Unfortunately, a narrative feature film is more than just moving images, and once Murakami dives into narrative and character, Jellyfish Eyes begins stumbling all over itself (the screenplay is credited to Yoshihiro Nishimura and Jun Tsugita from a story by Murakami). The story takes place in a small town that is dominated by a research university and a massive laboratory where a group of mysterious, black-cloaked researchers (Masataka Kubota, Shota Sometani, Hidemasa Shiozawa, and Ami Ikenaga) are dabbling in all kinds of dangerous powers with some kind of device that harnesses energy. Recently arrived in town is Masashi (Takuto Sueoka), a sensitive adolescent boy and his recently widowed mother, Shizuko (Asuka Kurosawa). Largely alone in the world, Masashi befriends a floating, globulous entity he names Kurage-bo, which means “jellyfish boy” (the bobbling tentacles under the inverted-flower-like appendage on the top of his head are decidedly jellyfish-like, although his face and body remind me of a lamb). Kurage-bo somehow emanated from an experiment at the laboratory, which is overseen by Masashi’s uncle, Naoto (Takumi Saito), who warns his mother that the town is dangerous and they should leave.

Meanwhile, once he goes to school Masashi discovers that all of the kids there also have floating friends, each of whom looks distinctly different (some are cute and blobbish, while others have creature-like appearances that are more fierce than friendly) and are under the kids’ control via a smart-phone-like device. These creatures are dubbed F.R.I.E.N.D.s, which ostensibly stands for “life-Form Resonance Inner Energy Negative emotion and Disaster prevention,” an utterly tortured jumble of words that reflects quite well the film’s own awkward attempts at significance. The kids all use their F.R.I.E.N.D.s to stage fights, with the standout being the school bully Tatsuya, whose F.R.I.E.N.D. looks like a murderous frog. Masashi befriends Saki (Himeka Asami), a gentle girl whose F.R.I.E.N.D. looks like an enormous dog that stands on two feet (for whatever reason her F.R.I.E.N.D. is eight feet tall while all the others can fit in a backpack). As the various tangles of the plot unfolds, it becomes clear that the F.R.I.E.N.D.s are related to the nefarious goings-on in the laboratory, and the film climaxes in Godzilla fashion with a giant, rubbery monstrosity threatening to wreak havoc on the town unless the kids can band together and stop it, thus teaching them the lesson that working together to fight something big is much better than fighting amongst themselves.

Although ostensibly a kids’ film that draws from the director’s own childhood experiences with the Ultra television series by Eiji Tsuburaya (the creator of the effects in Godzilla), Murakami has indicated in various interviews that he was also inspired by the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster caused by a tsunami and the lax standards maintained by Japanese authorities, which explains the tsunami imagery in Masashi’s dreams about his father and the potentially apocalyptic ending (lest we forget, Godzilla was born directly out of fears of nuclear power and Japan’s direct experience of being hit with two atomic bombs at the end of World War II). The narrative also takes on in various ways environmental pollution, religious cults, and our overdependence on alienating technology—all worthy themes that simply deserve a movie with a clearer sense of how to engage them.

Despite the bright colors of the film’s palette, it has a decidedly dark undercurrent, one that respects the difficulties of childhood, the agony of losing loves ones, and the general pain of loneliness. In many ways, the film feels like a distant cousin to Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), with its lonely boy protagonist finding friendship with an ugly-cute otherworldly entity, one that also has a glowing heart and is at one point resurrected from the dead. The problem with Jellyfish Eyes is that Murakami is no Spielberg, and while he certainly has an acute visual sensibility, he has a tin ear for expressing human emotion through drama; as a result, much of the film comes off as either insufferably saccharine or strangely out of tune.

There are various disconnects throughout, both narratively and emotionally, and about halfway through the plot becomes so muddled that it is all but impossible to discern why anything is happening and what the stakes are. Murakami, whose art is often explicitly sexual in nature, also loses sight of what is appropriate in a movie aimed at children, never more so than in a sequence in which two of the school kids are battling their F.R.I.E.N.D.s against Koh (Arata Ishikawa), a vindictive orphan who controls a large, powerful F.R.I.E.N.D. in the shapely shape of a long-limbed, big-breasted, short-skirted anime-inspired girl that looks exactly like Miss ko2, Murakami’s first sculpture and one of his most iconic creations. The inclusion of the fetishistic Miss ko2 not only adds a bizarre and misplaced sexuality to the film’s violence, but feels embarrassingly, transparently opportunistic, as if Murakami couldn’t help but explicitly nod to himself in a way that transcends cheeky self-awareness. Kids in the audience won’t get it, and adults who might will be so glazed over by that point that they probably won’t care.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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