The Great Yokai War: Guardians – first-look review

Six­teen years and over 30 fea­ture cred­its ago, Takashi Miike direct­ed The Great Yokai War, one of the pro­lif­ic Japan­ese filmmaker’s ear­li­est for­ays into fam­i­ly-ori­ent­ed fan­ta­sy. The film’s nar­ra­tive incor­po­rat­ed var­i­ous crea­tures from Japan­ese mythol­o­gy, known as yōkai, where­by a mod­ern boy is cho­sen to team up with them to destroy evil forces.

Now, Miike has direct­ed a belat­ed fol­low-up, The Great Yokai War: Guardians – although the stand­alone sto­ry by Yûsuke Watan­abe (a vet­er­an of Drag­on Ball Z and Attack on Titan films) is real­ly more a spir­i­tu­al sequel, requir­ing no real under­stand­ing of its pre­de­ces­sor. This wild­ly enter­tain­ing fan­ta­sy adven­ture gets by on exu­ber­ant direc­tion, game per­for­mances from a large ensem­ble, and lav­ish pro­duc­tion design and make­up work. For a sense of the aes­thet­ic, imag­ine a mix of Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, Guiller­mo del Toro’s Hell­boy films and Clive Barker’s Nightbreed.

One night young Kei (Koko­ro Ter­a­da) is trans­port­ed to the world of yōkai. He’s told he is the descen­dant of a great demon-slay­ing war­rior, and so is tasked by leader Nurar­i­hy­on (Nao Ohmori, Ichi of Miike’s Ichi the Killer) to assist in defeat­ing the Yokai­ju, a gigan­tic sea demon set to col­lide with Tokyo. When Kei refus­es out of fear, cir­cum­stances mean his younger broth­er Dai (Rei Ino­ma­ta) is seized by the des­per­ate yōkai to help achieve their goal. Hav­ing sworn to his late father that he’d always pro­tect Dai, Kei must catch up to his broth­er before it’s too late.

If you’re par­tic­u­lar­ly well-versed in Japan­ese genre cin­e­ma and its his­to­ry, you might recog­nise a num­ber of the fea­tured yōkai char­ac­ters as hav­ing appeared in oth­er notable films before, some­times as head­lin­ers. One exam­ple is the title char­ac­ter of the Daima­jin tril­o­gy (all from 1966), a wrath­ful spir­it sealed inside a giant ancient stat­ue. Miike also incor­po­rates tanu­ki, a species of canid con­sid­ered to be mag­ic which notably fea­ture in Stu­dio Ghibli’s Pom Poko. Guardians works with­out any pri­or knowl­edge of the var­i­ous spir­its, mon­sters and demons it con­cerns, but there is addi­tion­al fun to be had for any­one with even a little.

Vir­tu­al­ly every yōkai fea­tured even briefly in the film reassem­bles for a mass show­down in the final stretch, turn­ing the film into a mas­sive crossover event for mul­ti­ple leg­ends. With that in mind, it’s amus­ing that Miike seems to be delib­er­ate­ly riff­ing on a spe­cif­ic sequence from glob­al box office behe­moth Avengers: Endgame, where almost every liv­ing super-pow­ered char­ac­ter in the Mar­vel Cin­e­mat­ic Uni­verse charged en masse at a seis­mic threat. Miike’s even got a kai­ju-size walk­ing stat­ue fill­ing in for Giant-Man’s visu­al role in that famous set piece.