NYAFF Report: Princess Raccoon Review
Our men on the street in New York come through with another New York Asian Film Fest review. This one's Mark Gilson on Seijun Suzuki's Princess Raccoon.
Princess Raccoon. How on Earth do I even describe this film, much less review it? I've decided to paraphrase the intro to the film given by NYAFF organizer Grady Hendrix, Grady's knowledge of Asian films is unparallelled and his enthusiasm for them is absolutely infectious. Here's what he had to say: "Katie Holmes is marrying Tom Cruise. Michael Jackson is innocent. The world is going to hell in a handbasket, and this is your in-flight movie."
From that, you may expect Princess Raccoon to be a dark and gloomy tale, but in fact it is anything but. It's essentially a Japanese fable that unfolds as something somewhere between a stage play and a musical, with completely entertaining results. While the English title is Princess Raccoon, it's actually about tanuki. A tanuki is a Japanese animal best described as a "raccoon dog". It's got the face of a raccoon, including the little mask, but actually a member of the canine family related to the fox. Along with said foxes, tanuki are considered to be mischievous spirits, able to take on other forms and deceive people. Tanuki in Japanese folklore are also almost always represented brandishing a monstrous set of testicles (seriously).
The story is pretty standard fable kind of stuff. A narrator character comes out to tell us that love between a human and a tanuki should never happen, but as our story unfolds, that is exactly what comes to pass. A vain father (Azuchi Momoyama) casts his son (Amechiyo) out of his kingdom after learning "mirror mirror on the wall" style that he shall grow to be more beautiful than he is. As he passes into exile he encounters a beautiful woman who he falls in love with, the always lovely Zhang Ziyi as Tanukihime, Princess Raccoon. While this sounds like the setup for every star crossed but tragic Asian love story you've ever heard, its execution really makes it like nothing you've ever seen.
There are the vibrant and beautiful period costumes that fill every scene with color, a hallmark of any Seijun Suzuki film. There are the sets, which at times are extremely minimal and look more like they're from a stage play than a film. At times characters appear superimposed over what look like images from Japanese prints, but the prints aren't static backgrounds. Waterfalls cascade, and rivers snake through them. This does a good job of putting the viewer into an unfamiliar space. Are we watching a play? A movie of a play? A movie musical? Maybe we're somewhere in that "floating world" Japanese woodblock prints are meant to represent.
Whatever it is, it's definitely musical. We're talking opera, rap, Chinese opera, uptempo stuff, Princess Raccoon covers all the bases. Oh but we don't just get song, we get dancing, too. Tapdancing. Breakdancing. Synchronized dance numbers. There's even an odd bit of Sid and Marty Krofft style technicolor psychedelia with a thousand year old Witchie-Poo type who exalts the Virgin Mary, and an important role played by a Golden Frog that looks and sounds like Freddie the Flute from H.R. Pufnstuf.
Seijun Suzuki should be commended for being able to take so many different elements that you would think would be at odds with each other, and pulling them into a cohesive whole. He even explains away Zhang Ziyi's lack of Japanese language skills by explaining that she has in fact come from far off Cathay. That's right, she's a CHINESE Japanese raccoon-dog princess. We instead get treated to Ms. Double Z singing and speaking a lot of her native tongue, which just adds another layer of originality to this production. The film just works, and it's a blast to watch, fresh and innovative. Not bad for a guy in his 80's.
Reviewed by Mark Gilson.
