The Happiness of the Katakuris (2002)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Memorable, crazy movie

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

All four generations of Katakuris live on a house built over a garbage dump near Mt. Fuji. It's not much to write home about, but they dream of calling it the White Lover's Inn, a bed and breakfast that will serve the visitors that the road that runs nearby is sure to bring.Finally, after much waiting, a TV personality shows up and the family is overjoyed. Yet he soon kills himself and they find his naked body. So they do what any family would do: they bury it and move on. A second guest, a sumo wrestler, dies having sex with his underage girlfriend.In fact, every guest they get dies, whether by accident or murder or suicide. And the backyard is filling up!Oh yeah - there's also a con man in love with the youngest daughter, the police investigating all these murders and an active volcano.Takeshi Miike (Dead or Alive, Blade of the Immortal, Visitor Q) has directed everything from light-hearted children's films to movies so controversial governments have stepped in to block them. Here, he creates a musical that combines Japanese pop, karaoke and traditional musicals to make one of the most legitimately bonkers films I've ever watched. The film can quickly turn into flashbacks or claymation at a moment's notice, sometimes multiple times within the same scene.The leader of the Katakuris, Masao, is played by Kenji Sawada, who was a crossover pop star at the end of the 1960's. He was nicknamed Julie for his love of Julie Andrews. He's one of only two Japanese artists to ever appear on the cover of Rolling Stone and even had Barry Gibb write songs for him!Shizue's boyfriend, the sailor who claims to be a British relative of Queen Elizabeth, is played by Kiyoshiro Imawano, who was known as Japan's king of rock, even recording with Booker T & the M.G.'s. His funeral, dubbed The Aoyama Rock n' Roll Show, drew 42,000 mourners.The father, Jinpei, is Tetsuro Tamba, who was Tiger Tanaka in You Only Live Twice. And Naoto Takenaka, who plays a reporter, is the Japanese voice of Batman and Nick Fury.This is a movie that demands to be experienced. From animated fairies ending up in people's soup to heroic dogs that surf through lava, this is a demented version of The Sound of Music.

At times this movie was rather enjoyable, at other times it got to be a tad tedious, and still other times you stare at the screen in amazement thinking to yourself that this movie is really messed up. Welcome to the movie "Happiness of the Katakuri's" which is the title I bought this movie under. A movie about a family trying to make an inn work in the middle of nowhere and getting no customers, and then finally they get their break and they have a string of customers only to have tragedy strike again and again. Some scenes are really funny, some scenes make no sense this movie runs a gambit of being this and that during its runtime. Then there are scenes that really make me wonder what the heck they were thinking, mainly all the claymation scenes which they did not even really attempt to make those look real. Granted seeing the dog in claymation was funny and I am guessing they did it because I know that final scene would have been very difficult using real actors. Still, that opening scene with the creature in the soup seemed a tad pointless to the whole movie. The musical numbers were somewhat good, usually the ones involving the bodies and such were best, the one involving the husband and wife seemed a bit to long and really was not all that funny. So an okay movie, loved the discovery of the sumo guy, the scene of the family that looked sickly and needed cord, and the wound the son got in the end. Maybe a bit of reworking and taking a bit of runtime off this movie would have made it more entertaining as a whole instead of having a few dead spots that brought this one down a notch.

Anyone familiar with Takashi Miike (Audition, Ichi the Killer) would find this film to be so unlike his other efforts, but, still, only he could do this and make it work.It started with claymation and I really wasn't sure where it was going because it was so strange.Then it settled down to a normal film about a father who just wanted to bring his family together in the hills running a guest-house.Unfortunately, the guests kept dying and they had to bury them so that their guest-house would not get a bad reputation.Sounds like an interesting story by itself, but they would just break out in song at the strangest times. A musical about happiness and death, with claymation and dancing zombies? There is absolutely no way to categorize this film. You just have to sit back and enjoy it, and enjoy it you will for the singing, the philosophy, and the constant humor.Miike hit another home run.

The Happiness of the Katakuris is probably Takashi Miike's strangest film (or at least, stranger than any of the others that I've seen so far; which is quite an accomplishment when you consider that some of those films include the equally bizarre delights of Gozu, Dead or Alive, Ichi the Killer and Visitor Q). Where The Happiness of the Katakuris exceeds the strangeness of those particular films is in the not so subtle blending of genres, styles and influences; making reference to and pastiche of everything from Japanese television and post-war family melodrama, to Hollywood musicals and zombie exploitation.The overall result is like a kind of giddy burst of merry, kaleidoscopic excess; as sounds, sights, colours and textures all blend amidst the barrage of stop-motion horror, live action character development and scenes of Technicolor, all-singing/all-dancing delirium! The basic plot was loosely inspired by an earlier Korean film called The Quiet Family - the first film from Kim-Ji Woon, director of A Tale of Two Sisters and A Bittersweet Life - which was more of a straight horror/comedy story about a typical nuclear family that set up a hunting lodge in the countryside, only to find that their first wave of clients are dying off one by one in mysterious circumstances. Miike transports the action to rural Japan and spins a yarn of staggering imagination; adding broader strokes of slap-stick humour, campy musical numbers and a colourful zombie pastiche.Still, don't come to this expecting a horror film or something that continues the brutality of Ichi the Killer or Agitator (two other films that Miike directed alongside this in 2001); The Happiness of the Katakuris is a comedy at its most satirical and absurd; using the frame-work of the story to look at the backgrounds of three generations of Japanese men and the women that support them, and tying it all into a subtle reference about Japanese culture, from the post war to the present. And even if you chose to ignore the more satirical angle presented in both the humour and the narrative design there's still so much left to enjoy; with the constant barrage of sight gags and colourful musical numbers erupting from the seemingly calm veneer of a "normal" family life.For me, Miike is a genius filmmaker, and The Happiness of the Katakuris is easily one of his must-see works! From the Buñuel-ian tinged opening that descends into a sequence of stop-motion animation that introduces us to both the themes and story of the film we're about to see, to the grand finalé which moves spasmodically from musical, to farce, to high tension; before eventually ending on a dual moment of tragedy and jubilation. The performances throughout are superb, with each member of the family feeling like a proper three-dimensional character that we can really relate to and believe in. It's also worth pointing out that for a director with a reputation as brutal and offencive as Miike's this is the second film he made in the year 2001 alone in which the ultimate point of the film was the importance of family and tradition (the other being the similarly brilliant and outlandish satire, Visitor Q).The Happiness of the Katakuris is masterpiece film for me; inventive, irreverent but also filled with empathy and compassion. I'd place it on the list of essential films by Takashi Miike, with some of the others being the well-known likes of Audition, Gozu and Visitor Q, but also more understated works like The Bird People in China, The Great Yokai War and Shinjuku Triad Society. A must have for anyone with an interest in original, intelligent and highly imaginative film-making!