THE GREAT YOKAI WAR (Japan – 2005)
Directed by: Takashi Miike
Starring: Ryunosuke Kamiki, Bunta Sugawara, Chiaki Kuriyama
“The army of bizarre creatures is wicked awesome. It’s like a Miyazaki tableaux reimagined by Sid & Marty Krofft.”
- Noel Murray, The Onion AV Club

Takashi Miike has made dating movies about torture, shown a man slicing out his own tongue, covered his cast in showers of breast milk, and treated chihuahuas very, very badly. The last thing anyone expected from him was a kids’ movie, but with THE GREAT YOKAI WAR he gives us a LORD OF THE RINGS-sized epic kiddie flick that blows the competition out of the water and returns him to the front ranks of Japanese directors.  For the uninitiated, the yokai of the title are Japan’s funk-a-licious demons from mythology and folklore – there are water yokai, umbrella yokai, snow yokai, and a million other flavors of yokai, promising a movie that looks like a Hieronymus Bosch painting on acid. 

The flick kicks off in true family film fashion with a nightmare vision of a post-apocalyptic Tokyo, a slinky female demoness (played by Chiaki Kuriyama of KILL BILL VOL. 1 and BATTLE ROYALE) in a short skirt and wielding a whip, and then the birth of a goo-covered, flayed, screeching cow fetus who prophesizes the apocalypse. It’s a miracle kids in Japan can sleep at all.

The story is about a young boy who has to go on a quest to the top of Goblin Mountain in order to retrieve a magic sword and end the war between the sterile, mechanical forces of technology and the lovable, creepy, long-necked, giant-nosed, hairy-faced, wall-sized, hopping, flying, gerning, pogo-ing yokai who are on the verge of extinction. Delivering massive battles, non-stop special effects and a story that’s as tight as a drum, Miike turns in a top quality popcorn muncher. But he also delivers the kind of truth that Peter Jackson shied away from at the end of  THE LORD OF THE RINGS: every quest has an ending and no childhood lasts forever. Amidst the burning fusion of ridiculous ideas at the heart of this movie take a moment and be very still and quiet. That sound you hear is a child's heart breaking.