Review: The Old Man Movie

Text © Richard Gary / Indie Horror Films, 2022
Images from the Internet

The Old Man Movie (aka Vanamehe film; Old Man Cartoon Movie)
Directed by Oskar Lehemaa and Mikk Mägi
Eesti Filmi Instituut; Apollo Film Productions; BOP Animation; Unearthed Animation; MVD Entertainment
88 minutes, 1995 / 2022
www.facebook.com/vanamehemultikas
www.unearthedfilms.com
www.MVDEntertainment.com/

At first, one might see this Estonian (with English subtitles, though an English dub is also available in the extras) Claymation film looks like it might be along the lines of Up (2009) or, thanks to the farm motif cover, Chicken Run (2000). However, it is important to note that it was released by Unearthed Films, so you know there is something more to this than young adult fare. So, let’s fire up this puppy and see what’s what.

Right off the bat, during an old-type newsreel, we meet the world’s greatest cow milker, but he waits too long to milk his cow one time and… badda bing, badda BOOM!

Decades later, three little kids are dropped off at their grampa’s farm. He’s a tough old coot who is the current head milker, much to the dismay of his cow and her sore teats. We are introduced to a bunch of locals who are apparently addicted to milk, including a near toothless alcoholic, a younger woman wearing a tank top and lots of cleavage, and an older woman in traditional dress that spits on grandpa often.

Grampa and Cow

How tough is the old man? He immediately grabs the kids cell phones and destroys them. The youngest boy, Mart, is an inventor of sorts, the second oldest boy. Priidik, is, well, a typical boy, and the oldest is a girl, Aino, who is obnoxious, yet quite wily. So far, the story is going along well, and I can see this is not your typical cheerful Babe (1995) farmer tale, but rather a dark and comic tale more in the lines of The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001).

There are some insane animals on the farm, such as a pig who poops like crazy, and my favorite, a rooster with a vicious and conspiratorial mind that has a fixation on Priidik. Like the cow, Grampa does not treat them well. Which is why when the cow goes missing, that’s when the storyline really picks up. Who will get him? The older man in a wheelchair who is afraid of the Lactocalypse, a band of hippies, a horny tree god, or our central characters of the Grandpa riding his tractor in search with two of the three kids in tow?

Mart, Aino, Priidik

From this point, the story becomes completely unhinged, and I will not explain much other than the rock concert was my fave part. Because this is animation and not “real” life, there are things than can be presented that are out of the realm of reality in a way that is totally unexpected. There are so many curves in the story that it is nearly impossible to guess what will happen next.

Along with Unearthed trailers, the extras are all Old Man/Grampa related shorts. The first is “The Taste of Cow” (2 min), which is a warning about where to swim in farm country. Next is “I Went to Sauna with Grandchildren” (2 min) teaches a lesson about going into an icy lake after a hot sauna. “My Cow Gave Birth” (2 min) describes a bad place to sleep. “The Old Man is Tired” (2.5 min) has grandpa depressed as Autumn springs. Finally, “The Old Hag Had Me Put an Implant” (2.5 min) warns of where not to hide your vodka.

This is such a fun film, and much better than I even expected. Some of the animation is quite stunning, especially those scenes dealing with animals, most notably during close-ups. Most of the film is a mixture of outrageous, outlandish, and wildly WTF. There are scenes that are quite dark in tone, but still manages to keep the humor on various levels, from “hunh?” to laugh out loud. Don’t let the subtitles get you, they are clear and stay up long enough to read (pet peeve of mine is when the subtitles are flashed faster than I can comprehend the whole text). While this is not as horrifying as the usual Unearthed releases, it is also definitely not for kids.

IMDB listing HERE

 

Review: Takashi Miike's The Happiness of the Katakuris

Text © Richard Gary / Indie Horror Films, 2015
Images from the Internet

 

The Happiness of the Katakuris (aka Katakuri-ke no kofuku)

Directed by Takashi Miike
Shochiku / Arrow Video / MVD Visual
113 minutes, 2001 / 2015
www.mvdvisual.com

Japanese director Takashi Miike (pronounced Mee-KAY) is no stranger to extreme cinema, having started with direct-to-video (you read right) films that mainly focused on violent underworld and cop-and-robbers themes, such as the Dead or Alive series. In the West, he is more known as the person who created such icky-fests are Ichi The Killer (2001), the creepy “Box” segment of 3…Extremes (2004), and most notably the graphic and horrific Audition (1999).

So, of course, The Happiness of the Katakuris is a…musical? Oh, but not just any musical, that is certain. A mixture of the love of family, death-death-and-more-death, horror, crime, comedy, dancing, and a snappy soundtrack; yes, we’re off to a Miike off-kilter special treat.



"We're a happy family / We're a happy family /
We're a happy family / Me, mom and daddy"

We are introduced to the six-member Katakuri family through the very young daughter, Yurie (Tamaki Miyazaki, in her only film credit), who is full of hope and contentment. Her mom, Shizue (the cute Naomi Nishida) is a single mother after a brief marriage (it is explained that she “falls in and out of love too easily”), Shizue’s brother, Masayuki (Shinji Takeda) is an ex-con recently out of prison but has a good heart, their parents who are laid-off shoe salesman Al Bund… I mean Masao (Kenji Sawada) and lovingly doting wife Terue (Keiko Matsuzaka), and Yurie’s great grandfather, Ojisan Jinpei (the then-80-year-old Tetsuro Tanba), who was a World War II soldier and still has an amazingly good pitching arm. There’s also a cute little mutt, Poochi. The whole clan moved out to the countryside to try and make a go at a Bed and Breakfast called the White Lovers’ Guesthouse, but are waiting for patrons to finally show up. The problems begin when they do eventually come. And go.

 

Through no fault of the Katakuri tribe, the customers rarely seem to last a night without meeting their maker by different means. Since the family doesn’t want to ruin their reputation before they have the chance to be successful, they must figure out what to do with the growing pile of bodies.

To add to the problems, Shizue has fallen for a con man in a Western Naval uniform named Richado, or Richard in the translation (Kiyoshiro Imawano), who claims to be the illegitimate son of the Queen of England’s half-sister. Through all this craziness, there is even crazinerness (yeah, I know it’s not a real word, lighten up) singing and dancing.

This film is a bit of a legend in Japan, less so outside, because its cast at the time is off the hook as far as character actors known in the Islands country. For example, at the time, Imawano was the largest native rock star who occasionally acted. It would be like when David Bowie did Labyrinth (1986). Sawada, on the other hand, is one of the original rock’n’rollers in Japan, and on some level is known as the “Elvis of Japan” (except he can act). The rest of the cast, including the second and tertiary level, are easily identified character actors (Miike refers to Nishida, for example, as the “Meg Ryan of Japan”). Many have become known through Miike’s previous prolific and prestigious work, but most have come into their own through various work.



Original Sound of Music-like Poster

Even though there are references here to The Sound of Music, including the design and font used on the poster, this is certainly not a Julie Andrews lightweight megalith, but is very dark and humorous at the same time. For example, in Miike fashion, some the characters include a sumo wrestler and his obviously underage uniformed schoolgirl girlfriend, an TV announcer who has a bug climb into his nose, violence, zombies of a sort, and as I said, a nice body count. And did I mention the Claymation yet?

 

At the odd moment throughout the film, such as the enjoyable yet WTF opening sequence, suddenly everything and everyone turns to pixilated Claymation for part of the scene. You just never see it coming, but it’s hard not to enjoy it. It’s handled quite imaginatively, and it’s always easy to tell which characters are which, even though they are in clay.

There are certainly some Asian tones to the film that some Westerners may get, but not to the level of those in the East. For example, one of the musical numbers is very stylized in a music video way, set to a karaoke mode so the audience can sing along (if you can read Japanese, of course). As I experienced last year in China, karaoke is a big thing, and rather than being in a bar with everyone in the audience observing, one would rent a small room for private parties of a dozen or so people, drink and sing along to music videos on a screen, with the words highlighted underneath rather than just having the lyrics alone. It’s a socially fascinating thing to experience for a Westerner, but kind of common for the middle classes.

Another aspect that Western audiences may not get used to right away, even if they notice, is that there are some long, static shots rather than quick editing. Sergei Eisenstein may be correct that editing = action, as MTV videos promoted decades later, but Miike looks at it differently, and succeeds in still getting the action on high without cutting around quickly. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some effective jump-inducing scares here and there.

This was shot in Kyoto, and the film is actually a remake of another dark (sans music and dancing) Korean film, The Quiet Family (Choyonghan kajok) from 1998, but Miike definitely changes up the story enough to make it his own. It’s an exciting, sometimes experiential yet mostly a cohesive and comprehensive release.

While I won’t delve into it here, as usual Miike’s ending is a bit evasive, and I have my own theory of what happened that isn’t necessarily the filmmaker’s (and is just as fantastical as his), but I guess that’s my problem, right? Normally a “smiley” emoticon would go here.

Tons of extras abound on the DVD. There are a couple of trailers for this film, a 5:30 short on the Claymation process, an interesting 30 minute Making of documentary that includes interviews with the cast, a 24-minute analytical look at Miike’s career filled with clips made in 2015 called “Pimps, Dogs and Agitators” by academic critic Tom Mes, and a separate series mostly archival interviews – and one from 2015 – with most of the main cast members ranging less than 10 minutes each, though the latest one with Miike is 38 minutes (for honesty’s sake, it’s the only extra I didn’t watch all the way through).

Mes also does one of two commentary tracks giving the viewer a detailed-filled and precise look at this film. Most of his references are lost on me as I have only seen a few of Miike’s multitude of output, and Mes is kind of monotone, but it still kept my interest throughout. The second track is Miike and actor/film critic (and first guest of the B&B) Tokitoshi Shiota discussing the film. There are two versions available of this last track, one is in Japanese with English subtitles, and one is translated into English. Normally I would go for the original, but since I wanted to still follow the story through subtitles, I went for the translation one. There was a bit too much kibitzing, but there was still enough information about the making of the film for me to not give up and have fun with it.

Beyond all the events that happen to this family, the core of the film is actually quite sweet, a treatise about what is happiness. This is a bit of classic film in Japan, and it’s easy to see why. You certainly will not be bored, especially since it isn’t a typical and formulaic story or production.