The Cinematheque

“In all his best work, there is a sharp logic running beneath [the] surface absurdity of Obayashi’s films … The 1980s [are] his most commercially successful decade … also his most adventurous one.”

Hal Young, Senses of Cinema

A filmmaker whose underground roots blossomed into popular success, Obayashi Nobuhiko (1938–2020) isn’t by any stretch of the imagination an unknown. The sensational re-release of House in the early 2010s assured notoriety in North America if nothing else, but the very limited availability of his extensive filmography meant that he could be both praised and misconstrued—sometimes in the same sentence. Obayashi was a wild optimist—in style, worldview, and his relationship to youth culture. Now, with more of his films becoming available in North America, it’s possible to see the ways the filmmaker wasn’t just a committed conjurer of special effects and cult hits, but a studio artist (as well as a loyal sketch artist of his hometown of Onomichi) who could bend the world, and the Japanese film industry, to his point of view.

Following the restoration release of the masterful Beijing Watermelon last summer, four of his most successful films from the 1980s are now available in North America for the first time. Together they show the lead-up to that late-’80s triumph, and stand as influential time capsules of pop idols, schoolyard rivalries, teen sci-fi, vacation travelogues, and counter-cultural romance. At the same time, their rhythms are inspired by something more personal than these genre labels, as each measures their protagonist’s self-knowledge against the barometer of the wider world. Obayashi, impatient and independently minded and resourceful, built from strength to strength over the decade, connecting with audiences during a downturn in Japanese studio filmmaking, while building on formal experiments that would continue to activate his imagination through the rest of his long career.