The latest film from Mamoru Oshii (Patlabor 1&2, Ghost in the Shell 1&2, Avalon). The thing looks really bizarre.
The plot is re-imaging of post-WW2 Japan in the form of fast food joints and uses some sort of CGI stop-go "paper cut-out" animation based on over 30,000 photos taken of the actors.
Trailer.
From the Imdb:-
Plot summary (from Production I.G.'s overview page):-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.
More on the film:-Eating on the street without paying -
the artistry of the tachigui people.
So much is in the dark and left unsaid.
Immediately following the end of the World War II, Tokyo was trying to emerge from the rubble. In a black market in one corner of Tokyo stood a flimsy soba (buckwheat noodle) eatery.
It was a funny time just before the closing. A man appeared at the threshold. "One Moongaze (raw egg). With soba". This was none other than the legendary Fast Food Grifter, Moongaze Ginji. His relentless scam quietly initiates.
The time changes. In the midst of the first anti Japan-US Security Treaty movement (1960), the streets rumoured about Foxy Croquette O-Gin, a beautiful Fast Food Grifter lady, who disappeared all of a sudden. Wandering the alleys in the years of skyrocketing economic growth was Crying Inumaru. Then came Cold Badger Masa, whose scandalous death made people aware of the presence of Fast Food Grifters within the Japanese society. Beefbowl Ushigoro put an end to a major gyudon (beef and rice bowl) restaurant chain. And it is not possible not to mention Hamburger Tetsu, who shocked the entire fast food industry.
Fast Food Grifters are the phantoms that rise and fall with the shifting diet-styles. They are the dissenting heroes that left their names on the dark side of dietary culture with their glare. Now their legend revives, strong as ever...
"Tachigui" literally means "stand while eating". It is a word that may find a rough English corresponding in the expression "fast food."
Director Mamoru Oshii does not hesitate to declare that portraying the world of tachigui is his lifework. It is no exaggerating to say that there is no one in the vastly urbanized Japan, who hasn't experienced tachigui or fast food in his/her life, in a broader meaning that includes not only famous American hamburger giants, but also cheap and popular soba or gyudon restaurant chains. Oshii is convinced that history and evolution of tachigui through the decades in Japan is somehow deeply interlinked with the nation's mainstream history, starting from the aftermath of WWII, until the end of the Showa era (1989), just before the explosion of the bubble economy. The film endeavors to recapitulate the age Director Oshii lived in, by looking at the art of "eating on the street."
The heroes of this still unsaid history of Japan are called Tachiguishi, or Fast Food Grifters.