Takashi Miike’s NINJA KIDS!!! will have its world premiere in New York City on July 3
NINJA KIDS!!! (Takashi Miike, 2011)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Sunday, July 3, $13, 7:00
NYAFF runs through July 14, Japan Cuts July 7-22
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com
www.subwaycinemanews.com
www.japansociety.org/japancuts
Japanese director Takashi Miike might be most well known for such wild and crazy violence-filled works as Ichi the Killer, Audition, and the recent 13 Assassins, but among the ninety films he has made during his twenty-year career are a handful of kids movies, from the charming (Zebraman) and the fantastical (The Great Yokai War) to the overwrought (Yatterman) and now, with Ninja Kids!!!, to the relatively mundane. Based on the long-running Japanese children’s program Rantaro the Ninja Boy, which began in 1993 and is now approaching 1,500 episodes, Ninja Kids!!! follows the trials and tribulations of young Rantaro, played by Japanese child star Seishirô Katô (wearing oversized glasses that make him look like a cross between Poindexter and the Warner Bros. bookworm), who is sent off by his farmer parents to ninja school. There he encounters fellow students dripping snot and baby-sitting, a crazy master who continually challenges death, a teacher who is more like a drill sergeant, a big-headed villain who keeps falling over, an old woman who can change appearance at will, and other oddities as he trains to become the master ninja his father never was. The film is composed of a series of vignettes, some that work, many that don’t, but they never come together to form a cohesive narrative. The costumes are colorful and the hairstyles brilliant, but just as with Yatterman, the look of the film clearly trumps the story, which is disjointed and way too over the top, even though it’s supposed to be cartoonish. Ninja Kids!!! is having its world premiere July 3 at the Walter Reade Theater, a joint presentation of the New York Asian Film Festival and Japan Cuts: The New York Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema.