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Onmyoji (Special Edition)Rating:
Release Date: 12 August, 2003 Retail Price: $29.98 OUR Price: $26.99 You SAVE: $2.99! Cast: |
Onmyoji (Special Edition) Reviews
Some interesting insights into Japanese culture
This is obviously not a movie for everyone. If you go into this movie expecting it to be like a western fantasy movie then you'll be disappointed.
As a number of other reviewers have pointed out. This movie is meant to be stylized, there are many references to traditional Japanese dramatic styles (including both Kyogen and Noh) particularly in the manner in which the characters act.
Translating classical genres into modern contexts such as the monster movie is always a bit fraught. On balance I liked what director Takita Yojiro did with this movie despite it's clunkiness for the modern viewer.
The stand out for me was the acting. Nomura Mansai was particularly good as Abe no Seimei. I thought his "foxy" persona was spot on. I also liked Ito Hideaki's flute-playing nobleman sidekick. The two of them have great rapport together.
For people interested in Japanese culture there are several other really interesting aspects to the movie (as pointed out to me by my colleague Alex Golub of Golublog and Savage Minds fame):
Firstly, the whole issue of where demons come from and how to destroy them. This revolves around the issue of social harmony. When harmony in relationships is upset through anger, envy, jealousy or whatever, the negative emotions create the demonic aspect of the person which then takes on a life of its own. Exorcising the demon primarily involves the restoration of harmonious relationships (and not the intervention of "good" as is the case in Christian understandings of exorcism).
The other interesting aspect of the movie to me was the way in which magic is a function of words and movement performed properly. For me, the climatic fight scene was great because it was so clearly NOT about weapons skills or direct combat at all, but rather the use of spiritual skill and intelligence. Seimei's laying out of the pentagram was a marvellous peice of film-making and captured the spirit of East Asian martial arts philosophy beautifully.
The last example of something thought-provoking in the movie I'll give (though by no means the last thing in the movie) was the way in which the director forced you to confront the boundaries between the real and the "unreal": the use of paper dolls and butterflies as the "real" forms of Seimei's women servants (and at one point, himself) was a great example of this, and added layers of meaning to other instances of this motif in other Japanese films. For novices to Japanese cinema like myself, a good example would be the paper birds that attack Haku the dragon in Miyazaki's "Spirited Away".
Overall, I liked this movie a great deal. It's worth seeing in its own right but as a way to learn more about traditional Japanese culture, it's worth even more stars.
Alright fantasy fare
There's an evil prince and a good prince, aided and abetted by evil and good wizards. Butterflies turn into beautiful maidens. Beautiful maidens either live forever young (forget it - got to eat merman sushi to qualify), turn into delicate paper dolls, or, if the wizard is prankish, turn back into butterflies.
Our hero, Hiromasa, is a young, junior grade wizard, a wise man in waiting, an onmyoji in ONMYOJI. Spends most of his time playing flute solos in front of closed carriage of a mopishly beautiful, eternally youthful maiden. Falls in love with her, apparently by osmosis - how do you fall in love with a sigh machine, anyway? Hiromasa's boss is Seimei, a yin-yang master of the complex spells with a strange sense of humor who may, or may not, help the Mikado when his newborn son is threatened by the evil machinations of boss bad wizard Doson.
With plenty of supernatural elements, the plot is both busy and superficial. The characters are pretty shallow, and production values are campishly low. There's a supernatural bird and a sick animatronic baby that look like they were purchased at a dollar store. ONMYOJI recalls the spirit, if not the particulars, of the old Gene Autry and Roy Rogers programmers of my Saturday morning television youth. No central love story, or much graphic violence. Target audience, adolescents. With its indifferent acting, stylized and unambitious action it seems more or less the same as those bygone cookie cutter westerns. Some of the special effects are laughably bad.
ONMYOJI was comfortably interesting, an unusual flight of fantasy. Good Saturday morning fare, safe for the whole family.
More Customer Reviews (11 total)
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