'Great Yokai War' is fantasy with an edge
When does Takashi Miike sleep? In 2003, the Japanese director made five movies, and of the nearly two dozen he's made in the last decade and a half, few have been in the same style. When it comes to genres, his motto appears to be ``use once and destroy." Having done porn, exploitation, horror, adult drama, yakuza mayhem, and a blissed-out musical, Miike adds kiddie adventure fantasia to his list.
In some respects, ``The Great Yokai War," which plays tonight and tomorrow night at the Brattle, is an extreme departure from the grisly action of ``Ichi the Killer" or minor fright of ``One Missed Call." For one thing, strong-stomached 11-year-olds and their stoned baby sitters will love it. The tale of a preteen boy named Tadashi (Ryunosuke Kamiki) who embarks, with extreme reluctance, on a quest to save Tokyo from an obliterating race of machines, ``Yokai" pours a century of Japanese folklore and roughly 50 years of Japan's apocalyptic entertainment into two hours of movie.
The animatronic critters and the cast's nutty costumes call to mind Pokemon and nearly any Mario Bros. game ever shoved into a
Yet in a way, ``Yokai" sends up the piousness of Miyazaki's environmental fury, which is not to say that Miike isn't concerned about the hell man has made of earth. He just isn't terribly serious about passing off that concern as entertainment. Instead, this is wild kitsch that gets going when Tadashi is chosen to ride a legendary dragon while leading the tit ular Yokai race of mystical woodland spirits to peace.
The kid wanders into a load of phantasmagoric set pieces worthy of Lewis Carroll. Slimy green hands reach out from a lake. The panels of a wall grow eyes. And a woman's head at the end of a long, rubbery neck takes it upon herself to lick Tadashi's face. On his journey, he meets, among many other outre creatures, a turtle man and a river princess who, in one suggestive scene, appears to have just given birth to our little hero.
Miike offers a surfeit of villains, too. The most memorable is the movie's White Witch, a beehive-hairdoed, cream-clad whip cracker. We know we should fear her because she's played by Chiaki Kuriyama, the go-to girl for underage nastiness. (You might recall Kuriyama as one of the fiercest prep schoolers in ``Battle Royale" or as the mace-swinging Gogo in ``Kill Bill, Vol. 1.")
While Tadashi learns how to wield a powerful sword in time for the inevitable machine-vs.-nymph showdown, the little actor is required to do more girlish screeching than on a month's worth of ``TRL." But the terror in his face is persuasive enough, and his bladework, while less ``Zatoichi" and more ``Conan the Destroyer," is, too.
Sure, Miike's storytelling muscles and his handle on chaos have been firmer (try ``Ichi the Killer") , but ``Yokai" is a big, silly party, with an important backdrop that's not fooling anybody.
As monsters take Tokyo, one seemingly half-baked guy sums up the movie's gonzo spirit when he blows off imminent destruction this way: ``Hey, it's only Gamera." Not quite. But the sentiment is hilarious.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. 
