Fitting comfortably into the same niche that houses similar films of this era, like William Klein's Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? and the early works of Robert Downey Sr. (with a dash of Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls tossed in), Nobuhiko Oboyashi's Emotion unleashes a torrent of visually creative nonsense that alternates between the playfully childish and the disturbingly provocative over the course of 39 frenetic minutes. When he wasn't busy with his day job of shooting TV commercials, Oboyashi was a pioneer of Japanese experimental cinema of the 1960s, cobbling together a mishmash of rapidly paced intercuts, literary non-sequiturs, speed-ups, slow-downs and distorted lenses, alternating his use of heavily filtered monochrome and vibrant color images, natural and urban environments and even Japanese and English narration to create a densely-packed compilation of his favorite tricks of the trade at the time. Ostensibly, there's a "story" to be gleaned from all this, about two teenage girls who form a friendship, one of them the prototypical good girl, all cheerful and bubbly, the other a more mysterious and haunted outsider who spends most of her screen time gazing out from beneath her heavy dark bangs. A vague theme of "innocence corrupted and depravity redeemed" seems to emerge from their interactions, but I'd be hard pressed to point to any specific scene that proves my point.
There's also an older male figure identified as "Dracula" who lurks menacingly on the sideline in the early portions of the film, and then becomes increasingly preoccupied with twirling around a bright red umbrella and practicing dramatic flourishes of his cape. He chases one of the girls in a sequence that is far more comical than menacing, even though it leads to a brutally savage outcome - a stabbing knife, sprays of blood, murder and suicide in broad daylight, and so on. But in narrative terms, the stakes are extremely low due to the unrelenting absurdity of its premise, and the film never managed to push me past the feeling that this was an artifact of a clever filmmaker indulging in an extended summertime lark with his friends.
Which is all perfectly fine, especially since the director seems quite aware of the quaintness and indulgence of this production, even going to some length to point out the contributions of his amateur accomplices in the opening and closing credits. I was more than sufficiently amused and intrigued to see Oboyashi pursue and refine some of the techniques that he would go on to employ more than a decade later in his feature-length debut House, a genuine cult classic that is certainly far more familiar to Criterion fans than is the name of the guy who directed it. Emotion (that's actually the film's title, not a translation from Japanese, as the above screencap indicates) is available to watch on Hulu Plus, which is why I'm reviewing it here. It's also included as a supplement on Criterion's edition of House, a helpful reminder that the rampant lunacy of that beloved film didn't just spring up out of nowhere, though I think a comparison of the two demonstrates that Oboyashi grew more assured and effective as a director who could keep his audience engaged over those years. For all of the charm and novelty that I enjoyed in Emotion (including the very pleasant discovery of the famous commentary-track guru Donald Richie's involvement as a narrator), there isn't much substance to be gleaned from the experience. It's a fun snapshot of vintage mid-Sixties comedy/horror J-Pop, with an excellent and multi-dimensional soundtrack that's worth listening to all on its own, but it ultimately whips past us in a frenzy, registering with all the staying power of an random stranger's impromptu outburst of street corner delirium.
Next: Law of the Border