Obayashi’s Teen Movies

When House was revived in 2010, Manohla Dargis suggested in the New York Times that it “might be about a haunted house, but it’s the film that is more truly possessed: in one scene a piano bites off the fingers of a musician tickling its keys; in another a severed head tries to take a bite out of a girl’s rear, snapping at the derrière as if it were an apple.” House was Obayashi’s first feature, “and at times it feels as if he threw everything—every movie he had ever seen, every idea he had ever entertained—at the screen, using the horror genre as a big box into which he could combine the bits and pieces he wanted to sample from avant-garde cinema, Looney Tunes cartoons, schlock Italian horror, and martial arts movies.”

Obayashi had started out making experimental films in the 1960s, when his extended circle of friends and occasional collaborators included artists Genpei Akasegawa and Yoko Ono. In the 1970s, he found work making television commercials—thousands of them, many featuring such stars as Kirk Douglas, Sophia Loren, and Catherine Deneuve. In a 2019 Notebook interview, Obayashi told Aiko Masubuchi that he dreamed up House with his daughter, Chigumi, and her teen spirit seems to infuse the films he made in the years that followed. As the Cinematheque programmers put it, these ’80s-era movies now “stand as influential time capsules of pop idols, schoolyard rivalries, teen sci-fi, vacation travelogues, and counter-cultural romance.”

In School in the Crosshairs (1981), an alien disguised as an exchange student aims to enforce a strict disciplinary regime but is thwarted by Yuka (Yakushimaru Hiroko), a student with telepathic powers. “Telepathy and time-leaping become narrative ciphers for Obayashi’s own manipulations of time and space,” wrote Paul Roquet in a 2009 piece for Midnight Eye. “Notably, however, Obayashi’s characters always reject these supernatural abilities by the end of the film, in favor of returning to a more ‘normal’ existence.”

“School in the Crosshairs’ vibrating neon magic spells, matte-painting backgrounds, and inexplicable dance montage could turn away the filmgoer too serious to let herself enjoy Obayashi’s bewildering playfulness,” writes Jeva Lange at Screen Slate. “But as for picking sides in the battle between childlike tricks and approval-seeking conventions, Obayashi has made his loyalties abundantly clear.”

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (1983) is the first of many feature adaptations of Yasutaka Tsutsui’s immensely popular novel—serialized in 1965 and 1966 and then published as a single volume in 1967. Pop idol Tomoyo Harada stars as Kazuko, a middle-school student whose confusing zips back and forth through time are complicated even further when her romantic feelings for one close friend begin to shift to another.

Obayashi’s version of the story has been “accused of clunky handling of beloved material,” notes Danielle Burgos at Screen Slate. “Obayashi’s focus on blossoming feelings puts plot on the back burner, to the point the film takes what seems (if you’re unfamiliar with the source material) to be a hard left in the final third. But by playing to his strength of conveying deep longing for past moments, Obayashi is perfectly suited to tell a story about the pains of wrong time, real love.”

In 1984, Obayashi and Harada reteamed on another adaptation of a popular book, Katsura Morimura’s autobiographical The Island Closest to Heaven. After her father’s sudden death, sixteen-year-old Mari (Harada) travels to New Caledonia, where the two of them had been planning to take a holiday together. The Island is “one of Obayashi’s most straightforward features,” writes Hayley Scanlon, “save for its brief use of color filters in the opening and closing scenes and the lengthy title sequence which draws inspiration from classic Hollywood melodrama.” The film nevertheless “engages with some of his key themes in the romantic nostalgia of love and loss as his heroine comes to a new understanding of herself while bidding goodbye to the past.”

Surveying Obayashi’s career for Senses of Cinema in 2021—he had passed away the year before—Hal Young called His Motorbike, Her Island (1986) his “best romance film, a deeply bittersweet portrayal of a romantic triangle between a girl, Miyo, a boy, Koo, and his motorcycles.” Miyo, played by Kiwako Harada, “seeks liberation and happiness not through Koo, but through his bikes: the faster and closer to death it brings her, the better.” His Motorbike is “also one of Obayashi’s most beautifully shot films, switching between vivid, modern color and nostalgic chromatic from frame to frame; memory and present forever colliding.”