Vidas asombrosas de los estafadores de comida rápida

A documentary without a loss for words... ever...

Let us assume that the narration is more than a spoof, let us assume it is a commentary on Japanese society. And as this film is as fast paced an absurdist documentary as they come, the constant wordplay, as fast is it goes, and as poorly translated as it is-- in its current festival screener version as seen tonight at the Copenhagen Cinematek-- It is still quite enjoyable.

But for the patient, and ONLY the truly patient and open-minded, I'm talking to you Jim Jarmusch fans with ADD relapses, I believe this is a film for you. It's an intelligent film if you allow it to win you over.

Quite beautiful, and quite kitsch, and quite Japanese sub-culture. And quite experimental. Static 2D in a 3D world. All in all, Fun for those that want to see a Japanese film that spoofs Japanese food culture. A thumbs up if you're in the mood for something completely different.

TACHIGUI: THE AMAZING LIVES OF THE FAST-FOOD GRIFTERS Japanese title: Tachiguishi Retsuden

Director: Mamoru Oshii Featuring: Toshio Suzuki, Mako Hyodo, Kenji Kawai, Shinji Higuchi, Katsuya Terada Narrated by Koichi Yamadera ----------------------------------------

Way back in 1995, Mamoru Oshii unleashed his dazzling animation feature Ghost In The Shell, which helped consolidate anime's international acceptance - and also burrowed itself into Andy and Larry Wachowski's overall concept for The Matrix.

The movie's sequel, Innocence (2004), was the inaugural Japanese animated film to compete for the Palme d'Or at Cannes, and it left heads spinning as much for its style and innovative effects as for its oft unfathomable plot.

Always the trendsetter, Oshii has now presented us with Tachigui: The Amazing Lives Of The Fast-Food Grifters – which has absolutely nothing to do with Ghost In The Shell, nor Japanese anime for that matter.

Say hello to Oshii's creation "superlivemation": not quite animation, nor exactly live-action. Instead the cast endured somewhere in the vicinity of 30,000 snapshots, which were digitally processed and reconstituted in a deceptively simple paper cut-out fashion reminiscent of Balinese puppetry. The movement itself is a stilted, stop-motion style that echoes sequences from Shinya Tsukamoto's experimental Tetsuo: Iron Man (1988).

"I couldn't think of any method but this one," said Oshii in a recent interview with The Daily Yomiuri. "I realized that this project was not suitable for traditional animation."

The cast choice is equally enigmatic. Kenji Kawai - who also composed the superlative soundtrack - appears as a ravenous burger fanatic, while renowned Studio Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki spends his screen time being murdered in bizarre fashion. Others include Katsuya Terada, who dabbled with Oshii on Blood: The Last Vampire, and Shinji Higuchi - a special effects whiz who's worked on Godzilla movies.

Koichi Yamadera's narration sounds like the stuff of a dry NHK documentary – which belies the comic undertone here as well as Yamadera's extensive career voicing stoic anime characters like Spike Siegel in Cowboy Bebop.

And the plot itself is a bizarre re-imagining of post-WWII Japan in the context of various fast-food off-shoots - from soba ramen shops to gyudon stand-up bars; American dogs in the heat-up trays of convenience stores to McDonalds- inspired burger-chain restaurants. "Food is a primal root of desire," asserted Oshii, by way of explanation.

Thrown into the mix is a new breed of consumer: the fast-food grifters of the title, people who don't like to pay for their tucker and are constantly fine-tuning their elaborate scams to score free munchies.

Oshii said his ulterior motive was homage to the "art" of eating food on the streets – something still considered a bit of a taboo in this country, and which goes some way toward explaining the use of "tachigui" in the title.

The director of live-action movies (Avalon, Stray Dog) as well as animation, Oshii has often blurred the definition between the two mediums. The celluloid result here is deposited somewhere in the grey area between both formats.

At times the visual experiment here is as exhilarating as it can be irritating. Just don't ask what it's all really supposed to mean; Oshii's films, which are equal parts cerebral and innovative, are often not particularly clear story-wise. Where Oshii succeeds is via a liberal dose of black humor – here you'll find Kentucky Fried Rat, death by hula-hoop, the world's fastest samurai burger chef – and in the movie's very nature of surrealism.

This is a man who defers to the influence of filmmakers like Godard and Truffaut, and perhaps owes as much to Andrei Tarkovsky as he does David Lynch. So it shouldn't come as any surprise that at one stage a B-52 bomber does a fly- through in a Yoshinoya look-alike franchise. The 54-year-old writer-director seemed to think this natural. "The Japan I depicted in the movie may not necessarily be faithful to reality," he suggested.

Of course. --------------

By Andrez Bergen

OK, I am not Japanese. I do know a little about Japanese culture, and a little less about Japanese pop culture. Other than that, I am Spanish, I eat paella and I like black humor.

Good, with that point set, I can comment on the movie: I have no idea on how it is enjoyable to the Japanese audiences, Mamoru Oshii is quite a good director- despite the overly pedantic postmodern stuff in the style of Talking Head, and even that was curious and somehow interesting- and I am surprised he came up with this. It may just be one of those lost-in-translation cases, I am afraid it is, but as a European viewer watching the film with subtext overloaded English subtitles I just thought it was horrible. The jokes seemed bad, the script was overcooked- I mean, give the audience a break, and shut up a little you damn narrator- to the point of almost making my head explode over an overkill of fast-paced speaking and absurd action.

However, I thought the animation was really cool. The idea is great, and it is well exploited in those animated scenes. However, the eye-candy finishes as soon as the characters are left aside to start with an endless not funny at all mumbo-jumbo speech over still pictures. It just makes you want to fast forward to the next cut-out hysterical characters scene.

I read Mamoru Oshii is actually planning on a sequel for this. The idea was good but horribly exploited. Maybe the second part will bring up the good parts of this first one and actually make an interesting movie, or maybe it will be more and more over-narrated scenes. But hell, if you thought Talking Head was dense, Amazing Lifes of Fast Food Gifters will give cause you a stroke.

Of course, all this comment is based on the experiences of someone who is European. Probably this is totally useless to Japanese people, maybe it was a really funny film lost in cultural frontiers and translation. Maybe.

I don't want to go too far into detail, because I can't really justify wasting much time on reviewing this film, but I had to give an alternate opinion to hopefully help people avoid the movie. The animation is crud and the story alternates between boring/pointless to extremely irritating. The humor was completely lost on the audience, and yes - Ghost in the Shell fans, this is NOT an action sci-fi or anything like that - its an attempt at slapstick comedy, and the humor just did not work after being translated. It was a total chore to watch this movie, and horrible way for me to kick off the film fest, especially considering how excited I was and how open I was for anything - I wasn't expecting a Ghost in the Shell sequel, but I was expecting something entertaining, and it simply didn't achieve this. Yaaawwnnn... Rent Kino's Journey instead.

All anime contains some material that doesn't translate well to other cultures but sometimes you find something that is so completely enmeshed in the home culture that only a miracle could make it understandable to a foreigner. An example sitting on the edge would be the limited anime series, "Fooly Coolly". Only by using the DVD extras can anyone outside Japan get a real understanding of the goings-on. Along comes Mamoru Oshii's new endeavor, you thought "Innocence: Ghost in the Shell 2" was tough?

A "biography" of the post-war noodle stand freeloader seen through the eyes of a mysterious scholar who ascribes a monk-like aura to the most notorious freeloaders. The freeloader comes in, orders a bowl of noodles, eats them and then insults the noodles expecting to get them for free. Much of the action (for lack of a better word) revolves around a single noodle house as different famous freeloaders come in over the decades trying to get a bowl of noodles. The film has almost non-stop narration as it parodies a documentary. Lots of talk, lots of still artwork.

The esoteric subject matter aside, the animation is done in a very unusual modified cut-out animation style as emulated thru CGI. Sometimes the characters are constructed as if they are cardboard stick puppets but it's all computer generated. Sometimes the camera swings around the scene and the characters briefly disappear as if you were looking at paper from the edge. The art is excellent overall but this experimental style seems better suited for a short instead of a feature length film. The story creates a distance from the characters and the animation style actually make the distance worse. Unfortunately, the available English subtitles don't help at all. Perhaps someone will undertake the effort to translate this film for English speakers but I'm afraid that this film will scare most distributors away.

An experiment for experimental viewers only.