Takumi: A 60,000 Hour Story On the Survival of Human Craft

During the first half or so this piece of media tries extremely hard to appear contemplative and thought provoking while painting the most uninspired, chliché-driven and completely empty of meaning image of traditional japanese culture. It's not really a demonstration of craftsmanship in filmmaking up to this point, but not a crime either. But it doesn't just stop there: from then on it completely stops trying to hide that it's not in fact a badly handled documentary but really a overblown, phoney commercial for the Lexus car brand. It's a deceptive and manipulative try to heighten their self image to an almost transcending point while not only misunderstanding the concept of documentary journalism but maliciously faking it to further their interests.

Fascinating subject matter, beautifully shot. Watching the film has a meditative effect, which given one of the themes is the importance of focus and stepping out of our attention-deficit society, is very clever.

At first I just thought this was the most boring, disjointed documentary I'd ever seen on a subject so thoroughly interesting. Then finally once I realized this was sponsored by Lexus, everything made sense.

This is the bitter end, I'm afraid. We are now in a world where companies can hire 'documentary teams' to create advertisements disguised as art and not only get away with it

Shame.

Beautifully shot and thought provoking film. Makes you appreciate the extensive work that goes into handmade crafts compared to the machine made world.