Serdar | Genji Press

Finally, a live-action fantasy from Japan that doesn’t look better on the back of the DVD box than it does on the screen! That was the problem with Shinobi and Azumi, which looked great in theory but were terribly leaden in practice. Now comes Ashura, which sounds like it ought to have been even worse than both of them, but it has something neither of those movies had: a sense of humor, directed mostly at itself. Ashura knows it’s absurd in the extreme and everyone on screen looks like they know it, too. It’s a romp and a half, and it doesn’t wear out its welcome too soon.

The movie’s a period setpiece in Japan’s Edo (the old-school version of Tokyo), which as of late is suffering from a rather nasty incursion of demons. Izumo (Somegoro Ichikawa, also of the hilarious Welcome Back, Mr. McDonald), one of the duly-appointed Demon Slayers, tears into his work with gusto, and enjoys the company of his equally bloodthirsty comrades; they’re like a cross between a supernatural police force and a murderous dance troupe. Then Izumo is tricked into killing a little girl, takes off his black Demon Slayer armor, and puts on the more garish colors of an actor and dissolute playboy. He’s able to fill packed houses with cheering fans when he performs the roles written for him by his playwright boss Nanboku, but he’s still inwardly despondent even if he hides it behind a mask of rakish indifference.

Here is another of Japan’s loveliest and most sorrowful of films, restored to life and freed from the patina of decades of damage that hid its beauty. Sansho the Bailiff was one of the first Japanese movies I rented as part of my cinematic education about Japan, a process which started with a theatrical screening of Kurosawa’s Ran back in 1985 and has persisted to this day. Like director Kenji Mizoguchi’s equally-saddening Ugetsu (another movie I saw at the same time, possibly back-to-back with it), the only copies available were VHS transfers; I was unlucky enough to rent a copy of Sansho that sported nasty creases in the tape for the first five minutes. The luminous beauty of the movie still showed through despite all that, and I longed for a day when I could see it again without multiple generations of print damage and analog tape artifacts obscuring it. Here we are at last.