Happî furaito

Shinobu Yaguchi made his directorial mark with giddy comedies like My Secret Cache, Waterboys, and Swing Girls, and this film takes his comedy (of sorts) to the friendly skies.

Happy Flight is a buoyant entertainment, with situations springing from the familiar context of the airport and environs. The cast is uniformly agreeable, showing their skills at light, breezy material. If anything, the comedy is perhaps too light; unlike Yaguchi's other blithe offerings, there's a certain paucity of fresh gags to keep the whole thing running smooth. The talented Haruka Ayase proved her comic skill with Hotaro no Hikaru; the movie Cyborg Girl gave her a platform for a clever, funny dual role. Here, however, the writing doesn't allow Ayase to make much of her character or situation. Other actors have the same problem.

The situations were engaging for the most part, but never seemed to result in comic payoff. Given the level of talent here, one expect a bit more. If anything, this comes off like a gently comic drama, always careful to treat ANA with kid gloves - but in the process depriving the comic elements of bite.

We've all been let down by a service that proves an inconvenience, but perhaps isn't the complete disaster we make it out to be. But with so many components to service provision, the poor people on the floor take the brunt for a lot when they are quite simply doing their job and following procedure. You see it as incompetence, but it's quite the opposite in reality.

In what is essentially a feature length promotional video for ANA and the sheer number of people and steps required in getting a flight from A to B, "Happy Flight" is an informative and entertaining journey part-way across the Pacific Ocean, in a plea to not be so harsh on them the next time your flight is delayed.

With a large and strong cast of many recognisable faces, this is much more enjoyable than you would think, walking a fine line between entertainment, goofball comedy and being informative about the various roles and what is required in each. There is much to learn about commercial aviation, and that knowledge makes the laughs more plausible, with the extended cast in different settings breaking things up nicely and never getting bogged down in one single aspect. The story itself is a very realistic scenario, away from sensationalising or disaster movie tension. In fact, you learn as you go and get a sense of reward. It's very much "Airplane!" (1980) from a very administrative perspective.

Trainee pilot Suzuki (Seiichi Tanabe) is flying his final flight as a novice before attaining full pilot status. It is his final test. Flying as co-pilot for Harada (Saburo Tokito) from Haneda in Tokyo to Hawaii, he is nervous about passing this last examination. Also starting a first international journey on a much bigger jumbo jet is cabin crew member Etsuko (Haruka Ayase). On a longer flight with more, increasingly demanding passengers, it's stressful for all, not just the first timer.

But while taking off, the "bird man" tasked with ridding the runway of birds is distracted, and damage is caused to a seemingly small part of the plane, but one that will affect the various readings necessary to keep the plane safely in the air. With the plane less than halfway through its journey, procedure dictates they must turn back to Haneda Airport as a storm approaches.

Compartmentalising (I actually used that word) the storyline into the various groups of people involved make this a collection of intertwined shorts. The check-in staff need to get everyone on the flight; the weather room need to monitor conditions; the hangar mechanics need to ensure no missing tools may have compromised the plane; air traffic control must do whatever it is they do. All are under pressure and time constraints to make sure their part of the job is completed.

And as the team follow their procedures, the film itself is a very professional job. There is nothing spectacular about this, turning a disaster into a set of steps to follow, as you'd expect from a film made in collaboration with an airline. But it is much more realistic, and deserves credit for it. It is well paced and the story develops nicely, with a good balance between humour and detail. It is never too dull, nor too silly.

All is overseen by the safe pair of hands that is Shinobu Yaguchi, with a string of similar films that are universal and crowd-pleasing, but also offer some genuinely good moments of cinema, with "Swing Girls" (2004), "Water Boys" (2001) and "Wood Job!" (2014).

Safe is very much a word to describe this, in the sense that you know where you are, so you can just sit back and enjoy.

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It would be a mess if all the crew on a jet liner are this inept. They all act like they're fresh out of school. In reality, there's a mixture of experienced, and not so experienced crews on board.

The movie was fun to watch. But it seems like the producers including the director really had to learn the subject that they were not so well prepared to take on. Every scene looked like regurgitating something they've learned from ANA. The airline will be out of business if they had this many problems within 2 hours of the flight.

Saburo Tokito, and Shinobu Terajima was good as the captain and the head cabin attendant. It seem like the movie followed the format of another series "Attention please" staring Aya Ueto. The formula of inept flight attendant(s), and the strict instructor is strait out of that story.

Ittoku Kishibe also was great in his supporting role. If they collected the actors of Tokito, Terajima, and Kishibe's caliber in other roles, this movie would have been better.

Not a bad film, but could have been better. It had a charm of its own, and was worth watching.

I caught this film in a retrospective of Japanese films at a local mall this week. With a title like "Happy Flight", I expected a light comedy although I had no idea what sort of "flight" was referred to. An pre-flight instruction video that preceded the opening credits made it clear that this would be about a flight of an airplane.

In the first thirty minutes or so of the film, we see a slew of activity that went on behind the scenes before a commercial flight takes off from the airport. We meet the pilot-in-training on his final flight exam, the stern pilot examiner, the strict purser, the gaggle of excited new stewardesses on their first foreign flight, the team of mechanics on the tarmac, the ground crew, the people in the flight tower, the guy responsible to ward off birds, and of course, all those the quirky passengers. When the plane takes flight and encounters various problems with natural, mechanical, and human causes, the crew both onboard and on the ground all cooperate to ensure the passengers welfare.

These people all have their own little side stories to tell, mostly hilarious. But you can also feel an underlying seriousness the overall story the director wants to tell. This becomes more evident when the plane is in flight when every decision made is one of life and death. In the midst of the comedy, you cannot help but feel the tension and drama of the situations as well. This is indeed everything you are curious about the airline industry but were too afraid to ask or too afraid to even actually know. As I take my next flight, I will definitely think of this movie again.

A fun and exciting movie about one particular ANA flight from Haneda Airport to Honolulu. Overall, it was a very fun and exciting movie, but I felt 103 minutes weren't nearly enough to summarize this story.

There were simply too many things happening with too many characters. We have the pilots, flight attendants, mechanics, flight control, weather control, and airport staff. Each with their own situations and problems to handle. I guess it shows that hard work of everyone, not only the pilots, are required for a smooth flight. However, the film ended before I really connected with any of the characters. The lead actor and actress' screen time and presence weren't much more than other supporting cast.

Ayase Haruka's acting was disastrous in this movie, she's simply not a light comedy material. Although the cast was loaded with big-name actors, it felt cheap and rushed, like a TV dorama series.

The production team did well to summarize the story the best they could in 103 minutes, and I thought the story was nice and characters were interesting. A fun watch-and-forget movie that would've worked much better as a dorama series.