Here’s more freaky shit from Japanese auteur Takashi Miike. In The Happiness of the Katakuris, Miike reimagines Ji Woon Kim’s The Quiet Family as a go-for-broke animation-comedy-fantasy-horror-musical spectacle. In a remote region of Japan, the Katakuris family opens a guesthouse and eagerly awaits their first patron. A sickly man rents a room for the night only to commit suicide by plunging a room key into his neck. Hoping to avoid a public relations disaster, the worried Masao (Kenji Sawada) suggests they bury the body in the backyard. With each new guest, there’s a new corpse to bury. Though a supposed road plan promises to bring commerce to the area, the Katakuris family must now unearth and rebury their dead. Curiously, Miike fares better with the film’s family drama than he does with its audacious set pieces. The family greets death with playful song-and-dance but the musical sequences grow noticeably more uninspired as the film moves on. Far better are the quiet, goofy transitional moments that follow each musical number. Masao’s nightmare-within-a-nightmare calls fabulous attention to the authenticity of the film’s many realities, not to mention the naïveté and boredom of its characters. The more complex special effects are tackled via a series of delirious Claymation sequences (one evokes a complex food chain, the other exaggerates the family’s will and might). Though uneven, this genre-defying creation’s spectacle is still never less than awesome to behold.
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