Northwest Asian Review: Jellyfish Eyes1 min read

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The poster and publicity for “Jellyfish Eyes,” the debut film from Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, left me wondering if the film might be an anime.  It isn’t, but it features a cornucopia of fantastic creatures interacting with what we loosely call the real world.

The action starts with figures in black-hooded cloaks, standing around what looks like a boxing ring-sized octagon with the Yin-Yang symbol at its center.  Exactly how that works is never explained.  Exactly how many things in this story work is never explained, but we leave the cloaked figures soon enough to concentrate on the main story.

The young boy Masashi Kusakabe (played by Takuto Sueoka) arrives in a small town where his mother is trying to start over again, after the death of Masashi’s father.  The father appears only in odd, menacing dream sequences, nightmares the boy suffers.  The father perished in the tsunami that hit Japan in 2011, the same disaster which precipitated another disaster, the Fukushima nuclear meltdown.  Though the film comes across fairly lighthearted, darker history always lurks at its edges.

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