Review by Andrew Swafford
When Nobuhiko Obayashi passed away in April of 2020, my Twitter timeline was flooded with two distinct emotions: half of the film critics I followed were paying their respects to the legendary director of House (1977), while the other half were deeply angry that Obayashi was only known as the legendary director of House. The outrage is understandable: by the time Obayashi died of lung cancer at the age of 82, he had been making movies for over 50 years, with approximately as many feature films to his name. He was such a prolific filmmaker that his Wikipedia page lists only a “Partial Filmography” made up of almost 30 titles. How could a filmmaker who was able to create this much work be known only for one movie?
The answer, of course, is lack of distribution. To my knowledge, the only time an Obayashi film has been widely distributed on home video in the United States was in 2009, when House was released by the Criterion Collection. The boutique film distributor perhaps did too good of a job marketing the film to an audience who had never heard of Obayashi. The House release is a striking, bright-orange package, featuring an outlandish face that seems to pop off the cover; it later became an icon for one of the company’s only t-shirts but could just as easily make sense on an Insane Clown Posse album cover. The trailer is absolutely bonkers, showing off the film’s one-of-a-kind special effects, happy-go-lucky music, and tonal whiplash between scenes of cartoon violence and teenybopper cutsiness. In the online description for the film, Criterion said it could be described as “a psychedelic ghost tale...A stream-of-consciousness bedtime story…[or an] episode of Scooby-Doo as directed by Mario Bava.” All of this marketing material hit a sweet spot between “gonzo horror movie” and “live-action anime” that made the film into catnip for a certain type of film fan – myself included – with a somewhat unhealthy obsession with Japanese media. Crucially, though, the stateside success of the film isn’t just a result of canny marketing, as House unequivocally lives up to the hype as an overwhelming sensory experience that is genuinely some of the most fun a person can have watching movies.
But of course, in unearthing this film from 1977 and lauding it as this lost maximalist masterpiece, both the Criterion Collection and the film’s fans tend to frame House as this lightning-in-a-bottle fluke of movie magic rather than the hard work of a director with a singular voice (honed for years by making commercials for Japanese television) who had been putting out work consistently for decades by the time House came to the attention of American audiences. On the occasion of Obayashi’s death this was the gripe of many Film Twitter voices who felt the success of House had overshadowed his (much) broader filmography, and some of them even made a valiant effort to point people towards places to access Obayashi’s other work online, be those means legal or otherwise. I, like many, had been in quarantine for a few at that time, and had a hard time motivating myself to watch movies when all the days were running together, but I did manage to watch a few Obayashi films I had never seen: Emotion (1966), a somewhat sleepy 40-minute film about a girl encountering a vampire; The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (1983), a very confusing YA time-loop film with an absolutely beautiful avant-garde freakout sequence at its climax; and His Motorbike, Her Island (1986), which is an absolutely gorgeous story about a young love triangle that jumps back and forth between tropical color visuals and monochrome film that feels more silver than black-and-white. I didn’t love all three of these films, but I’m glad I watched them, as they gave me a somewhat broader view of Obayashi as an artist – one who consistently leans into the artificiality of cinematic language in order to both create dazzling images and tell sincere (though often oblique) stories about simple emotions.
Emotion (1966)
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (1983)
House (1977)
His Motorbike, Her Island (1986)
Fast forward 40 years to Labyrinth of Cinema, a 2019 release that is receiving a rare level of attention and (limited) theatrical distribution in America this year due to it being Obayashi’s final film. Labyrinth of Cinema is one of those movies that is easily described as a career-capping magnum opus: it’s 3-hours long, it’s a highly experimental work by a filmmaker who had been experimenting with form for half a century already, it’s a metafictional movie-about-movies that spans a great deal of Japan’s sociopolitical and cinematic history, it was written, directed, and edited during Obayashi’s battle with cancer, and it was likely made with the full understanding that it would be Obayashi’s final statement as a filmmaker.
As someone who has seen at least a handful of Obayashi’s films, I feel relatively more qualified to speak on Labyrinth of Cinema than the average white American film critic who has only seen House, but I have to admit that I struggled greatly with it. The title is apt, as the film’s runtime does feel like an endlessly fractaling maze of movies-within-movies and off-the-wall editing techniques. Obayashi at his best is visually inventive on a second-by-second level, and the sheer amount of artificial elements being stacked atop each other here made following the actual story though its full runtime seem like a Herculean task that I simply wasn’t up to. I fully admit that this is more of a problem with my attention span, my lack of cultural competency, and my viewing environment (at home on a screener) rather than Obayashi’s own obvious labor of love, but I can’t say I’m eager to revisit this to figure out what I’m missing.
I’ll do my best to summarize and describe Labyrinth of Cinema despite feeling pretty lost throughout: after some bold title cards of alternating colors, Obayashi drops us into a celluloid movie theater celebrating its final day of business, calling to mind other movies like Goodbye, Dragon Inn or The Last Picture Show that use shuttered movie theaters to evoke the end of an era. Furthering this point, Obayashi’s narrator then quotes the Japanese poet Chuya Nakahara – whose verses are interspersed throughout Labyrinth of Cinema at various points as a type of guiding voice – with the line “They call it modernization. I call it barbarization.” The narrator – who I must assume is Obayashi himself – continues with his own thoughts: “It is time to review history, so we can build a better future. That’s why I made this movie with movie friends.” It is delightful to hear the 80+ year-old Obayashi speak with such continued childlike whimsy (“I made this movie with my movie friends!”) even when he is dealing with concepts of heavy historical import, which is of course characteristic of his authorial voice throughout his career (I’m reminded of the moment in House where a girl describes a nuclear mushroom cloud as looking like cotton candy). Throughout Labyrinth of Cinema, Obayashi explores the extremes of tragedy and innocence simultaneously.
In order to review history for the benefit of a better future, Obayashi says he’s going to “visit Japanese war movies from the 20th century.” The idea of “visiting” those war movies is the central conceit of the film: from the frame story of the theater’s final day of business, we watch recreations of various war stories set within various points of Japanese history, always with the same cast (who are also viewers of the film, perhaps projecting themselves into the leading roles mentally) and always with roughly the same central conflict of the central male soldier attempting to save the same damseled young girl who is inevitably devastated by the horrors of war. And that’s about all I can say, to be honest, about the plot of Labyrinth of Cinema – I’m not well-versed enough in Japanese history to know the various military conflicts that are being recreated here, nor am I aware of any specific movies that Obayashi may be attempting to lampoon as his early narration implies.
The specter of Hiroshima and Nagasaki hang over the film ominously, of course, and WWII is where Obayashi’s survey of Japanese military history seems to end (due to the young girl actor actually being based on a real person who died in the nuclear blast, I think?), but it’s a long time getting there, and the vast majority of the film’s runtime is occupied by this loop of military conflicts that (to an uneducated viewer, at least) seem to overlap with and blur into one another either intentionally or unintentionally. From a bird’s eye view, this could be seen as a really smart editing choice – presenting these grand military conflicts as just repetitive cycles of violence that we desperately need to break out of for the sake of generations of children who have needlessly suffered – but working with limited context, I found it difficult to simply stay engaged.
Another frame story is utilized to explain how we get from one time period to another, involving a man in a spaceship that doubles as a time machine and is also inexplicably populated by a bunch of fish who have been green-screened into the space of the film world – and these fish are a key example of Obayashi’s favorite cinematic technique in Labyrinth of Cinema: use of green-screen to place his characters in a completely artificial space. On-location camera shots are few and far between here – almost everything is green-screen in a way that draws attention to itself rather than attempting to create the illusion of realism. This was perhaps a logistical necessity so that the deathly ill Obayashi didn’t have to spend a lot of grueling days on set and could instead construct the movie primarily in the editing room, but it majorly affects the experience of the film. “Movies are a cutting edge time machine,” says the man in the spaceship, and maybe Obayashi’s obvious use of green screen is meant to serve as an example of how movies can so easily transport us from one time or space to another. Whether or not a viewer is able to suspend their disbelief enough to care about these characters who are obviously not in the places they’re meant to be will probably vary from person-to-person, but again: I struggled.
There are several other pet techniques that Obayashi utilizes more-or-less constantly here, like placing borders of various colors and shapes over his shots, putting certain subtitled lines in colorful boxes that sit atop his already composited images, and putting monochrome filters of various colors over entire scenes. His editing style is also as fast as I’ve ever seen it, with an extremely short average shot length that constantly disorients the viewer’s sense of time and space. When the film slows down a bit, however, it can often become very painterly and beautiful, both when depicting scenes of violence (like a burning village or a fleet of warships moving into a harbor) and scenes of peace (which often involve characters looking over the sea or sitting under the stars). Despite the fact – or perhaps because of the fact – that these images are obviously cut-and-pasted together from component parts, they are often extremely evocative, and I could see their beauty carrying someone through the film even for a struggling viewer.
All technical trickery and metafictive layering aside, the ultimate goal of Labyrinth of Cinema is to be an anti-war film, and on those grounds, it is easily comprehensible – perhaps to the point of being overly simplistic. Obayashi doesn’t seem all too interested with the material concerns that push one nation or faction to war against another, nor does he seem concerned with the question of whether or not a warless society is attainable. In his view, war is bad because it harms children. In its prioritization of innocent life above all else, it is not too dissimilar from another famous Japanese anti-war film, Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies. Where the differences couldn’t be more stark is in the level of distance Obayashi creates between his audience and the emotional reality of the children harmed by war: his central damsel character is more of an idea bound by layers and layers of artifice rather than a living breathing human being who we need to watch slowly suffer in order to understand the heavy toll of military violence. And perhaps that’s just as well – Grave of the Fireflies is a famously tough sit, whereas Obayashi’s work almost always strives for a certain level of fun, even when it is formally challenging.
This, to me, is the central paradox of Labyrinth of Cinema: it’s perspective on war seems simple, but its methods for delivering that message feel designed to test the limits of any cinephile. For some, its boundless enthusiasm for movie magic and commitment to the bit is sure to be invigorating – for others, it may be more of a disappointing exercise in tedium. I am unfortunately in the latter camp, though it gives me no joy to dislike a movie by such a purehearted and virtuosic filmmaker who I’m sad is no longer with us.