Cinema Around the World: Japan

16 July 2008

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In recent years Hollywood has been flooded with remakes of Japanese horror movies such as Dark Water and The Grudge, which all seem to pale in comparison to the original counterparts.

And while Japanese horror may not reach mainstream Western audiences their animation is becoming increasingly popular.

Studio Ghilbli has been producing movies for over twenty years and it was only 2001's Spirited Away that made it on a major international level.

But as audiences grow tired of the Dreamworks/Pixar fight for supremacy in the animation genre older Studio Ghibli movies have been re-packaged, re-dubbed with the voices of well known actors and have finally found an audience.

Like most countries that were making movies in the early part of the twentieth century Japan too had a very successful silent era. However they were still producing those silent movies well into the thirties when the likes of Hollywood had progressed onto sound.

Matsunosuke Onoe was one of the first stars of Japanese cinema who appeared in over 1000 movies.

The 1950s was a golden era for Japanese film as the likes of Rashomon, Seven Samurai and Tokyo Story were all released, the Seven Samurai went on to become the influence behind the movie The Magnificent Seven.

Akira Kurosawa's 1950 picture Rashomon, which explains the rape of a woman and the murder of her husband from the accounts of four witnesses, won Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars and marked the arrival of Japanese cinema on the global stage.

In 1954 one of cinema's most famous monsters made it onto the big screen for the first time: Gojira, better known in the west as Godzilla, which became a landmark picture in Japanese science fiction and special effects.

1961's Yojimbo, about a masterless samurai who arrives in a town where competing crime lords gamble to make money, heavily influenced the west as Sergio Leone remade the film as spaghetti western A Fistful of Dollars.

However Leone and his production company failed to secure the remake rights to Kurosawa's film, resulting in a lawsuit that delayed Fistful's release in North America for three years.

By the eighties Studio Ghibli movies dominated the box office as the likes of Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind were released, director Hayao Miyazaki would have this success in Japan for twenty years.

In 1997 Japanese filmmaking cemented itself further on a global stage when director Shohei Imamura won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival for the film The Eel, becoming only the fourth two-time recipient of the award.

As Japanese cinema has moved into the twenty first century Studio Ghibli reached the pinnacle of it's success in the west as 2001 picture Spirited Away not only broke Japanese box office records but it won the Best Animated Feature at the Oscars, the first anime film to win an Academy Award.

In 2004 their next project, Howl's Moving Castle was also recognised by the Academy as it nominated for Best Animated Feature but lost out to Brit flick Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw