Ninagawa Mika treats us to a lush, colourful, dazzling Halloween Party
Ninagawa Mika, originally a fashion photographer, is one of my favorite directors. I urge you to see her TV-series Followers, which is on Netflix and combines her lush, colourful style with her explicitly feminine feminism.
She made some movies which are a feast for the eyes as well as urgently important: Sakuran, an adventurous plea for women’s sexual autonomy, Helter Skelter, a critique of the beauty industry and Diner, a gastronomic crime action flick. Her latest movie No Longer Human, a biopic about Japanese novelist Osamu Dazai, got panned by the critics, which I find incomprehensable because people seem to be missing Ninagawa tells her stories by way of images, and these stories are in now way superficial. Pretty, but not superfcial.
Just in time for Halloween Ninangawa delivered this beautiful video for the song Halloween Party by Japanese performer Hyde, part of the soundtrack of an upcoming anime feature, an adaption of Nishino Akihiro’s novel Poupelle of Chimney Town.
The song sounds to me like a shameless rip-off of Danny Elfman’s This is Halloween and the video does indeed have a strong Nightmare before Christmas-vibe, with some Cats and Tim Burton’s Batman thrown in for goth measure.
There’s a story interwoven about a romance in the version above, there’s also a dance version here. I chose the drama version because, well, I like people in love but also it seems to give some casual insight into life in Japan in times of corona.
Enjoy, and have a creepy, crawly, shivery, scary, TERRIBLE night! (PB)
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