Miike Takashi Research Articles

Miike Takashi’s Crows Zero and adaptive authorship revisited

Abstract This article contributes to the scholarship on Japanese director Miike Takashi, who has gained increasing international recognition over the past two decades. Through a case study of Miike’s manga-inspired live-action film, Crows Zero (2007), I delve into specific aspects of the film’s settings, especially poetry and linguistic sings, to explore authorship from a comparative perspective and its manifestation in transmedia adaptation. This analysis draws upon Thomas Leitch’s concept of adaptive authorship and rethinks the historical dichotomy between the auteur and the metteur-en-scène, as originally delineated by François Truffaut. By arguing that Miike’s role in the film is neither a mere adapter lacking creativity nor a consistent artist, and by highlighting instances of directorial authorship in the film’s nuanced details, I question the tendency in film studies that adaptive authorship is often overshadowed by, and eventually integrated into, auteurship to the point where it can only be examined within broader auteurist analyses. Thus, this case study underscores the advantages of an adapter-based approach over an auteurist one, suggesting that moving beyond the doctrines of consistency and coherence may facilitate the identification of authorship from different perspectives.

Ringing One Missed Call: Franchising, transnational flows and genre production

Abstract Eric Valette’s 2008 remake of Miike Takashi’s 2004 J-horror film Chakushin ari / One Missed Call calls into question a simple East/West economic and contextual binary often assumed in cases of transnational remakes, regarding the purity of an original ‘exotic’ Other and the debased, impure ‘corporate’ American remake. One Missed Call cannot be so easily placed into national cinema categories when we explore the production and financial origins of the film however, given the transnational nature of the remake’s content and production. This article explores how transnational remakes engage with transnational flows of production and influence, thinking about how transnational modernity works with what Koichi Iwabuchi terms ‘cultural odor’. The article challenges the presence of an ‘original’ in the transnational franchising of the One Missed Call films, contending that Ring (Nakata Hideo, 1998) and The Ring (Gore Verbinski, 2002) have functioned as metatexts in both Miike’s and Valette’s versions of One Missed Call. In so doing, the article examines the characteristics of transnational media production on an economic and political basis.

Bad Jokes, Bad English, Good Copy: Sukiyaki Western Django, or How the West Was Won

Miike Takashi’s Sukiyaki Western Django is a contemporary remake of Sergio Corbucci’s Spaghetti Western Django. In this updated Japanese version all of the characters speak English and there is a notable cameo appearance by Quentin Tarantino that references the continuous series of filmic exchanges that have taken place between Asia and the West, most notably in the context of action cinema. Rather than conceiving of the various movements and exchanges between the two films (and their predecessors) in terms of the search for an “original” or for the conceptualisation of good or bad copies, this paper focuses on the question of genre and what it can bring to a discussion of cross-cultural value in cinema. In particular, the paper explores what the recurring turn to Westerns in Asia reveals about the search for new frontiers of value and aesthetics in global cinema. From the serious to the self-conscious to the downright “bad” (and bad-ass) Western, Sukiyaki Western Django is a notable recent example of how the “Asian Western” both localises and globalises a peculiarly American genre, and at once de-values and re-values the “original”.

Co-Producing Cross-Border Action: Technologies of Contact, Masculinity and the Asia-Pacific Border

It seems like the Japanese have lost their interest in their own cities and their own country…they seem to have become numb…Taipei looks like Tokyo in the 1960s and 70s. The people look more alive, more human. Tokyo isn't a place you can stay…. Everybody in Japan is thinking, ‘there should be somewhere we have to return’. (Miike Takashi 1997, on his film Rainy Dog)

The Good, the Bad, and the Culturally Inauthentic: The Strange Case of the “Asian Western

When The Tears of the Black Tiger (Fah talai jone 2000, dir. Wisit Sasanatieng) was reviewed in Sight and Sound, reviewer Edward Buscombe expressed surprise at the existence of a Thai Western and concluded that the film was “ultimately, about nothing at all.” Such debates had already been well rehearsed around Italian Westerns, the paradigmatic “inauthentic” adaptation of an “authentic” genre. Asian cinema’s connection to the Western can be traced back to Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, which was reworked across diverse genres, including the Western. Two further “Asian Westerns” have been distributed internationally more recently, Sukiyaki Western Django (Sukiyaki Uesutan Jango 2007, dir. Miike Takashi) and The Good, the Bad, the Weird (Joheun nom nabbeun nom isanghan nom 2008, dir. Kim Ji-woon). While individual films have unmistakeable local resonances “lost” Thai cinema, South Korea’s Manchurian action films of the 1960s, the interplay between Japanese chanbara and the Western -- the common transcultural referent is not the American Western, but the Italian one. This paper examines the relationship between the “Asian” and Italian Western, and considers how the latter might inform the transnational ambitions of the former.

Transnational, Transgeneric, Transgressive: Tracing Miike Takashi’s Yakuza Cyborgs to Sukiyaki Westerns

This paper explores the transnationalism of Miike Takashi’s approach to film genres. Film genre has often been held as a stabilizing and internationalizing paradigm of film production, distribution, and reception, likewise with the increasingly transnational focus of Miike’s work that has accompanied his growing notoriety and fame with critics and cineastes, predominantly those outside Japan, where his fame is marginal. The paper also explores ways in which Miike’s transnational approach to genre problematizes and intervenes in transnational cinematic struggles by offering challenges to existing and homogenizing structures of genre and language. By looking at Sukiyaki Western Django (2007) as the definitive example of Miike’s transcultural generic work, the argument will examine the role of “gatekeeper auteurs” such as Tarantino and Eli Roth, in establishing Miike as the nomadic figure in world cinema.

Toronto 2010

TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2010 HIGHLIGHTS Having leapt into the exclusive club of industry film festivals of late, the Toronto International Film Festival nevertheless marked a transitional phase this year when it unveiled the Bell Lightbox, a donated piece of downtown real estate that is now home for year-round public programming and events. And in a shift indicative of its ambition, programming for TIFF's 35th edition (9-19 September 2010) hinted at a desire to distinguish itself from a growing pool of international rivals. Though its annual selection of films from Asia is usually conservative, this year's crop of titles was notable for bringing into relief the intricacies of intra-Asia and transnational cooperation among filmmakers. Here's a look back at ten notable titles: 13 Assassins (Miike Takashi, Japan 2010)Coming off as more square - but no less wildly entertaining - than many of his previous films, Miike Takashi's latest...

Nostalgia, place, and making peace with modernity in East Asia

This essay sets out to theorize the nostalgia boom that has held East Asia in thrall to the past for some years now. It begins by noting that this nostalgic sentiment often has an ersatz cast, not least since much of it harks back to epochs—Showa-era Japan, 1930s Hong Kong, colonial Taiwan—of which the ‘remembering’ subject has no bodily recollection. This strange vogue for the unremembered past is typically interpreted as a flight from time, and from a troubled particular present in particular: Japan's oil shocks, the looming Hong Kong handover, KMT rule in Taiwan, and so on. The present essay argues, however, that this scene realigns its component parts into a different picture when we view it through the comparative lens. Seen not contextually, but intertextually across the region, this yearning for yesteryear expresses not just a flight from time, but from place, too, and from one locale in particular. This abandoned site is the city of lived memory, a psycho-physical topos to which nostalgia has quite obstinately refused to stick. Underlying this reticence is the notion that the ‘really remembered’ city is not a proper ‘place’: earthy, gemütlich, and thus worthy of nostalgia. This notion persists across East Asia, and most especially in its literature and cinema, despite the plain fact that cities are ever more the region's primary site of dwelling. And behind this refusal to reconcile with the city as a place of home and hearth lies, unsurprisingly, the same queasy trepidation about modernity that has both plagued and sustained cultural practice both in East Asia and abroad. The essay concludes, however, by looking at two recent films—by Miike Takashi and Wong Kar-wai—which articulate an alternative aesthetic of nostalgia, and thus bring about something of a rapprochement between ‘place’ and the city-we-know.

Beyond “Extreme”: Rereading Kim Ki-duk’s Cinema of Ressentiment

BEGINNING IN THE 1950S AND 60S, films of Kurosawa Akira, Ozu Yasujiro, and Mizoguchi Kenji entered Western canon of East Asian cinema under various rubrics associated with auteurism and art cinema. Throughout 1980s and 90s, Fifth-Generation Chinese such as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige rose to international fame for their exotic, ethnographic films, sparking critical debates about self-orientalism, among other things (Chow 142-72). In recent years, however, dominant mode of East Asian canon-formations in West appears to have shifted into an area that can be (and has been) described as cinema.1 Under this blood-soaked bannerare assembled some of most iconoclastic auteurs in East Asia, including Fruit Chan, Pang Brothers, Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Miike Takashi, Kitano Takeshi, Park Chan-wook [Pak Ch'an-uk], and Kim Ki-duk [Kim Ki-dok], who are all enjoying a spike in international recognition and cult fandom, due in part to visceral nature of their disturbing yet engrossing films, which frequently shuttle between tranquility and terror, sublime and grotesque. According to one anonymous contributor to Wikipedia, Extreme cinema is a term typically used to describe films containing violence, gore, and sex of an extreme nature. In recent years, term has been a popular word to describe many of violent films coming out of Asia (particularly Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea). The online encyclopedia entry lists names of four East Asian directors (Miike Takashi, Park Chan-wook, Tsukamoto Shinya, and Kim Ki-duk) as examples of the more notorious 'extreme' filmmakers (Extreme Cinema). Alongside Park Chan-wook, famous for his vengeance trilogy of films (Poksu nun na Hi kot [Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance] [2002], Oldboy [2003], and Ch'ingolhan Kumjassi [Lady Vengeance] [2005]), Kim Ki-duk is arguably most acclaimed Korean auteur in Western world. An unprecedented ten of Kim's fifteen feature-length motion pictures are currently available in US home video market.2 Among these thematically interrelated yet stylistically disparate films, including Som [The Isle] (2000), Shilje sanghwang [Real Fiction] (2000), Nappun namja [Bad Guy] (2001), and Haeanson [The Coast Guard] (2002), his awardwinning Buddhist fable Pom yorum kaul kyoul kurigo pom [Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring] (2003) became an international art-house hit, breaking all previous box-office records of South Korean films receiving theatrical distribution in United States and Europe.3 Around time of this film's US release (beginning in April of 2004), Kim successfully made his way into Western critics' East Asian film canons by winning two prestigious Best Director awards from Berlin and Venice International Film Festivals, for Samaria [Samaritan Girl] (2004) and PIn ip [3-lron] (2004), respectively. As mother of all tributes to a maverick filmmaker whose sensuous, sensational imagery and wild and haunting narratives have enthralled film festival juries and extreme cinema aficionados around world, New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) held a then-complete retrospective of Kim's fourteen films between 23 April and 8 May 2008 (MoMA Exhibitions 2008).4 Regardless of ceaseless controversy surrounding Kim Ki-duk both at home and abroad, MoMA's endorsement and showcasing of his entire oeuvre- first of its kind granted to a Korean filmmaker5- demonstrates that Korean cinema can now boast its own Kurosawa Akira, its own Zhang Yimou, its own visionary auteur whose border-crossing reputation promises to boost status of nation's earlier and future cultural productions in global arena.6 Such rhetorical maneuvers by critics may prove to be problematic, however, given that pigeonholing of Kim as a Korean Kurosawa or Zhang- and, by extension, labeling of Korean cinema as something derivative (or, in words of Anthony C. Y. Leong, the New Hong Kong)7- has potential to reproduce dominant ideological positions vis-a-vis abstracted Asian other, with an attendant risk of rendering diverse cultural traditions as interchangeable elements within a monolithically conceived canon endorsed by Western scholars and Euro-American institutions. …

Psychological, Cultural, and Social Perspectives for Understanding the Representation of Women in Miike Takashi's Box

Abstract Miike Takashi's Box is the most surreal compared to Fruit Chan's Dumplings and Park Chan-wook's Cut in Three…Extremes. The ambiguous narrative structure and dreamlike elements in Box enable different possible interpretations of the film. Due to the film's dreamlike qualities, it is easily tempted to decipher the film by applying Western psychoanalytical theories. Nevertheless, there are many underlying elements in the film that actually display Japanese tradition, especially the performing arts, i.e. noh which existed since the 14th Century, about five hundred years before Sigmund Freud was born.

The Homelessness of Style and the Problems of Studying Miike Takashi

Les études critiques consacrées au cinéaste Miike Takashi se concentrent généralement sur le caractère outrancier de l’œuvre de ce dernier, de même que sur sa profonde indignation envers la société japonaise. En s’attardant sur l’usage récurrent fait par Miike du plan-séquence, du montage rapide, ainsi que d’une facture visuelle inspirée de la bande dessinée, cet article vise plutôt à faire ressortir le caractère « itinérant » de l’oeuvre du cinéaste, dans laquelle abondent les personnages sans foyer et sans identité claire errant dans un environnement marqué par la mondialisation. L’itinérance s’inscrit également dans les multiples changements de ton et de style rendant les préoccupations nationalistes et les dimensions politiques de l’oeuvre de Miike difficiles à circonscrire. Le travail du cinéaste soulève ainsi des questions fondamentales dans l’étude du cinéma populaire, de même que dans celle des dimensions politiques du cinéma japonais.

Monsters at War: The Great Yōkai Wars, 1968–2005

Miike Takashi, the Japanese director of infamous films such as Koroshiya Ichi (2001, Ichi the Killer) and Zehuraaman (2004, Zebraman), surprised audiences by directing the 2005 remake of the 1968 horror/fantasy Sim, Yokai daisenso (The Great Yoked War).1 With its cast of cute folkloric monsters (generically referred to in Japanese as yokai), this was the first child-friendly movie produced by Miike, whose work is better known for excessive Tarantino-like violence, gangster stories, and blood spilled on screen. But, despite their association with simple and straightforward horror tales and family entertainment, both the 1968 classic and Miike's 2005 remake use yokai to communicate strong, if also strongly differing, political messages. This essay compares the two films and also traces the evolution of the Yokai daisenso story through several manga, anime, and live-action versions produced over the past forty years. The emergence of yokai-themed films in Japan dates from the 1960s and coincides with the television broadcast of Mizuki Shigeru's 1968-69 Gegege no Kitard animation series, based in turn on Mizuki's hugely popular manga. The series traced the adventures of the yokai boy Kitard and his monster companions, particularly their battles with various other malevolent yokai entities. Following the success of the television series, the film production company

From The Black Society to The Isle: Miike Takashi and Kim Ki-Duk at the intersection of Asia Extreme

Miike Takashi and Kim Ki-Duk are established figures at the forefront of the Asia Extreme movement. Despite the superficial associations between the two film-makers and the pan-Asian faux-genre of extreme cinema, there are a number of connections that link Miike and Kim as artists beyond the violent or potentially misogynist content of some of their films. While critical reactions to both filmmakers make a case for the location of both squarely in the realms of the Asian Extreme mainstream, textual features see both subscribing to characteristics that can be located within key South-East Asian concerns of national identity and gender (despite Miike and Kim's specific positioning within their respective national characteristics). Paying close attention to the national positioning of both filmmakers, as well as to their transnational, western reception, this article argues that, within the boundaries of separate and distinct national identities, Miike and Kim both explore similar themes of fractured identity, cultural dislocation, gender and the failures of language. Through close analysis of Miike's Black Society (kuroshakai) trilogy (1995, 1997, 1999) and Kim's The Isle/Seom (2000) and Bad Guy/Nabbeun namja (2001), the article explores the transnational meaning and stylization that link these two significant film-makers beyond the limits of the Asia Extreme discourse.

Families, Fathers, Film: Changing Images from Japanese Cinema

Two films from roughly 20 years apart, Kazoku gemu (The Family Game, Morita Yoshimitsu, 1983), and Bijitā Q (Visitor Q, Miike Takashi, 2001), present images of the Japanese family and father that work together to create a portrait of the family in crisis. These films, coming at opposite ends of the so-called Bubble Economy, suggest that at root of this crisis is the abdication by the Japanese father of his responsibilities both within the home and within the wider social arena. In short, these films condemn the contemporary “salaryman” as an ineffectual, uncommunicative, and “weak” force within the home, incapable of providing a coherent, inspirational model for his family. This paper will first provide a context in which to read these two films, by analysing the presentation of the family and father in classic post-war films by Ozu, Kurosawa, and Mizoguchi. Against these classic works, this paper will then explore the ways in which the two more recent films cooperate with each other, using satire to criticise the contemporary Japanese family and the apparent “crisis” which faces it, and to show how the perception of this crisis is intensifying.

Asia Extreme: Japanese cinema and British hype

Can hype, used by Thomas Austin, Mark Jancovich and Barbara Klinger to describe Hollywood marketing strategies, also help us understand the promotional activities of independent British film distributors who have been promoting mainly Japanese and South Korean genre films under a variety of Extreme Asia brands since 2001? This article will examine how these distributors and the print/broadcast media are involved in the process of discursively segmenting a variety of audience taste formations, and then recruiting these niche demographics to build an aggregate audience by generating multiple promises and invitations-to-view, or hype, around a film text. I will examine the various discourses used to constitute these niches, including those of cult subcultural identity, auteurism and other notions of authorship, textual alienation effects and Orientalist cultural essentialism. I will focus on those exceptional texts in which this multiplying process has been particularly successful, in particular Miike Takashi's Audition (1999).

The break-up of the national body

In the context of both contemporary Japanese society and cinema, there seems to be a growing preoccupation with national as well as personal identity in the era of so-called ‘multiculturalism’. By drawing on Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s concept of ‘cosmetic multiculturalism’ as well as anthropologist Mary Douglas’s account of ‘body as society’, this article attempts to examine how ‘body-metaphors’ structure the films of Miike Takashi and how the presence of non-Japanese characters are related to such a body politic of his films. Finally I argue that by the repeated use of metaphors of the breakdown of bodily boundaries and fragmentation, Miike’s films may allegorize the break-up of the mythical national body of Japan as a racially homogeneous organic unity and non-Japanese characters are mobilized as an active factor in a narrative strategy to dramatize this.