Cute Creeps From Pop Culture: I Heart Coo

Sunday, November 16, 2008

I Heart Coo

Just got back from Kitchener after catching one of the last of this years' flicks in the Waterloo Festival For Animated Cinema, and, wow, Keiichi Hara's Summer Days With Coo was just what I was looking for! A great 'boy and his monster' story with plenty of funny, scary, and tearful moments... like E.T. with traditional legend replacing Science Fiction. It's no secret how much I love yokai (and Kappa in particular) so I went in fairly excited. I'm very happy to say that the film exceeded my expectations. It's impossible to avoid comparisons to Miyazaki considering the subject matter and ecological/ anti-development undertones, but the fact that this film holds up well under that comparison is saying something. From MAP, director Hara says, "Summer Days with Coo is very special to me. It was more than 20 years ago that I first read the original story and a great many things have happened between then and the realization of this film. Throughout my career, the concept has always been in my mind and I am very happy that I have finally had the opportunity to direct it as a film..." Official movie website here with loads of artwork. I sure hope this becomes available on the North American marketplace soon so I can share it with my kids.

"Horror and humor have been on intimate terms at least since the time of Elisabethan and Jacobean drama. Shakespeare's darkest tragedies were leavened with a gallows wit..."

-David J. Skal The Monster Show

"Even as we deny that our flesh must decay, however, we surround ourselves with fictional images of the very fate we strive to hear nothing about. They are everywhere: in books, films, and TV, in advertising, in toys and games for all ages, in children's breakfast food. No American child (even one lucky enough to escape Count Chocula) can grow up without learning what a vampire is..."

-Walter Kendrick The Thrill Of Fear

"... through expressions such as the comical Hyakkiyagyõ emaki, an inversion occurs, and that which should not be gazed upon is rendered visible-- and gazed upon with pleasure. The unseen (unseeable) is transformed into spectacle; the mysterious spirits of untamed nature are transmuted into familiar everyday objects; terror turns into humor; pandemonium becomes parade."

- Michael Dylan Foster Pandemonium and Parade

"The horror movie asks you if you want to take a good close look at the dead cat (or the shape under the sheet, to use a metaphor from the introduction to my short story collection)... but not as an adult would look at it. Never mind the philosophical implications of death or the religious possibilities inherent in the idea of survival; the horror film suggests we just have a good close look at the physical artifact of death. Let us be children masquerading as pathologists."

-Stephen King Danse Macabre

"No one will ever love a story the way a kid loves a story, whether told in a novel or as a ghost tale furtively whispered around a campfire. That's because no adult has an imagination quite like that of a child, where monsters might be real and lurking just under the bed."

-Monica S. Kuebler Rue Morgue