Takashi Miike remains one of Japan’s most eclectic and prolific directors. Since his directorial debut in 1991 he has helmed more than 100 separate film projects. His films boast wildly different budgets, production values, styles and genres. He is most famous outside of Japan for violent and confronting works such as Audition and Ichi the Killer, but in truth his material covers a much broader territory. The only unifying theme across his films seems to be surprise. He is, possibly more than any other director in the world, fiendishly difficult to predict.

Take Yatterman. It is a 2009 live-action adaptation of a 1970s children’s anime. It’s one of the more unusual projects I’ve seen Miike direct. For one thing it’s a children’s film with (in Australia, at least) an MA15+ rating. That seems typically Miike-esque: a children’s film that can’t legally be watched by children. It gets its rating not through violence and horror, which one might expect based on the likes of Audition, but through a bizarre seam of bawdy
comedy that runs through the film.

On at least one level it is the most perversely accurate anime adaptation Japan has produced: characters look and talk like their anime counterparts. Thanks to extensive digital effects, they even move and fight like their anime counterparts. The entire film has a highly stylised and abstract aesthetic. Yet while Miike goes out of his way to make Yatterman a dead ringer for its source material, he also chooses to be very self-aware at the same time. The characters chafe against their prescribed roles. The villains are sick of being villains all the time. One of them develops a crush on one of the heroes. At one point there’s a perfectly-played cameo by the anime’s original voice artists, and the film pauses for the villains to actually recognise their own characters.

Kyoko Fukada is the film’s best acting asset, managing to perfectly balance cartoon villainy with self-aware comedy. The remainder of the cast are not bad by any means, but Fukada does stand head-and-shoulders above as the funniest player.

At almost two hours, Yatterman does threaten very slightly to over-stay its welcome. As it is, the film is rather delightful. While the number of glossy anime and manga adaptations have exploded in the past decade or so – including at least 10 by Miike himself – Yatterman still stands up as one of the most memorable and idiosyncratic. It’s fast and frantic, over-the-top, ridiculously colourful and a little risqué: basically like being trapped in a kaleidoscope with a burlesque act.