The Uncanny Life and Films Of Ōbayashi-San

by James Fletcher

On April 13, 2020 producer and actor Kyoko Ōbayashi attends a solemn temple within the sprawling grey concrete organism of Tokyo. Once credited as producer across many of her husband, Nobuhiko Ōbayashi’s films, on this singular day she serves as his official mourner, having lost her partner of nearly sixty years just three days earlier to a prolonged battle with lung cancer, first diagnosed in 2016.

The following day, Kyoko released a statement, via fax of course, to the Japanese Press, imbued with the simple, yet heartfelt sentiment “I would like to convey the director’s “thank you” to everyone who loved Ōbayashi’s work”.

Born in 1938 in Onomachi, within the prefecture of Hiroshima, Nobuhiko Ōbayashi was a creative force from an early age, who would eventually become celebrated as one of Japan’s pioneers of experimental filmmaking, spending much of his professional life establishing a particular surrealist approach to moving images, embellished with melodramatic, non-conventional narratives.

Arguably one of his most well-known films, 1977’s House (aka Hausu in its native Japanese) would not just become the director’s first cinema-released feature film, but the film which would become his calling card to the west after finding itself a cult DVD audience in 2010, before finding sell-out audiences in America’s art house cinemas.

However, before the commercial success of House, Ōbayashi’s foray into cinema was hard earned with the director having worked his way through Seijo University, initially following in his father’s footsteps hoping to graduate as a physician, but ultimately dropping his medical studies to take on filmmaking full time.

In 1956, Nobuhiko moved to the liberal arts department, and began working with 8 and 16mm film, producing a number of short films that blended practical and special effects, essentially rebelling against the fundamentals of established shooting principles. Together with a team of like-minded creatives, notably Takahiko Iimura, Donald Ritchie and Yoichi Takabayashi, Ōbayashi became a founding member of ‘Japan Film Andepandan’, a collective that would go onto influence Japan’s experimental film scene of the 1960s and beyond.

But it wasn’t until after graduation that Ōbayashi’s career began to take form, as he broke ranks with his Andepandan members to take up an offer directing TV commercials for advertising giant Dentsu. During the ‘60s and ‘70s, Nobuhiko-san put as many as 2,000 commercial spots under his belt, and helped usher in the ‘Big In Japan’ phenomenon by casting a number of top Hollywood actors, lured by big pay checks and an unspoken, pre-internet, promise their work would never see the light of day in America. Often bizarre, sometimes surreal and typically obscure, Ōbayashi’s slate of commercial stars included the likes of Kirk Douglas, Catherine Deneuve and Charles Bronson in his roster.

Often frowned upon by “real filmmakers” and shunned by his Andepandan co-founders, it was this extensive commercial work that caught the attention of Toho Studios, who approached Ōbayashi with the idea of producing a film that would reflect the popularity and success of Spielberg’s Jaws, which was actively defining the Blockbuster culture in the United States. Intrigued, Ōbayashi pondered the idea with his young daughter, coming up with the concept of House; a play on the cabin-in-the-woods genre that pitted a group of schoolgirls against a supernatural force inhabiting an old house, the contents of which would literally devour its intruders.

After the studio eventually allowed Ōbayashi to direct the comedy-horror himself, having had a number of established directors turn it down, Hausu became a commercial hit, and a critical pariah. But it launched the cinematic career of Nobuhiko Ōbayashi, giving the director a path that would lead to a number of personal, occasionally self-indulgent films resonating with anti-war themes and activism that unexpectedly served as a cathartic post-war reflecting pool for Japan’s rebellious youth culture.

Working with a constantly evolving medium, Ōbayashi’s work skimmed across genres as much like a stone skipping the surface of a calm lake, each work sending ripples into the experimental film scene, some breaking successfully while others struggled to find coherence in the mainstream market. A staple of his films though, was the use of young people, mostly teenagers, as his protagonists, as with his sci-fi infused The Little Girl Who Conquered Time (sometime known as The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, 1983), 1992’s musical-comedy ensemble The Rocking Horsemen, and the charming family adventure Samurai Kids, which follows a six inch tall Samurai and his friendship with an eight year old boy.

But Ōbayashi’s primary trademark was his enthusiastic playfulness with visual effects, often layering false perspectives with abundant use of green screen, graphic overlays, practical effects and unconventional camera framing.

These visual philosophies are the cornerstone of what would perhaps become Ōbayashi’s most personal and important works, three thematically linked films that would simply become known as his Anti-war trilogy. Having lost his father to conscription at the beginning of the Second World War, the trilogy was a personal eulogy to the dangers of not just war itself, but in the complacency of forgetting its horrors. Comprised of Casting Blossoms to The Sky (2012), Seven Weeks (2014) and Hanagatami (2017), which was written, produced and directed after Obayashi’s lung cancer diagnosis, the three films serve as a moral compass and reminder that the things we hold dear must be nourished by the memories of what has been lost. A sentiment personally reflected in many of his earlier films, populated by hopeful teens and set in his childhood hometown of Onomichi.

Nobuhiko Ōbayashi passed away on April 10, 2019 at the age of 82, just before the release of his swansong, Labyrinth of Cinema. An icon of Japanese cinema, his final film was honoured at the 2019 Tokyo International Film Festival to a sombre revelry.

Thanks to The Japanese Film Festival and Hayden Orpheum Picture Palace, Sydney cinema lovers will have a chance to experience Labyrinth of Cinema, free of charge, on the big screen as part of Finding Serenity in Chaos: A Nobuhiko Ōbayashi Tribute. Beginning March 11 and running until March 14, the retrospective will also include the aforementioned thematic trilogy comprised of Casting Blossoms to The Sky, Seven Weeks and Hanagatami alongside the cult classic House (Hausu) and the short film Emotion: That Dracula We Once Knew.

Screening times and ticket reservations can be secured by visiting here.