Survive Style 5+ 4K 2004

The Japanese are a truly strange people. They fall into two categories: some wear blue suits, carefully spread seaweed paste on rice cakes, and all have identical, flat faces. The others are just people, without any specific nationality, who amaze with their cosmopolitanism and ability to be themselves—even if you’re a family man turned into a chicken by a psychic or a pathetic gay man with sweaty palms in a men’s bathhouse.

Gen Sekiguchi’s creation is striking for its unique humor and the global scope of the questions it raises, seemingly in jest. A husband who kills his wife time and again in increasingly sophisticated ways keeps finding her in his cozy, remote little house, decorated like a fairy-tale cottage. The garishly bright, eye-catching colors resemble a schizophrenic’s dream or a playground, distorting quasi-reality into hyper-grotesque.

Several plotlines, each rich in character development, form an amusing mosaic reminiscent of either Burton’s thoroughly stoned world or a surprisingly coherent dream that threatens to become reality at any moment.

In a mad world where Dad has once and for all become a chicken, where an aggressive European on a plane asks a piece of broccoli what its function is in the universe, and where an upside-down face becomes a rival to the main character, the only way to survive is to go mad. This is Gen Sekiguchi’s way of surviving. Now it’s mine, too.