Princess Raccoon (Operetta tanuki goten)
Directed by Seijun Suzuki | Music by Michiru Oshima
Japan | 2005 | Fiction | 111 mins | Japanese w/English subtitles
***Closing Night film***
This event is part of Global Roots Film Festival: Why Sing, Why Dance?
Director Seijun Suzuki made his name in the 1960s with a number of stylized, inventive low-budget gangster flicks. In later years, however, his work became infinitely more surreal, theatrical, and symbolic, a style that’s on glorious display throughout this musical.
" 'Man cannot fall in love with a raccoon,' we are told at the outset of the film. 'Or vice versa. It is ridiculous and impossible. But since this is the 13th night, let me set a love trap, for a fruitless love affair.' Paying homage to the Japanese 'Tanukigoten ' musicals of the Forties and Fifties while merrily plundering the campest elements of Western rock, Eastern rap and Busby Berkeley choreography, Suzuki throws cultural caution to the wind. One minute, the performers are grunting and gesticulating in the masked and face-painted traditions of noh and kabuki; the next, they are dancing to hot latino beats, stamping their feet, waving their butts and swooning in the kind of camera-swirl embraces beloved of Baz Luhrmann. Imagine a Japanese opera troupe having a night off at a neon-lit karaoke club where the drinks are spiked with mescaline and you'll have some idea of the sublime strangeness of it all. ~ Mark Kermode, The Guardian.