantasia International Film Festival 2021

THE OL BATTLE ROYALE BEGINS!

Naoko Tanaka (Mei Nagano) is a 26 year-old office lady – a secretarial and clerical worker in a large Japanese company. Her job at Mitsufuji is reliable, the atmosphere is laid-back, and she has some friendly colleagues, but the fires of war burn brightly beneath the veneer of the office’s calm banality. Cliques of office ladies fight for departmental supremacy like sneering gangsters and posturing delinquents. These warring clans battle daily until a new employee arrives, Ran Hojo (Alice Hirose), armed with the strength and charisma of a manga hero to become the company’s top office lady and unite its competing factions. An unlikely friendship between Naoko and Ran is found, but what will happen to them and their company when powerful OL gangs from other companies arrive to test their honor and resolve? Can Ran, Naoko, and the office ladies of Mitsufuji survive the onslaught?

Director Kazuaki Seki’s debut feature is a hilarious, uproarious, action-packed send-up of workplace pettiness and office territorialism, pitting mild-mannered, pink-collar workers in vicious duels over coffee breaks and alongside photocopiers, all under the oblivious noses of their male superiors. Comedian Bakarhythm’s screenplay riffs on the conventions of Japanese comics with a witty meta-commentary and a furiously paced series of fights. Setting superhero grandeur in an unremarkable context, Office Royale is a hysterically energetic satire and a grandiloquent action spectacle.

Special Edition Contents:

• High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentation
• Original DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 audio
• Optional newly translated English subtitles on both films
• Introduction by historian and critic Kim Newman
• Yankees, Yakuza, and Making Copies, interview with director Kazuaki Seki
• Heroic OL Diary, interview with screenwriter Bakarhythm
• One-Punch Lady, interview with actress Mei Nagano
• Ran’s House, interview with actress Alice Hirose
• Press conference interviews with the cast
• Behind-the-scenes footage
• Deleted scenes
• Theatrical trailers
• Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Ian McEwan

Mad God (Phil Tippett, 2021) – Fantasia International Film Festival 2021

READY YOUR EYES. READY YOUR SOULS. PREPARE TO MEET YOUR MAKER.

Follow the Assassin, Mad God’s silent soldier, on his mysterious mission through Miltonesque worlds filled with grotesque monsters, mad scientists, and savage war pigs. This darkly surreal realm where nightmares roam free is forged from the subconscious mind of legendary visual effects and stop-motion craftsman Phill Tippett (contributor to the original Star Wars trilogy, Robocop, Jurassic Park, and Battleship Troppers). Commenced over thirty years ago and later resurrected at the behest of animators at Tippett’s Berkeley studio, this ambitious personal project employed hundreds of puppets, dozens of environments, and a crew of more than 60 artists who painstakingly animated every set, creature, and effigy in this macabre masterpiece.

Each element of Mad God is independently created and hand-crafted from its creator’s heart. At times, that heart bursts with love for its craft, while at other times it is morbidly gruesome, punctured and left bleeding. Altogether, Mad God is a testament to the power of creative grit and an homage to the timeless art of stop motion animation.

Limited Edition Contents:

• High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentation
• Original DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 audio
• Introduction by filmmaker Guillermo del Toro
• Audio commentary by filmmaker Phil Tippett and special effects artist Dan Martin
• Fantasia International Film Festival 2020 live-streamed tribute, masterclass, and Lifetime Achievement Award with Phil Tippett, hosted by Rupert Bottenberg
• Phil Tippett: Mad Dreams and Monsters, Alexandre Poncet and Gilles Penso’s 2019 documentary on the life and work of Phil Tippett
• Worse Than the Demon, a short film by Phil Tippett’s daughter, Maya Tippett, on the making of Mad God
• Dammit Phil, You Had One Job!, Phil Tippett on his infamous meme
• Nightmare Music, new interview with composer Dan Wool on the music of Mad God
• Trailer
• Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Matt Frank
• Double-sided fold-out poster
• Illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Sam Ashurst and a gallery of exclusive production writing and artwork by filmmaker Phil Tippett

My Fantasia Top Ten Shorts!

Watching the 2021 Fantasia International Film Festival’s packed selection of short films was a major priority for MMC! and nearly 150 short films got screened over the Festival’s 21 day run. And while there were some really fun, creative, and moving short films programmed at this year’s FIFF, only ten could make this list of MMC!’s absolute favourites!

And here they are! Right now!

Vanille (Guillaume Lorin, 2020)

Conceived as a half-hour TV special, Guillaume Lorin’s animated adventure concerns Vanille, a nine-year-old Parisian girl with hair issues sent to visit her aunt in Guadaloupe. There, she embarks on a magical adventure involving a hair-stealing spirit, a half-boy/half-shrub companion, and a mysterious flower. Lorin’s film is nimble and playful throughout, full of movement and expression, and it is wonderfully specific in how it draws on the director’s childhood in Guadeloupe, celebrating its natural beauty and Creole heritage. While strongly representing the art style of European bande dessinées, Vanille brings real Studio Ghibli vibes by capturing the movement and wonder of Hayao Miyazaki and the quirk and caricature of Isao Takahata. The incorporation of photographic backgrounds into animated work often feels conspicuously dissonant, but Lorin makes it feel eminently natural here, deepening the short’s connection to its tropical setting. Someone bring me a Vanille series now!

My Fantasia Top Twelve Features!

The 2021 Fantasia International Film Festival is now in the books. Online platforms have been accessed, movies have been screened, and awards have been handed out. MMC! is so grateful for the opportunity to have covered this year’s hybrid version. Thanks to all of those that made Fantasia happen! Jusqu’à l’année prochaine!

With that said, lets get on to the good stuff — counting down MMC!’s top ten twelve favourite feature films!

Mad God (Phil Tippett, 2021)

MMC!’s favourite film at Fantasia proved to be the favourite film of many others, as Phil Tippett’s Mad God took home the audience prizes for Best Animated Feature and Most Groundbreaking Film. Tippett’s special effects sorcery has been seen in the original Star Wars trilogy, Robocop, Jurassic Park, and Starship Troopers, and Fantasia celebrated Tippett with a Lifetime Achievement Award and the North American Premiere of Mad God, Tippett’s highly personal masterwork thirty years in the making. This stop motion opus observes a masked figure (equal parts steampunk plague doctor and World War One trench soldier) lowered in a suspended container into a nightmare landscape of industrial horrors and misshapen monstrosities. Tippett’s central character, the “Assassin,” descends from horrifying world to horrifying world in a Dante-esque tour of mankind’s compulsions and degradations made real. The Assassin’s goal is unclear and so Mad God functions as more of an experiential film than a classical narrative, resembling something like a videogame walkthrough if Hieronymus Bosch worked today as a game designer. The variety and complexity of Tippett’s worlds are truly jaw-dropping and Mad God makes the most of its rare moments of live action performance, such as a cutscene featuring Alex Cox playing a fingernail-enhanced mad scientist. Mad God’s abundance of grotesquerie will surely make it an acquired taste, but it is nevertheless a crowning achievement for Tippett on par with the work of Ladislas Starevich, Jan Švankmajer, and the Quay Brothers.

MMC! Double Feature #39: Budget Christopher Nolan at Fantasia

We all love Christopher Nolan, right? With his high concept structures, embedded narratives, elliptical storytelling, and problematized causalities and memory projects, what’s not to love? If your answer is massive budgets and less than mind-blowing executions, then the 2021 Fantasia International Film Festival has you covered with a pair of highly inventive, totally mind-bending, and decidedly handcrafted gems!

Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (Junta Yamaguchi, 2020)

You would be hard pressed to find anything at Fantasia 2021 as simple and clever as Junta Yamaguchi’s Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes. Cafe owner Kato (Kazunori Tosa) returns to his upstairs apartment one evening and finds himself unexpectedly visited on his computer screen by himself two minutes into the future and speaking from a computer screen in the coffee shop. As Kato tries to make sense this micro-time loop, employees and friends arrive and begin playing with the phenomena, managing to modestly extend the loop by placing the screens in front of each other and creating repeating images of the screen each two minutes farther away than the last. Options for fun and profit remain limited in their DIY time tunnel but shenanigans naturally ensue through the interventions of a potential love interest, a couple of gangsters, and pair of mysterious men.

Strawberry Mansion (Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney, 2021)

Set in a future world where dreams are taxed by the federal government, co-writer/co-director Kentucker Audley plays James Preble, a dream auditor sent to the remote home of Arabella Isadora (Penny Fuller) to assess the elderly eccentric’s vast collection of VHS-recorded dreams. In her dreams, James meets her younger self (Grace Glowicki), traverses a vast dreamscape, and uncovers the sinister truth behind dreams and his love of Cap’n Kelly fried chicken. Time between dreams and reality pass differently and James’ existence is tested as he searches for his dream-Arabella while also negotiating the intrusion of her family in real life.

Strolling Through Dream/Time

Both Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes and Strawberry Mansion explore the stretch and squash of time on causality and reality in deceptively lo-fi terms. Junta Yamaguchi’s film was born from an acting workshop of the popular theatre group Europe Kikaku and was shot on an iPhone, recalling recent Japanese puzzle box films like One Cut of the Dead and Special Actors. Audley and Birney’s film was shot digitally, then transferred to 16mm to give it a home movie haziness, and its thrift store costumes and craft store props give it a Gondry-esque playfulness that is archly twee but still sufficiently foreboding. Buttressed by their own limitations, these films are dreamier, loopier, and more intriguing than any of Christopher Nolan’s massive science fiction epics. And to demonstrate that brevity is the soul of wit, it should be noted that you can watch Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes and Strawberry Mansion in less time than it takes to see Inception, Interstellar, or Tenet.

Both Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes and Strawberry Mansion are on-demand titles at the 2021 Fantasia International Film Festival waiting to be watched whenever it is convenient to you, but be warned — less than a week of Fantasia remains and Festival deadlines are far less forgiving that the temporal rules of either of these films.