Tokyo Sonata (Japan 2008, 120 min. dir: Kiyoshi Kurosawa, cast: Teruyuki Kagawa, Kyoko Koizumi, Yu Koyanagi, Kai Inowaki.

The world plunged into financial crises in 2008 but Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata was already a testament to what was about to happen. Released in 2008, the film follows one struggling Tokyo family from job loss to slow family disintegration.

Ryuhei (Teruyuki Kagawa) loses his white-collar job but cannot face his wife, Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi) with the news. Each day he dresses in a suit and tie for work and leaves home with his briefcase. She learns the truth when she sees him standing in a food line for free lunch at a local park along with other unemployed salary men.

Her eldest son, Takashi (Yu Koyanagi), finds his exit from the household by joining the American army under a new recruitment offer for Japanese. He’s promptly sent to the Middle East battlefields. The youngest son, Kenji (Kai Inowaki), observes all this while trying to sneak away and take piano lessons that the family cannot afford.

In the end, at his brilliant recital, there is at least hope for something; even though the family can not pay for the schooling he will need to realize his musical potential.

Though set in middle class Japan, there is a resonance to Where God Left His Shoes (MovieWithMe.com) because both films sketch the desperation that comes when there is no way out. The events of 2008 are still rolling over, receding slowly and revealing the debris like a retreating tsunami. Both films seem to ask, where do you go when there is nowhere left to go?

Departures (Japan 2008, 130 min, dir: Yojiro Takita, cast: Masahiro Motoki, Tsutomu Yamazaki, Rokoyo Hirosue, Kazuko Yoshiyuki, Kimiko Yo).

If you want to know about cultural differences watch Departures after a few episodes of TV’s Dexter. One comes from a thousand year tradition and the other from a twenty-minute idea sketched on a napkin.

That’s not to say either is better, just different. Daigo (Masahiro Motoki) isn’t a righteous serial killer like Dexter; he’s an out of work cello player who falls into an obsession with the dead because of a misprint in a newspaper want ad. His job is giving people a good send off after they are dead. Dexter’s mission is similar except he gives people a good send off by making them dead.

Daigo becomes an assistant funeral preparer, learning from his boss, Ikuei (Tsutomu Yamazaki). The Japanese go through an elaborate ritual of washing and preparing the dead before they are put in a coffin and cremated. It’s apparently the way things are done, even though it seems like a lot of work and waste of materials. Don’t the Japanese get it about green and recycling?

First repulsed, Daigo becomes fascinated with his work; though never admitting his new profession to his wife. He tells her he’s in “ceremonies.” Like Dexter, you can’t make a movie about death without some humor. In fact there is a lot of humor. From the opening scene where they are preparing a body they discover is an hermaphrodite, to later sequences with his boss, Ikuei, who does body prep between endless cigarettes.

The power of the movie is not only making something repulsive into something beautiful, but asking and (finally) answering the question of why a nice kid who plays a good classical cello would want to do this. In each of us there is a core of something never understood, always present, and rarely resolved. With Daigo it is his childhood abandonment by his father.

Returning to his own village, taking a bizarre job that exposes him to other people’s emotions at the moment of final loss, and confronting the death of the man he never knew; is his own way of reaching into his secret place and freeing himself. It is his departure. Two things worth noting here: the rather amazing screenplay by Kundo Koyama (who has written a lot of Japanese TV). How does anyone get an idea like this? And the performance of Tsutomu Yamazaki as the world-weary boss who is a substitute father. Also Tsutomu as the brother in Kurosawa’s Kagemusha (1980). Don’t know that one? Shame on you.

The Sky Crawlers (2008 Japan, 122 min. dir: Mamoru Oshii (story and characters by Hiroshi Mori) cast: voices only

The creator of The Sky Crawlers only got one thing wrong: the kids actually go up in the planes. If you substitute UAS drones (unmanned aerial system) for fighter planes, and joy sticks for throttles, this film is deadly accurate about our own future. The pilots, male and female, are trapped in an endless adolescence that provides the sharp responses and reaction times needed for split second aerial dogfights. But they lack the emotional resources needed for love and maturity. Sounds like the ideal modern soldier, doesn’t it? They are called “kildren” in this future age where a perpetual war rages against who knows who? Does it really make a difference anymore? Pilot Yuichi falls in love with his new commander, but he is flustered and shy. In the skies, however, he is a demon.

The great films about pilot’s lives have all been made except this one. The dizzying aerial dogfights in animation are so intense they are almost three-dimensional. The story in between the aerial sequences is full of boredom and dreams. Dreams of love, dreams of life beyond the squad room. But reality is the never-ending series of life-days measured out between climbing into the fighters and doing battle in brilliant skies where only death tumbles you back.

Mamoru Oshii gave us Ghost in the Shell, parts I and II, and also Jin Roh (also reviewed on MovieWithMe.com). In each of his films there is a simmering, romantic nihilism that suggests our world has removed the possibility enduring love. In Jin Roh, the romance is between a police-trained high tech killer and a girl whose best friend was killed by him.

Existential Japanese anime has no equivalent in US films, yet its roots are probably our own film noir movies. Watch as it slowly unfolds with the same sense of destiny as these darkly intense movies from our own movie past.