Jellyfish Eyes is a new live-action psychedelic children’s adventure that tells the story of a young boy who relocates with his recently widowed mother.
Jellyfish Eyes is a new live-action psychedelic children’s adventure that tells the story of a young boy who relocates with his recently widowed mother. He is haunted in a dream after losing his father in a terrible natural disaster. While becoming acquainted with his new surroundings, he soon discoverers a mysterious but playful creature that he builds an unlikely bond with called a F.R.I.E.N.D. (“life-Form Resonance Inner Energy Negative emotion and Disaster prevention”) that looks like a jellyfish sprite.
The loner boy soon discovers his new schoolmates, who are endowed with technology, also have these pets and they use them to battle each other. No adult can see these creatures while in fact an evil corporation designed and dispensed them with the purpose to harnessing the negative energy from the children to in turn create their own form of “clean” energy. Eventually the children realize what is happening and try to stop the evil corporation from corrupting their humble suburban surroundings with their perversion. The movie stands as a metaphor for the post-Fukushima Japan and one that is completely tonally adrift (saccharine to the bone) even with its inventive conception and good intentions behind it.
Jellyfish Eyes comes from the mind of prolific Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, known for his combination of high and low art, as it is his first feature film as a director. Released onto theaters in Japan in 2013, it finally makes its way stateside for the first time getting a prestigious Criterion treatment. Murakami has been known for decades and is world famous. Perhaps he is best known to western audiences for his artwork design of Kanye West’s 2007 Graduation album. Given the anime-like vibes the movie exudes, it’s not hard to envision this movie as a simple, albeit incredible cliché, animation movie that have more presence in America than Japanese live-action cinema does. Not only has a story of a small boy finding some kind of wonderful sweet-natured creature an incredible familiar tale, the movie’s social and political commentary are quite broad and well worn territory by this point.
The film makes somewhat obvious but thankfully not obnoxious critiques about the world’s reliance on technology, incompetent governments, hollow spirituality, and the societal impacts on corrupt corporations. While this is quite unique for what is essentially a children’s movie, it comes off felling superficial and incredibly broad in its targets. Especially when combined with the cheesy story, the shallow characters, and hackneyed themes that have been done to death, it feels all the more laughable. Instead of saying anything truly interesting, the film is filled with borderline vacuous parables design to be social commentary and simplistic uninteresting storytelling. This after all is a movie where one of the main characters proclaims she hates “fighting” but it also serves as the solution to the problems at hand and thusly generates most of its entertainment from. While the film looks very clean and colorful, the direction of it all is rather basic and the CG animation is laughable at times. It seems most of the creativity came from the design of the monsters that don’t live up to a lot of Murakami’s usual level of inventive designs and multipurpose cartoon creatures. This unique live-action anime hybrid would be a welcome inclusion to the Criterion if it weren’t so disappointingly average. Even adding the brainwashed cult and over-the-top baddies seems to miss any chance of this being any real campy fun.
Jellyfish Eyes comes courtesy of the Criterion Collection and features a new high definition master of the soundtrack. Special features include a new interview from Takashi Murakami, Making F.R.I.E.N.D.s a new piece on the making of the film’s creations, Takashi Murakami: The Art of Film, a new documentary on the making of the film, a trailer of Jellyfish Eyes 2, and also an essay by critic Glen Heifand. Heifand is apparently a bigger fan of Jellyfish Eyes than myself of this film so it was interesting to read a different opinion of what I would call a mediocre film. Not a bad assortment of features for a new release. Murakami is an interesting artist and shining a light on him is actually just as interesting as the creation of this film.
Jellyfish Eyes
2013 (Japan)
Takashi Murakami
Spine #787
Available On DVD & Blu-Ray
