Review for Kamikaze Girls

Introduction

How can I review the same movie four times? The truth is that I just can’t. Much as I love Kamikaze Girls, and I find that I love it even more having just watched it again, there’s very little that I can add about this film that I haven’t said before in my initial review of the UK DVD release, the Hong Kong release, and the UK special edition. This little chunk of text is really to take a quick look at the Blu-ray release, and see how it compares to what has come before.


Can a Lolita ever be a friend with a Yanki? Before I continue, it would help to define the terms. It's all about fashion, about individuality, about rebelling against conformity. Just as each generation develops its anti-establishment rebellions, defined by fashion, music, ethos and so on, so two of the groups that have developed in Japan are the Lolitas and Yankis. Lolitas are girls who have a fascination with the Rococo period of European history, who like things pretty, demure, and all things sweet. The preferred dress is frilly, adorned with lace, bouffant, flowery, and complimented by a parasol. On the other hand, a Yanki typifies the rebellious dropout, uncouth, rough, quick to anger, prone to violence, long coat wearing biker chick, with a code of honour that typifies their sisterhood. You wouldn't exactly imagine the two groups coexisting in peaceful harmony.


But in the small rural town of Shimotsuma, where the majority of the population do their clothes shopping at the local supermarket, there are not a lot of like-minded antiestablishment characters to hang out with. Momoko Ryugasaki is probably the only Lolita in the village, but she isn't bothered by her solitude, especially when she ascribes to a hedonistic, totally self-centred and self-indulgent mindset. Her father is a failed Yakuza, who was run out of the city for selling ridiculous counterfeit clothing, and her mother ran off with her gynaecologist when Momoko was seven. Momoko's life revolves around guilting her father out of enough money to fund her trips to Tokyo and the 'Baby The Stars Shine Bright' boutique to stock up on her favourite clothing. When that money runs dry, she tries selling some of her father's left over stock, although she isn't expecting Yanki Ichigo 'Ichiko' Shirayuri to pull up on her pimped up scooter. A headbutt to the face is the start of an unconventional friendship.

That’s a little cut and paste from my previous review to catch you up with what the film is about. You can click over to that review (or any of the other reviews) to see what I thought of Kamikaze Girls back then, and indeed what I think of it today.

Picture

That the Blu-ray sleeve text cuts and pastes the DVD blurb doesn’t help, but the Blu-ray gets a 1080p widescreen transfer that is slightly windowboxed. Obviously it comes from that brief era when HD televisions in Japan were still of the CRT sort, and overscan had to be compensated for. Of course you can turn overscan on, with modern HD flat panel displays and fill the screen, but there will still be that slight zoom effect, and you might lose a few pixels of image in the process.

Kamikaze Girls is presented on a BD25, with nothing else on the disc but the film. It’s certainly a world away from the DVD release, offering an image that is rich in vibrant colour, and with much greater detail than ever before. Also, given its progressive transfer, you get the film with excellent smoothness and clarity, and you can happily ditch the NTSC-PAL standards converted effort of that DVD. All that extra detail really does work wonders for the film’s cinematography and art design, as well as all those frilly, lacy Lolita fashions. However, this film is one of powerfully saturated colours, bright to the point of neon, very much of a live action comic book style, and on occasion the colours can be saturated to the point of compression. Not only might you lose detail to black crush, but to red, blue, green, yellow, pink and every other colour in the spectrum crush. That maybe down to the source material, but I wonder what the film would look like if opened up to a BD 50 to max out the bit rate.

Sound

The Blu-ray blurb isn’t kidding here. Kamikaze Girls really does get that DD 5.1 surround Japanese track again, encoded at 448kbps. It’s exactly the same experience as the DVD, and while the surround is put to adequate use to convey the film, and it does give a pleasant rendering of the film’s music, it’s still disappointing that a lossless track couldn’t be sourced. It’s also a shame that the bitrate couldn’t be upped to the maximum allowable for a Dolby Digital track. The Hong Kong DVD still has the technically superior audio, even compared to this Blu-ray. The disc uses the same subtitle track as before.

Extras

Kamikaze Girls is presented on this Blu-ray with an animated menu, offering scene select, and the choice of playing the film with or without subtitles.

All of the extra features are on disc 2, a single layer DVD which offers the exact same content as the Kamikaze Girls Special Edition DVD, review linked to here...

Conclusion

I love this film! Well, that must be obvious considering this is my fourth review of it. It might just be my favourite Japanese movie, or at least it’s in the top ten. It’s the ultimate feelgood film; there’s no way that you can watch it and not feel better about the world. It’s a wonderful tale of an unconventional and unlikely friendship, and no doubt this is exactly what I said the last time I reviewed it.


The real question is; would I review it for a fifth time, or the verbal brevity that would pass for such a review should it happen? Would you believe that I would? This Blu-ray looks fabulous, especially compared to the DVD release, it offers a world more detail, and Tetsuya Nakashima’s Technicolor fantasy is even more damaging to the retinas given an HD colourspace to work with. But I still think we’re not seeing Kamikaze Girls at its best. Give it a BD50 for it to breathe, fill the screen as there’s no need for overscan protecting windowboxing anymore, and most of all give it the lossless audio track that Yoko Kanno’s soundtrack deserves, and I would indeed quintuple dip. Until then, Kamikaze Girls on Blu-ray from Third Window Films is as good as it gets for English speaking territories.