With a filmography both so vast as to be barely comprehensible and often reduced to the cult favorite House, Nobuhiko Obayashi remains a perpetual object for further study. Even my own familiarity with his corpus doesn’t leave room for everything in the tightly curated series Japan Society will host from February 7 to 14: “Obayashi ’80s: The Onomichi Trilogy & Kadokawa Years,” comprising six films and imported 35mm and 16mm prints. Ahead of this early 2025 repertory highlight, we’re pleased to debut a trailer edited by programmer Alexander Fee.
Here’s Japan Society’s official description: “The teenage symphonies of Nobuhiko Obayashi (1938-2020) are wound in a melancholy nostalgia for a period indelibly lost to time—that inexpressible gap between adolescence and adulthood. Braiding visually expressive fantasias with striking formal experimentation and pop-art boldness, Obayashi’s idiosyncratic cinematic language produced some of Japan’s most beloved seishun eiga in the 1980s. Captivating generations of filmgoers with his earnest portraits of young love and vanished worldviews, Obayashi’s films were further bolstered by Kadokawa’s innovative tactics of popularizing dreamy pop idols like Hiroko Yakushimaru and Tomoyo Harada.
With a career overshadowed abroad by the oddball eccentricity of his electric 1977 debut House, the 1980s would prove to be the high-water mark of Obayashi’s popularity, epitomized by his endearing Onomichi trilogy—set in the filmmaker’s hometown of Onomichi, the site of Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story. Framed in 35mm viewfinders, against wildly ingenious chroma-key composites and characterized by his unflagging optimism for the youth of Japan, Obayashi’s youth passages are caught up in the ages of transition, demonstrably attuned to the extraordinary nature of ordinary adolescence.”
Watch below: