Face-Off: Tokyo Story vs. Toy Story

@jeorj_euler​ 

 am surprised that you do not know him.

Yasujirô Ozu is considered by many as the greatest Japanese director who ever lived. Tokyo Story is 4th on the Critics' List (Sight and Sound 2022) and on the Director's List (Sight and Sound 2022). 

He has definitely been a huge inspiration for the work of Hirokazu Koreeda. That is a bit of an understatement. As much as I love Koreeda. He took everything from Ozu. The subtility, the deep-dive into family relations. 

I do not think one would say that Ozu's work is more entertaining. Koreeda's films have a European taste (he even made a couple of European films). Viewers accustomed to whatever this European taste represents might find Koreeda's work more entertaining. Ozu is even more slow-paced, there is no plot, no ostentatious effect, practically no outside scenes. He works on a thin line. A little less subtility and he could easily fall into soap opera territory. But, he and Kôgo Noda were such great screenwriters, their psychological observations are so on point, that he somehow managed without any of the manipulation tricks associated with Hollywood to convey real strong emotions.

Note: I tried to make a poll on Kôgo Noda, but it never was published.

Ozu may seem like a man who does not direct his films or who directs them like stageplay. One would be surprises to learn that he actually storyboarded all of his shots down to the very last detail. He was actually very precise in framing and blocking. 

Needless to say I am not voting for Toy Story. Ever since I was five years old, I hated Toy Story and found it profoundly ugly.

Well, my exposure to film is spotty at best, as I've probably mentioned before, and just because I'm willing to see things outside of the usual Hollywood/Vancouver/Pinewood blockbusters and mainstream non-blockbusters doesn't mean that I have a decent awareness of that outside. I'd never heard of Sight and Sound, a British print publication apparently, prior the seeing the IMDb poll suggestion about items from the 2022 Critics' List. A lot (maybe most) of the movies in IMDb's Top 250 but not in IMDb's Top 150 seem somewhat obscure to me, which thankfully become less so over time. Several of Kore-eda's films do have a noticeable presence on some of the key streaming services, even if only from time to time, and they are somewhat reasonably referenced/recommended on the IMDb website. For whatever reason (perhaps on account of the theme of dysfunctional families), I'm drawn to them, and they are not equally ambiance-oriented or "unentertaining", for lack of a better word to describe the particular subgenre of drama (or even action), similar to cinema verite and not big on leitmotif if any musical scores at all. Of course, these are a relatively new films, so they have not yet fallen into any kind of memory hole or branding as "vintage". I shall take care to look into Ozu and Noda.