Shanghai Film Review: ‘We Are Little Zombies’

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No pulsating, psychedelic, pop-punk phantasmagoria ought to be as moving and smart as “We Are Little Zombies.” But Makoto Nagahisa’s explosively ingenious and energetic debut (ima…

Certainly, little Hikari does not. A solemn schoolboy eternally occupied with the plastic brick of his first-gen-Gameboy-style console, Hikari is an appealing anti-hero, delivering his wry observations in voiceover and to camera, blinking owlishly out at the world from behind his Coke-bottle glasses. His eyewear, like so much else here, is so retro as to be archaic, but he rejects laser surgery because “reality is stupid,” and so it might as well be blurry too.

In Ikuko especially, Nagihasa’s mischievous agenda to subvert the trashy stereotypes of Japanese pop culture is apparent: as a 13-year-old Lolita figure whose own mother referred to her as a “femme fatale,” the witheringly self-possessed Ikuko is a personified rebuke to the fantasy idea of the pliant, sexualized Japanese schoolgirl and to the adults who would foist it upon her. Instead, she’s weird and dark and totally her own. She gives the boys mean nicknames.

But despite all this see-sawing swagger, cut to the rhythm of a massive cardiac event by snip-happy editor Maho Inamoto, and despite all the scuzzy, irreverent post-production shenanigans — picture-in-picture, text on screen, slo-mo, animation, black-and-white, split-screen, colored filters, giant goldfish swimming past apartment windows, etc. — it’s often the quiet, classical shots that linger most.

 

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