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Dis­cov­er the sur­re­al provo­ca­tions of this Japan­ese anthol­o­gy comedy

14 Mar 2022

Words by Anton Bitel

A shirtless man stands in a room with a white fluffy dog statue on a pedestal and a woman sitting nearby.
A shirtless man stands in a room with a white fluffy dog statue on a pedestal and a woman sitting nearby.
Kat­suhi­to Ishii, Hajime Ishimine and Shu­nichi­ro Miki’s off­beat Funky For­est: The First Con­tact is now avail­able on Blu-ray.

Funky For­est: The First Con­tact opens with the image of a cute-look­ing UFO. White, with two blue port­holes that look like eyes, it is perched on the bar­ren sur­face of a white moon or plan­et, with oth­er celes­tial bod­ies vis­i­ble float­ing behind it in a milky back­ground. There is then a segue to the Mole Broth­ers (Ken­ji Mizuhashi, Ryô Kase) being intro­duced on stage.

This vari­ety show dou­ble act per­form their ener­getic rou­tines – more miss than hit – while them­selves kit­ted out in white tuxe­does against a white back­ground, before an all-male adult audi­ence like­wise dressed in white. There is then a cut to a man watch­ing the show on a device. He too is kit­ted out in white, in the nar­row white padded inte­ri­or of the UFO, which lets out flap­ping blue pseudopo­dia to pro­pel itself into the air where it joins sim­i­lar fly­ing ves­sels. These all resem­ble cel­lu­lar organ­isms as much as inter­plan­e­tary ves­sels, sug­gest­ing that this will be a jour­ney to inner as much as out­er space. And only then does the film’s title appear on screen, in blue on white, and in a mix of Japan­ese (ナイスの森) and Eng­lish (‘The First Contact’).

These dis­parate images from the open­ing sequence of Funky For­est present them­selves as some­thing of a chal­lenge to the view­er. For although uni­fied by the dom­i­nance of white, they are oth­er­wise, in all their indi­vid­ual and col­lec­tive sur­re­al­ism, inco­her­ent and demand­ing of syn­the­sis. Sure enough, like the Mole Broth­ers’ strange stage show, this film from writers/​directors Shu­nichi­ro Miki, Kat­suhi­to Ishii and Hajime Ishimine will offer a range of mad­cap sketch­es whose jokes nev­er quite land.

It is an enter­tain­ment, but also, as a series of incon­se­quen­tial episodes stretched over two and a half hours, it keeps rais­ing the ques­tion of its own enter­tain­ment val­ue, or indeed pur­pose. And as a film some­times con­cerned with art and artists (includ­ing a DJ who cre­ates a lame mix’, an ani­mé team being direct­ed by a lit­er­al dog, a trio of oth­er­world­ly per­form­ers whose sto­ry – not unlike the film itself – will take three hours” to tell, and an inter­stel­lar band of musi­cians), it is also deeply reflex­ive, offer­ing a meta­com­men­tary on its own elu­sive and often entire­ly dis­pos­able forms.

Young woman wearing a blue coat and backpack standing in a forest.

While much of what Funky For­est does might seem mean­der­ing and arbi­trary, there is a range of recur­ring char­ac­ters and sce­nar­ios to give it the sem­blance of con­ti­nu­ity. Gui­tar Broth­er’ Masaru (Tadanobu Asano) and his two equal­ly Unpop­u­lar with Women Broth­ers (Susumu Ter­a­ji­ma, Andrew Alfieri) are on a sort of slack­er search for part­ners, while the three Bub­bling Hot Spring Vix­ens’ exchange sto­ries with­out obvi­ous nar­ra­tive punch­lines, and Eng­lish teacher/​amateur DJ Take­fu­mi (Ryô Kase) and his stu­dent Not­ti (Eri­ka Nishika­do) tell one anoth­er their dreams. And the high school where both Masaru and Take­fu­mi work appears to have incor­po­rat­ed a num­ber of pecu­liar and inap­pro­pri­ate­ly sex­u­alised crea­tures into its extracur­ric­u­lar activities.

Those crea­tures, part yon­ic part phal­lic things that ooze milky sperm and insert their appendages into human ori­fices to pro­duce obscure effects, are like some­thing out of Cronenberg’s most trans­gres­sive imag­i­na­tion. The scenes which fea­ture them, though rel­a­tive­ly few in num­ber, are the most mem­o­rable from Funky For­est. Per­haps their pecu­liar sym­bi­ot­ic rela­tion­ship with humans rep­re­sents the first con­tact’ of the film’s sub­ti­tle. Per­haps indeed they are the alien Piko-rikos’ of which lit­tle school­girl Hataru day­dreams, and which also find their ways into the sto­ries of the Bub­bling Hot Spring Vix­ens and the dreams of Not­ti and Take­fu­mi (although Masaru will insist to Take­fu­mi, There’s no such thing as Piko-riko”). Or per­haps their pen­e­tra­tive inter­ac­tions with school chil­dren fig­ure a more gen­er­al pae­dophilic theme in the film.

After all, Takefumi’s sex­u­al yearn­ing for his own stu­dent Not­ti becomes a recur­ring motif here. And when one of the (very obvi­ous­ly anatom­i­cal­ly male) crea­tures latch­es itself vam­pir­i­cal­ly to a young school girl’s arm, the health teacher will say to it (in Takefumi’s pres­ence): Do you like lit­tle girls?… You haven’t grown up, have you? You mid­dle-aged Peter Pan wannabe.” It is a line that res­onates with anoth­er sequence of episodes where a mid­dle-aged adult male can is shown sit­ting along­side a pread­o­les­cent girl in a school class­room. Indeed all of the grown-up males here seem arrest­ed and childlike.

Most­ly, though, those crea­tures, in all their grotesque hybrid­i­ty, embody the mon­strous form of the film itself, com­bin­ing with­in its ungain­ly dura­tion not just weird go-nowhere com­e­dy, but also pro­longed singing-and-danc­ing sequences and even episodes of ani­ma­tion. For Funky For­est offers itself as a wild­ly unsta­ble, exper­i­men­tal arte­fact which will leave the view­er, in this first encounter, con­found­ed and frus­trat­ed. Much as the film begins with a space­ship, it also – sort of – ends with one.

A UFO!”, Not­ti will shout, send­ing Take­fu­mi out look­ing and ask­ing, Where?”. Not­ti, it will turn out, has tricked her would-be boyfriend with a pun. USO, USO, USO,” she will repeat – the Japan­ese for a lie’. Here Funky For­est is itself the UFO, an uniden­ti­fied object seem­ing­ly beamed in from anoth­er plan­et – even as it decon­structs itself and reduces all its crazy excur­sions to the lay­ered fic­tions of dreams, sto­ries and jokes.

Six years lat­er Shu­nichi­ro Miki would return solo to helm The Warped For­est, a loose sequel fea­tur­ing plen­ty of call­backs to the orig­i­nal. Again an ensem­ble affair, this time with a more con­cen­trat­ed focus on close encoun­ters with the freaky crea­tures whose occa­sion­al appear­ances were the most mes­meris­ing part of the first film, this is still sur­re­al, but also short­er, tighter and more cogent, using its alien escapades ulti­mate­ly to tell a very human sto­ry of the quest for hap­pi­ness. It is in every way the bet­ter film, but with­out that orig­i­nal first con­tact, it could not have existed.

Funky For­est: The First Con­tact and its sequel Warped For­est are released on a Blu-ray set on 21 March via Third Win­dow Films.

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