I hate to say it. This film received bad reviews so I’m not breaking any ground with this declaration. But I’m only ten minutes into Jellyfish Eyes, and it’s terrible. Like Power Rangers meets Troll 2 trying to do E.T. terrible. I’ll admit I’ve never seen more than a half-minute clip of Power Rangers, nor have I watched more than five minutes of Troll 2. But these are the things that are popping into my head right now. The basic story begins with some evil cabal releasing a poofy puppet called a F.R.I.E.N.D to create more “negative energy.” The doll befriends a lonely schoolboy who has lost his dad and transferred to a new school, and I’m utterly befuddled about who this movie is meant to be engaging. The director Takashi Murakami is touted on the cover description as a “world-renowned artist,” and I’d expect that given the nature of the film, it’s meant to be enjoyed by people of all ages. But it has such an amateur feel in the way it’s shot, I can’t imagine anyone but a ten year old enjoying this. It reminds me of something I would have watched twenty times on HBO as a kid and forgotten about until I engage in a happy hour conversation with someone my age who also saw it.
The Criterion Collection recently released Jellyfish Eyes on DVD, and I’ll engage with anything Criterion puts out, but this is already testing my patience. The essay in the booklet that comes with it suggests that the reason I’m not connecting with it is a cultural disconnect, but given the number of Japanese filmmakers and authors I love, I’m going back to the fact that I’m not a ten-year-old boy. Perhaps I should wait until the end and reserve judgment. Maybe there’s a charm to it that I’m missing and I’ll get it by the credits. Supposedly there some kind of post-Fukushima metaphor carried within the subtext but I’m not getting it. Oh wait, there it is. Technology run amok. All the boys have animatronic combat puppets built by the lab on the hill who wants more “negative energy.” They’re using them to hold cage matches, and this makes the boys tribal and evil like something out of Lord of the Flies. But wait, why is that girl’s puppet 100x the size of all the others? And why is it shaped like a gigantic shaggy gray penis?
My mistake was only looking at the cover art, the title, the fact the director’s name is Murakami, and assuming that I was in for some enchanting animated masterpiece and not alive action melodrama with shoddy animated puppets thrown in for good measure. Even the soundtrack is hallmark 80s’ synth bad. My hate is snowballing with the runtime. I wish this was so bad it was good, but it’s so bad it’s bad. It feels like it should be fun, but it’s not. I wanted to like this based on title alone. I wanted to discover that the critics were wrong. I love it when that happens: when I find a film the critics have panned that I love, that I feel is my own. Oftentimes with those types of films, I can see why the critics panned it but feel they’re looking at it from the wrong perspective, and maybe Jellyfish Eyes does this for others, but not for me. I wanted that and so many things when I put it on, but as The Rolling Stones once sang, “I should have watched Kung Fu Panda instead.” And of course, you can’t always get what you want.
Maybe I mixed those up…
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