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The Chasing World
Based on a novel by Yusuke Yamada, The
Chasing World revolves around beleaguered high school student
Tsubasa Sato (Takuya Ishida), who in the past few years has had to deal
with the death of his mother, his father’s alcoholism and the
hospitalisation of his catatonic sister Ai (Mitsuki Tanimura).
One day during a fight with local bully
Hiroshi and his gang, Tsubasa is mysteriously transported to an
alternate universe in which everyone who shares his surname is being
hunted in the name of sport. The week-long ‘Death Chase’ has been
declared by the tyrant King of Japan, a masked figure with alleged
supernatural abilities, and with the use of all vehicles and weapons
outlawed all the remaining Sato’s can do is run.
In desperate need of friends, the hapless
Tsubasa joins forces with the alternate versions of both Ai and Hiroshi
in an attempt to topple the reign of the heartless king. Plenty of
dastardly secrets and weighty metaphysics follow, and when Tsubasa
enlists the aid of a local reporter (the shapely Rio Matusmoto) it seems
he might be able to topple the reign of the cruel king for good. But
not if the masked, mechanoid Chasers catch him first...
Essentially Battle Royale meets
Run Lola Run, The Chasing World exemplifies everything that’s
best and worst about Japanese filmmaking in the 21st century;
the way-out premise, the undercurrent of paranoia, the low budget
special effects, the heightened sense of reality, unashamed lashings of
the supernatural. When it all comes together, as on Suicide Club,
Big Man Japan or Blood: The Last Vampire it works
beautifully. The Chasing World isn’t perhaps as widely renowned
as some of these, but it is no less engrossing - an ambitious and
enjoyable take on the dystopian genre that contains many moments of
profound intensity. Director and screenwriter Issei Shibata works the
hell out of both his source material and his actors in his efforts to
keep the pace rocketing along and succeeds admirably, with the end
result there’s never a dull moment to be had.
The notion of parallel universes is an
endlessly fascinating (if strictly hypothetical) concept, and is here
dealt with in an intelligent and cogent fashion. The Chasing World
has taken a while to obtain a release on Australian shores – it
appeared elsewhere on DVD in 2008 – and though it occasionally collapses
under the weight of its own metaphysics the film winds up being an
adrenaline-heavy Orwellian nightmare run through a distinctly Japanese
filter. With a sequel courtesy of Shibata and Yamada already in the
can, now is the perfect time to check out this underrated and cleverly
concocted sci-fi gem.
Audio & Video
The 16:9 anamorphic widescreen transfer is
surprisingly poor for a Madman release, amongst the worst we’ve ever
seen in fact. There’s a lot of shimmer, blacks lack definition and
occasionally bleed into one another and the transfer itself is quite
grainy, more VHS than DVD quality, especially for a release evidently
shot on HD. Still, the visuals themselves are strong and
cinematographer Shin Hayasaka imbues each scene with plenty of drama and
movement. On the audio front there’s nothing at all amiss: the Japanese
DD 5.1 and Japanese DTS 5.1 soundtracks each mean business. On my
surround setup at least the straight 5.1 was the way to go, with crisp
dialogue and Kazuya Takase’s deftly emotive soundtrack really brought to
the fore.
Special Features
Nada, just a theatrical trailer. Previous
international DVD editions, which appeared under the title Real
Onigokko, appear not to have contained anything much in the way of
supplementary fare either. A Blu-ray edition of both films was released
in Japan in late 2010 and reportedly contains numerous deleted scenes,
featurettes and the like, but a local HD release seems unlikely to be
forthcoming any time soon, especially since the DVD took three years to
hit our shores. |
