Dogs and Demons   ::   Керр Алекс

One could argue that independent films and the repetitive products of the Big Three filmmakers are both irrelevant to modern Japanese cinema. Porn and anime are overwhelmingly where the money and the audiences are. Japanese anime are the industry's most profitable export item. Those by the renowned producer Miyazaki Hayao (the director of 1997's hit Princess Mononoke, the highest-grossing Japanese film ever, and The Heisei Badger War) rise to a very sophisticated artistic level, yet unlike independent films, they are loved by the public – not only the Japanese public but young people worldwide.

Yet, as great as their success has been, even in anime we can see the telltale marks of stagnation. For one thing, anime never developed technically: while Japanese studios continued to paint pictures on celluloid with skills little changed from the 1930s, Pixar and Disney were inventing brand-new digital technology with dazzling visual effects that amazed the world in Toy Story, A Bug's Life, and Fantasia 2000. Furthermore, nothing can disguise the fact that in the end anime are essentially a children's medium. The really big hits, such as Pokemon and Sailor Moon (a favorite of the early-teen girl set), have none of the intellectual or aesthetic appeal of the famed works of Miyazaki Hayao – they are simply cute screenplay for little kids, and their very success underscores the vacuum at the adult end of the spectrum. In his closing years, Kurosawa sighed in an interview, «There is no hope for Japanese film companies. They have to be destroyed and rebuilt... The people accept only films they can understand, and what they can understand are only films with cats and dogs in them, not the modern world.»

Cinema provides a superb window into Japan's modern troubles, because all the patterns that afflict other aspects of national life come together here. One is monopoly. Three large companies-Toho, Toei, and Shochiku-have controlled most of the theaters and monopolized the business. They are shackled by the same seniority system that rules the rest of corporate Japan, with the result that producers prefer to work only in-house or with established directors with whom they have long-standing ties. In contrast to the frenzied telephone calling and «pitching» of new ideas that goes on in Hollywood, a deathly calm rules in Japan's studio offices.

We can sense the dead hand of bureaucracy weighing upon cinema: for decades, zoning rules made it hard to build theaters in suburbs and newly grown «bed-towns.» Cinemas did not benefit any branch of officialdom-so they haven't been built.