Ne Zha (2019)

I had heard of this year's sequel only when looking up box office records, and then I saw that the original broke some too. I'm sure the vast majority of ticket sales for each were in their native land. Still, their ratings are strong, so I got curious how well they might appeal to an American animation fan. NZ1 is less popular, but I like to start at the beginning.

In old China, Taoist god Yuanshi Tianzun sees fit to split the Chaos Pearl, a powerful monster, into the Spirit Pearl and the Demon Orb, the latter of which he curses to celestial destruction in three years. He tells apprentice Taiyi Zhenren to infuse Ne Zha, the soon-to-be-born royal son of Li Jing and Lady Yin, with the Spirit Pearl. Jealous co-apprentice Shen Gongbao swipes that pearl for new dragon prince Ao Bing, leaving the Demon Orb for the other baby. Although Ne Zha is widely feared and apparently doomed to early death, his parents insist on raising him with Taiyi's training, albeit in isolation. They hope that shielding their son from the whole truth will make him better and happier, but lies rarely form an effective long-term solution, especially in the face of Shen's unorthodox approach to pursuing godhood....

Raya and the Last Dragon (2021)

This has not received much mention in my social circles, but it gets moderately high ratings. After seeing its icon on Disney Plus enough times, I decided to give it a go. If nothing else, I'd see a dragon animation and a new effort from Big Hero Six director Don Hall.

The setting is an alternate version of Southeast Asia in centuries past, with humans and monkeys the only real species around. Known civilization consists of five hostile tribes, each named after a dragon body part. They had been in harmony 500 years ago, when dragons provided rain and other great benefits to them, but demons called the Druun turned all the dragons to stone, except one Sisu (Awkwafina), who disappeared after dispelling the Druun. Things get a lot worse when the tribes squabble over Sisu's gem and break it in five, reducing its power to keep the Druun from petrifying more beings. Six years later, Raya (Kelly Marie Tran), 18-year-old daughter of Chief Benja (Daniel Dae Kim) of the Heart tribe, is on a quest to find Sisu and unite her with all the gem shards, if only to unpetrify Benja.

Sansho the Bailiff (1954)

My only prior taste of director Kenji Mizoguchi was Ugetsu, which I basically liked but would be very selective in recommending, because it's pretty sad. Well, in my experience, directors never stop at just one sad movie. I'd had my warning.

The title character is the villain and doesn't get nearly the most screen time. The main focus is on two siblings, Zushiō (male) and Anju (female). Their troubles begin when their father, a governor, is dismissed and exiled for showing too much compassion. When they are 13 and 8, respectively, slavers capture them and their mother, sending the latter elsewhere. Most of the film is set 10 years later, by which time Zushiō has lost all hope and a good deal of virtue. But after Anju hears evidence from a new slave that their mother is alive on Sado Island, she gives serious consideration to a risky escape attempt....

Five Deadly Venoms (1978)

I'm not sure why I added this cult hit, called merely Five Venoms on Netflix, to my streaming list. Maybe I wanted to ensure that even genres I rarely watch -- martial arts, in this case -- remain available. Maybe the slim lineup of 20th-century features had a hand in my decision. Most likely, it had come up in some discussion of influences on Quentin Tarantino or whatnot. In any event, I watched it recently for the sake of variety.

In what I presume to be several centuries ago in China, a kung fu master on his last legs asks his one remaining student, Yang Tieh, to seek out his long-gone five previous students and, if they've turned to violent crime, kill them. (No middle ground, eh?) He doesn't know what names they're using or even their faces, since they always wore masks, but Yang can meet a man likely to provide further hints and can then keep an eye out for anyone using distinctive fighting moves. Each of the five employs a different style, and Yang has been hastily trained as a jack of all styles and master of none. The master thinks Yang's only hope of defeating any of the five is to ally with one of them, so he'd better hope they're not all evil.

Kung Fu Panda 3 (2016)

Having enjoyed the first two in the series, I was rather dismayed to sense a lukewarm reception for this. Sure, it blew away Norm of the North in its first duel, but even weeks before Zootopia stole its thunder, few people seemed interested in it. Even the dumb-looking Sing is ahead by a majority of estimates. Well, as one of the minority of viewers who preferred the second movie to the first, I thought I might beg to differ again. Besides, I saw nothing to lose by streaming.

You've likely seen ads indicating that fanboy-turned-champion Po (Jack Black) finally reunites with other pandas, whom he had presumed wiped out. As hinted at the end of KFP2, the first one to find him is his original father, Li (Bryan Cranston), provoking the jealousy of adoptive father Mr. Ping (James Hong). This is not as incidental to the main conflict as you'd think, for the latest national menace, the oddly solid spirit of a bull named Kai (J.K. Simmons), can be defeated only by a "master of qi" -- pandas' historical area of expertise. Po accepts Li's invitation to the hidden panda village, where, if he doesn't master qi in time, at least he'll learn more about his identity, the question of which is plaguing him once more.

Kwaidan (1964)

Yup, another 1960s horror set in feudal Japan already. But there are key differences, starting with the fact that this piece is a compilation of four stories, with no recurring characters between them. I hadn't seen a film like that since before I started this blog.

Might as well summarize them in order of presentation. In "Black Hair," a samurai gets a divorce against his wife's pleas, not because there's anything wrong with their relationship, but because he's seen an opportunity to marry into wealth; as you can imagine, he lives to regret it. In "The Woman in the Snow," a frosty demoness spares a man's life on the condition that he never tell anyone about her, which gets tempting when he falls for a reminiscent beauty. In "Hoichi the Earless," a blind shamisen player gets unknowingly solicited by ghosts to play a ballad about the battle that killed them, prompting his caretakers to fear for his place in the land of the living. In "In a Cup of Tea," a samurai sees a face clearly not his own reflection in (wait for it) a cup of tea, and his reaction does not please the owner of that face....

Onibaba (1964)

After enjoying Kuroneko last year, this seemed like a good follow-up: another Japanese horror in which a rural young woman and her mother-in-law, in the absence of their husband/son in wartime, kill numerous samurai. Judging from the Netflix jacket, the key differences were that (1) the women in Onibaba aren't ghosts and (2) they kill not for revenge but for provisions from selling the samurai equipment. (They make it look easy, thanks largely to their high-grassed home turf.)

It turns out that this summary tells us nothing we couldn't get from the first couple scenes. The plot really begins when neighbor Hachi (not that one) returns AWOL, reporting that he barely escaped from a battle that claimed their husband/son's life. Hachi courts the nameless young woman, against the express wishes of the elder. I had correctly surmised that the title translates to "Demonic Old Woman"....

Kubo and the Two Strings (2016)

Oh look, LAIKA again. For once, I felt like seeing their work in a theater, and so did my dad. Maybe that's because the stop-motion animation studio is trying something different this time: a setting in feudal Japan. You can't really tell from my past reviews, but I'm kind of a sucker for entertainment set thereabout.

A woman, Sariatu (uh, Charlize somebody), and her eye patch-wearing baby barely survive a stormy sea voyage and then make a home in a cave. There is a village nearby, but they have no money for better lodging. About a decade later, Sariatu spends most of the day catatonic, but son Kubo (Art Parkinson) has grown precocious, making a name for himself by telling stories of his samurai dad Hanzo fighting the Moon King's forces -- while illustrating them with moving origami controlled by his magic string instrument, which nobody identifies by name, but I determined it to be a shamisen.

Little does he know how much truth there is to his stories, until the day he neglects his mom's rule to come home by nightfall. The Moon King (Ralph Fiennes, once again playing a main villain in a family feature) is Sariatu's father and can now detect Kubo. The king and his identical other two daughters (both Rooney Mara) will stop at nothing to bring Kubo into their celestial kingdom, which pretty much requires that they blind him and make him learn to enjoy killing Earth mortals.

Taro the Dragon Boy (1979)

I know of very few anime movies that predate Studio Ghibli's 1985 debut. This one may be the earliest I've seen, with the possible exception of the same year's Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro.

The setting is rural Japan before the Japanese discovered irrigation. Taro, around age nine, has a reputation for being lazy and gluttonous but good at sumo and popular with woodland critters, who can talk. An impressed tengu (Shinto spirit) grants him the strength of 100 men, activated only when he aims to help others. When Taro asks his grandmother about his long-gone mother, he learns that she had involuntarily turned into an aquatic dragon while pregnant, which explains the scales on part of his back. He makes it his quest to find her in whatever distant lake has become her home.

Kuroneko (1968)

The original full title, Yabu no Naka no Kuroneko, translates to "A Black Cat in a Bamboo Grove." The first three words can also refer to a mystery -- and/or a short story that became the basis of the classic Rashōmon. Given that the same bridge plays a significant role in the setting, it's probably no coincidence.

Beyond that, I failed to unearth much in the way of enlightening trivia, but apparently there's some tradition involving a strong spiritual connection between cats and owners. Kuroneko begins with a young woman and her mother-in-law home alone while their husband/son is off at a long war. A troop of samurai gang-rapes and kills them, burning the rural house to the ground. Their cat inspects the bodies and somehow fuses with their spirits to help exact vengeance -- somewhat like The Crow, but even more intimate and magical. Their MO is to lure individual samurai (whether known offenders or not) from the bridge to an illusory estate, seduce them, and kill them a la feline vampires. Little did they know that their husband/son would become a samurai and be assigned to annihilate whatever's killing the samurai....