Hello, my name is Justin the Clue, and I'm here today with Will Slau.

And you're listening to the Important Cinema Club.

And Japanese Months continues.

And today we're talking about Masaki Yuasa, director of such films as Mind Game and Lou Over the Wall and someone that I will take a guess Will had never heard of before.

Correct. Yes. And I'm ashamed of that. Well, this is not really something that you go out of your way to watch. And actually, his films didn't get North American distribution until, like, the late

2010s. So you would have to be involved in, like, what anime is coming out, what features are

coming out. I picked this director because the thing about Japanese animation, when it comes to

feature films, there's not really that many otters. There's some Makoto Shinkai, he directed

your name, Mamaru Hosoda. He made Girl Who Lept Through Time, Summer Wars. Hirouki Imiashi, who did Dead Leaves and Pro Mare. And I really like that guy. Oh, hey, I know a few. Satoshi Kohn. Yeah, that's right. Hey, have you heard of Hayao Miyazaki? I have, yes. Yes, I know him. And I wanted to get a guy who had like done a lot of

feature films and so we could watch like a bunch of different kind of flavored thing. And most

importantly, I wanted someone that we didn't have to watch a anime series. Now, the thing about

Masaki is, he's directed a lot of anime series and he's also written and directed and sometimes, in the case of the ping pong animated series, storyboarded every episode.

So those are Oter projects.

They are also 10 to 25 episodes long.

So let's just do feature films, is what I told Will.

And I thought that there was enough to chew on here that like different flavors

and you could get his personality, that there would be something to kind of jump off of.

Well, I'll probably be really bad on this episode because I did feel like I was kind of

diving in headfirst into something I didn't know. I will say I really liked these movies.

I liked all three. Really exciting territory to explore. And I also think

Yuasa is an excellent filmmaker to conclude Japan Month on the Important Cinema Club podcast with. Because, you know, there are certain themes, certain ideas that have been running through the films that we've discussed, the filmmakers we've discussed over the last month, you know, whether it's a repressed sexuality or the malaise of modernity.

I mean, in films by Ozu or Neroosa, you know, you see a post-war Japan that is facing the encroachment of Western values and aesthetics onto a very traditional Eastern society.

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