The latest trailer for Godzilla Minus One dropped on Friday morning, and in the clip, we get a closer look at the awesome scale of the iconic kaiju that’s wreaking havoc in post-war Japan.
The 37th installment in Toho’s long-running monster franchise, the film, which was the closing film at the Tokyo International Film Festival, is a period piece and shows Godzilla appearing as Japan struggles to recover after WW2.
Godzilla Minus One is written and directed by noted CG animator and VFX artist Takashi Yamazaki (Lupin III: The First, The Great War of Archimedes). The film stars Ryunosuke Kamiki, Minami Hamabe, Yuki Yamada, Munetaka Aoki, Hidetaka Yoshioka, Sakura Ando, and Kuranosuke Sasaki.
The film is Yamazaki’s third on-screen depiction of Godzilla, following his previous use of the character with CG imagery in Always: Sunset on Third Street 2 (2007) and Seibu-en’s Godzilla the Ride (2021).
Toho International will release the film in North America in November, with Anime Ltd releasing the film in the U.K. and Ireland.
It’s been a long time coming, but anime veteran Masayuki Yoshihara finally helmed his first feature-length film with the 2023 release Komada — A Whisky Family.
Yoshihara is best known for his anime projects on television, with credits including Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Eden of the East and Dragon Ball Z. In 2013, he helmed the well-received anime series TheEccentricFamily for P.A. Works, based on the popular novel by Tomihiko Morimi. The Kyoto-set fantasy series ran for two seasons (25 episodes in total) and firmly established Yoshihara as a television director, the next step was to helm a fully-fledged anime movie.
The opportunity to direct a feature would come with Komada, which screened this week at the Tokyo International Film Festival and was also part of the competition selection at Annecy Festival, and the Anima’t section at Sitges Festival this year.
Set in the world of Japanese craft whisky production, and — unusually for an anime — based on an original idea, Komada tells the story of Rui, an aspiring artist who takes over the family distillery after the death of her father. The distillery is in a dire financial state following damage from an earthquake and interfamily disagreements on whether to stay independent or sell out to a rival distillery. Meanwhile, a young and seemingly lost journalist, Kotaro, is assigned to write stories about Rui’s attempts to save her family’s distillery and to relaunch Koma, the lost whisky that made the company’s name.
Komada is the latest project in a loose series P.A. Works has dubbed “the working series,” that is, film and TV projects featuring young people trying to navigate more traditional work environments. The other projects in the series include 2011’s Hanasaku Iroha: Blossoms for Tomorrow, which is set in a hot-spring inn; 2014’s Shirobako, set inside an anime studio; 2017’s Sakura Quest, a tourism-set feature; and 2021’s The Aquatope on White Sand, which takes place in an aquarium.
During the Tokyo Film Festival, Yoshihara, speaking via a translator, opened up to The Hollywood Reporter about directing his first feature, why whisky became the theme, the (welcome) research they undertook for the film, and he offers his take on the challenges facing the anime industry.
Komada — A Whisky Family is your feature directorial debut — was it a challenge to do a feature-length film because it’s something you haven’t done before?
With a feature film, it’s longer, so when I was editing, some new ideas would come up, so it was a little hard to, you know, sort out everything. I have the knowledge and experiences from [working so long in the industry] and not just in terms of technique. I can put my passion into this project. As a director, I need to take a balanced [approach] for the whole project. I need to see the conditions [we’re working with] and also navigate the team, so that was a little bit difficult.
Regarding the animation in Komada, some of the elements were incredible, particularly the scenes with whisky being poured into glasses. Was that difficult to do?
Like you said, pouring liquid into a glass — well that’s really hard to do in animation. We can do those types of scenes by hand drawing them, but even with masterful use of hand drawing you would still feel like you’ve seen it before. For this movie, I wanted to go one level beyond, so for those liquid scenes, we used 3D as a basis.
‘Komada — A Whisky Family’
Courtesy of the Tokyo International Film Festival
Komada is an original story, right? Does that give you more freedom to do what you want? Is there less pressure on the creative process with an original story? Or is there more pressure given you don’t have the IP to rely on to draw fans in?
I would say there’s a lot of pressure on my shoulders! First, I asked myself what did I want to make, and nothing really came into my mind. But for a long time, I’ve worked with and alongside young, aspirational people, and I wanted to put their feelings [and hopes and dreams] into this film. I wanted to show the before and after story of a group of young people, and the framework and story came afterward.
So Komada is part of P.A. Works’ “working series.” What’s the idea behind that?
The president of the company, [Kenji Horikawa], he planned this project that has now become a series. Komada wasn’t planned to be a part of the series, but during production, we realized it could be a good match for the theme [which is workplace dramas]. P.A. Works has a lot of projects that feature young people and their struggles with dealing with life. I also wanted to show the struggle that youth face, so I’m not surprised it matched the “working series” theme.
‘Komada — A Whisky Family’
Courtesy of the Tokyo International Film Festival
What made you set the story in the world of whisky production?
One of the reasons that we chose whisky, is that in the whisky industry it takes three years to mature the product before you get a tangible result. Sometimes they have to wait 10 years for the result. It’s a good way to depict the young people’s struggle [with time] and being patient.
Are you a whisky fan? How much outside help did you have with detailed whisky information in the film?
Actually, just near our company’s office, there is a whisky distillery [Wakatsuru Shuzo]. We always had a lot of outside help with the project.
Did you do a lot of research, in terms of drinking whisky?
(Laughs) Yes!
Is the theme of whisky also a good way of reaching a broader audience?
It’s interesting that there are a lot of whisky fans in Japan, and when they are fans of whisky, they are a little, I don’t know if it’s the right word in English, but they are like maniacs. Somewhat similar to those who like animation, the same level of passion.
Shifting topics a little, there’s been a huge boom in the Japanese animation industry recently, with lots of investment from the likes of Netflix and others. Has the working conditions for animators in Japan improved?
I would say there hasn’t been a big change, in terms of the animator’s position. But one big thing that I feel that these days is the shortage of animators is the problem. That situation has led to the quality of the output dropping.
How do they fix the shortage of animators issue?
Before in the Japanese animation world, we trained staff who applied to us, and that was why the quality was good. But now that we’re facing a shortage of people, we are having to go out to get people through social media, trying to find people who are interested. For those who want to join the industry, there are more opportunities. Before, if you wanted to join this industry, you had to find the door, now there are doors everywhere! The production side is always looking for more talent, so for sure there are more chances.
Japan’s Tetsuya Tomina is a director preoccupied with presence — a beguiling sense of place or striking actors simply existing on screen.
His second feature, Who Were We?, which premiered in competition this week at the Tokyo International Film Festival, is a metaphysical love story that follows a man and a woman — played by young stars Nana Komatsu and Ryuhei Matsuda — who find themselves on the premises of an ancient gold mine on Japan’s remote Sado Island with no memory of how they got there or who they are.
The premise for the film came to Tomina as he was finishing his debut feature Blue Wind Blows (2018), which was also shot on Sado Island (and later premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in the Generation Kplus section). Walking the island, the director was struck by the sight of a landform known as”Split Mountain” in Japanese, a towering cliff cleft in half centuries ago by the gold mining that took place beneath it for generations beginning in the 1500s.
Sado Island occupies a somewhat spooky place in the Japanese public consciousness. During the Edo period (1603-1868), the ruling Tokugawa shogunate shipped criminals and indigents to Sado Island and forced them to work the mines — often to their deaths. The island is also Japan’s closest landmass to North Korea and it is one of the sights where the Kim regime abducted Japanese citizens in the late 1970s and early 80s. But Tomina remains fixated on the place.
‘Who Were We?’
Courtesy of the Tokyo International Film Festival
“When I saw this cleft mountain, there was something about its presence that I was really drawn to,” he recalls. “During my research, I started to imagine the souls of those who worked in the mines and were buried in unmarked graves. But even though the island has a somewhat negative image, the local people are very kind, the food is delicious and the nature is so beautiful — so I really wanted to spend more time there.”
“I began to imagine the mountain as a place between this world and the next, where two characters who passed away might meet,” he explains.
Who Were We? is shot in rich, full-contrast color, framing its characters and landscapes in a retro 4:3 aspect ratio. With just a trace of plot, the film proceeds at a hypnotic pace, as the characters explore the mine and its surroundings, gradually coming to know one another. But their courtship arrives via innate chemistry since neither character has any recollection of who they were in their prior life.
“Since the story is a bit detached from reality and the characters have a kind of blank psychology, I needed actors who could convince the audience just by being present,” Tomina explains. “Matsuda and Komatsu were my first choice and I’m very grateful they said yes because this was a small production and they are big stars in Japan.”
Komatsu, also an in-demand fashion model, is best known internationally for her performance in Martin Scorsese’s Silence, while Matsuda has appeared in dozens of films but made his career breakthrough at the age of just 15 in Nagisa Ōshima’s Taboo (1999).
The director gave his two leads no background for their characters other than the vague hints of biography that are in the script.
“I don’t like for actors to draw from memory or psychology,” he says. “The way I like to shoot my films is to capture the actors simply as they are — to only capture their existence — and that’s the real reason I wrote this story of characters with no memory.”
After shooting his first two features on Sado Island, Tomina says he’s probably still not ready to let go of the place. Of the two projects he currently has in development, one is again set there.
The mean streets of the Philippines become a testing ground for one young man caught between right and wrong, and life and death, in the coming-of-age crime thriller, The Gospel of the Beast. Written and directed by Sheron Dayoc (Women of the Weeping River), this gritty, despairing look at a country wracked by drugs, robbery and murder is less about the violence — of which there are a few gory examples — than about the limited choices available in a place where poverty seems to eclipse any morality. Premiering in competition at the Tokyo International Film Festival, the well-made if sometimes generic feature should see additional festival play and pickups by streaming services.
Dayoc gives us a hint of what’s to come during a blood-soaked opening sequence set in a slaughterhouse, where 15-year-old Mateo (Jansen Pagpusao) dismembers pigs to help support his brother and sister. When he’s not knee-deep in animal parts, Mateo attends high school but is hardly able to pay attention in class. The fact that his father has mysteriously disappeared, putting the family in dire straits, does not make his life any easier.
The Gospel of the Beast
The Bottom Line
Tough and tender.
Venue: Tokyo International Film Festival (Competition) Cast: Jansen Pagpusao, Ronnie Lazaro, Nathan Sotto, John Renz Javier Director: Sheron Dayoc Screenwriters: Sheron Dayoc, Jeko Aguado
1 hour 25 minutes
After Mateo accidentally kills a rival during an afterschool fight, he has no choice but to flee town and seek protection in the arms of Uncle Berto (Ronnie Lazaro), a close companion of his missing father who leads a band of thieves and killers. Much of The Gospel of the Beast tracks Mateo’s slow initiation at Berto’s behest into Filipino thug life, charting how the irreverent but sweet-faced youth gradually transforms into a hard-nosed criminal.
He moves into an abandoned villa that Berto’s clan has converted into a combination college dorm/torture center, bringing victims back at the request of a wealthy mafioso who utilizes their services.
At first, Mateo is put off by all the dead bodies — which are very much treated like the slaughterhouse pigs — and he seems to be waiting for the right moment to get the hell out of there. But the gang also has its benefits: not only in terms of a livelihood, which is no small matter for the poverty-stricken teenager, but in terms of the camaraderie he’s never been able to find elsewhere.
If Dayoc’s film treads familiar ground, especially during the first act, it distinguishes itself afterwards by lucidly depicting how gangs can often function like surrogate families for kids with nowhere else to turn. Mateo not only gets the hang of being a bad guy, but starts to relish it, befriending another boy, Gudo (John Renz Javier), who moves into the villa. Their relationship is soon tested by the other members, as well as by Berto, forcing Mateo to decide where his allegiances lie: with his new family or himself.
The choice he winds up making speaks to the utter helplessness of his situation, and The Gospel of the Beast feels both realistic and determinedly fatalistic, offering little redemption for Mateo or others like him. Dayoc’s vision of his country’s youth is certainly a grim one, and yet the director never resorts to mere poverty porn, focusing instead on the upsides of communal gang life, including in a drunken singalong sequence filled with tenderness and warmth.
There’s warmth also in cinematographer Rommel Andreo Sales’ lensing, which is less despairing than the world it depicts, giving the locations a certain dreamlike quality. That aesthetic gibes well with the film’s coming-of-age narrative, in which a young boy turns into a man while learning a few life lessons in the process. The catch, though, is that this is the modern-day Philippines, and so what Mateo learns is not, as one would hope, to eventually do the right thing, but rather to harness the beast within.
At a moment of war and deep division in the Middle East, a film co-directed by an Israeli and an Iranian is already a victory in and of itself. But the gripping sports drama Tatami, which follows a female judo champ whose career is severely jeopardized by Iran’s government during an international tournament, is more than just a promising collaboration between two filmmakers hailing from opposing sides of a major conflict.
Set during one nail-biting day at the world championship in Tbilisi, Tatami — whose title refers to the mat where judoka fighters engage in combat — is both a riveting story of an athlete trying to achieve gold for the first time, and a searing political thriller where Iranian women are subjected to persecution, intimidation and possibly kidnapping at the hands of their country’s far-reaching authoritarian regime. Vibrantly helmed and performed, with co-director and Cannes best actress winner Zar Amir Ebrahimi (Holy Spider) playing one of the leads, the film is a win both behind and in front of the camera.
Tatami
The Bottom Line
Gripping, in all senses of the term.
Venue: Tokyo International Film Festival (Competition) Cast: Arienne Mandi, Zar Amir Ebrahimi, Jaime Ray Newman, Ash Goldeh, Lir Katz, Ash Goldeh, Valeriu Andriuta Directors: Guy Nattiv, Zar Amir Ebrahimi Screenwriters: Guy Nattiv, Elham Erfani
1 hour 45 minutes
Shot in stark black-and-white by DP Todd Martin (The Novice), who uses the Academy ratio to lend the drama a claustrophobic feel, Tatami bears some of the marks of classic boxing flicks like Body and Soul or The Set-Up, where a talented fighter is attacked by sinister forces outside the ring while taking a pummeling inside it. Here, those forces are the political operatives sent to Tbilisi to prevent national champion Leila Hosseini (the impressive Arienne Mandi, an American actress of Chilean and Iranian descent) from advancing too far in a tournament that could end with her fighting — and possibly losing to — the reigning Israeli champ, Shani Lavi (Lir Katz).
Instead of throwing the fight for the mob, Hosseini is coerced to declare forfeit for the glory of Iran. This she refuses to do so, winning one combat after another, and thus deepening the pressure on her coach, Maryam (Amir Ebrahimi), as well as on her husband (Ash Goldeh) back home. Her decision transforms Tatami into a riveting tale of women versus men, athletes versus government agents, and freedom versus oppression.
It’s also an engrossing sports flick in its own right, and one with a convincingly femme-centric point of view. Leila is a bull in the ring, taking out opponents with spectacular body slams (or whatever they’re called in judo) that she seems to pull out of her hat. She’s also a loving mother and wife — a fact that’s put to the test when the authorities start harassing her family, pressuring her to give up before she reaches the last round.
Maryam is under the gun as well, both as Leila’s longtime coach and as a daughter whose father is quickly taken into custody, and possibly beaten, so that she’ll act on the regime’s behalf. The well-structured script (by co-director Guy Nattiv and Elham Erfani) reveals that Maryam may herself have forfeited a tournament when she was at the prime of her career, making her inner conflict all the more nerve-wracking.
The film’s pressure-cooker atmosphere builds to a crescendo as Leila gets closer to the final, surviving several beatings on the mat while government thugs, as well as the rest of her team, tighten their grip around her. Dynamic editing by Yuval Orr keeps the action on the move, cutting between multiple viewpoints — including that of a concerned tournament official, played by Jaime Ray Newman — as Martin’s roving camera takes us in and out of the ring, with the bulk of the movie set in one location.
In your typical fight flick, an underdog like Leila would wind up prevailing against all odds, winning the title even though her government does everything it can to stop her. That the filmmakers opted for a different denouement is both a welcome twist and a meaningful one, underscoring the grueling political situation both Leila and Maryam find themselves in. In Tatami, victory is less about getting the gold than about choosing whose side you’re on, even if it means losing so much else in the process.
